Comment by markus_zhang
3 days ago
This is a human problem. We humans praise the doctors that can put the patients with terminal illnesses alive for extended periods, but ignore those who tell us the principles to prevent getting those illnesses in the first place. We throw flowers and money to doctors who treat cancers, but do we do the same to the ones who tell us principles to avoid cancers? No.
The same for MSFT or any other similar problem. Humans only care when the house is on fire — in the modern Capitalism it means the stock goes down 50%, and then they will have the will to make changes.
That’s also why reforms rarely succeeded, and the ones that succeeded usually follows a huge shitstorm when people begged for changes.
> Humans only care when the house is on fire
In corporate context it's because that's, in theory, an effective use of resources:
If 20 teams are constantly "there is a huge risk of fire", a lot of mental energy is wasted figuring out how to stack rank those 20 and how real of a fire risk there is. If instead you wait when there is a real fire, you can get the 15 teams actually fixing that one.
In practice, you've probably noticed that the most politics-playing & winning teams are the teams which are really effective at :
1) faking fires
2) exaggerating minor fires
3) moving fast & breaking things on purpose (or at least as a nice side effect) to create more fires in their area of ownership* , and get rewarded with more visibility & headcount to fix those fires.
* As long as they have firm grip of that area... If they don't, they risk having it re-orged to another team.
>If instead you wait when there is a real fire, you can get the 15 teams actually fixing that one.
In this case, with Microsoft's really amazing revenue stream, a charismatic management team can distort reality for quite some time and convince the right people within the company that there is no fire.
Yeah the more "honest" side at least tried to fix it after the fire. The demagogue ones like to fake fire and move fast.
This is a capitalism problem.
If you treat people well and give them the means to survive without trying to wring every red cent you can out of them, they'll be more likely to stick around and keep providing value.