Comment by stego-tech
3 days ago
I knew Microsoft was incredibly dysfunctional (you have to understand this if you're supporting their suite and want to succeed), but damn, I'm floored by the incompetence reported on from juniors to the Board and seemingly every step of leadership in between.
Yet I'm also not surprised, because I keep encountering it in non-Microsoft orgs. The current crop of leadership in general seems to be so myopically focused on GTM and share price bumps that even the mere suggestion of a problem is a career-ending move for whoever reported it (ask me how I know). Making matters worse is that Boards and shareholders have let them get away with this for so long, across every major org, that these folks believe in their heart and soul that they're absolutely, infallibly correct. The higher up someone is in an organization, the higher the likelihood they'll reject any and all feedback from "beneath" them that is contrary to their already-decided-upon agenda.
The kicker is that I'm not sure how to actually deal with this in a way that minimizes pain. In my subjective experience, these sorts of companies simply do not change until and unless there's literally no other option other than failure - and then, they're likely to choose failure for the parachute selection instead of doing the hard work of reform. Maybe what's needed is for Microsoft (or any of the legion of similarly dysfunctional enterprises out there) to genuinely fail in a non-recoverable way so as to shock the wider industry/economy into taking serious action on corporate misgovernance.
Maybe failure is the best option.
I don't know. I just know that this isn't tenable.
> Maybe what's needed is for Microsoft (or any of the legion of similarly dysfunctional enterprises out there) to genuinely fail in a non-recoverable way so as to shock the wider industry/economy into taking serious action on corporate misgovernance.
The naive model of capitalism says that the benefit of market competition is that it's possible for failing companies to get out-competed by non-failing ones. In practice, there's enough of a combination of "natural monopoly", lock-in effects, and anti-competitive practices that the software landscape is covered in companies that are too big to avoid, let alone too big to fail.
That's what I've been trying to impart on folks for a decade, now. The lack of regulations has let apex predators capture the environment, and short of an environmental collapse (as in, the sudden and permanent destruction of compute in general that makes their business unrecoverable), the only solution is hunting the hunters - i.e., government regulations, monopoly breakups, market penalties, etc.
There is no feasible way for someone to out-compete Microsoft, Apple, Google, or Oracle. None. They have to fail in some capacity to a significant, global-economy-harming degree to even provide an opening to competition in the marketplace. Even if AI turned out to be a huge nothingburger tomorrow, they'd still be unassailable.
That is the problem.