At some point you have to really feel for the Microsoft employees who care about the company and are passionate about the products they are responsible for. There comes a point though where even the most passionate employee must begin to wonder why they are bothering. With Ballmer leading the company on the fool’s errand of trying to pull off a merger of Microsoft and Yahoo much is being made of trying to create some kind of synergy and blending of two different corporate cultures with the incoming Yahoo employees. What isn’t being talked about that much is how are the Microsoft employees reacting to all of this.
In a post today Mary Jo Foley does indeed talk about just this and take away on it from what she has been able to find out isn’t very good. With some Microsoft employees looking to move into any newly created Yahoo related teams as soon as they can to other employees pointing fingers at badly managed sections of the company the internal picture isn’t looking very good to say the least.
As Mary Jo quotes one anonymous source as telling her
“No one wants it (the Microsoft-Yahoo merger) to happen. The only reason it’s being considered is that the management of Windows Live has been so ineffective that they can’t ship anything worth using. They are consistently behind what consumers want, and unlike the old Microsoft, they are so poorly managed that they can’t even copy everyone else. “
My feeling though is that as bad as the internal conflicts are for Microsoft it is only a smaller part of a much larger problem with the company. In last night’s Elite Tech News podcast when we were talking about Microsoft’s Mesh initiative I suggested that Microsoft had a problem of not having a viable brand anymore. Perhaps more accurately I should have said that Microsoft has a negative brand which really is worse than having no brand.
Granted Microsoft is responsible for the condition of their brand regardless of how hard their employees try to make a difference. No matter how you look at the situation, Microsoft initiatives look more like spaghetti thrown against the wall with nothing to hold them together. This does nothing to instill confidence in the company with the corporate world; or even its own employees, as it struggles forward. As far as confidence in it from the consumer market I don’t think there is any at all.
Sean Aune from Mashable suggested in last night’s podcast that part of the problem is that Microsoft has spent too many years accepting the status quo and now they are trying to catch up by doing everything all at once. This is probably very true but I think along with that Microsoft is marketing itself to a dead end part of the consumer marketplace. People of my generation and even the one after us are generally a complacent lot regardless of how much we might bitch and moan about Microsoft. When it releases new versions of its software we grudgingly line up with our wallets open.
It isn’t the same for younger generations growing up in an Internet Society. They aren’t interested in the boring and utilitarian. They want things of industrial design beauty and to be able to run everything they need with the least amount of intervention from some monolithic corporation. They want cool and easy to use which is the last impression that Microsoft gives to anyone.
With Microsoft you never know where to go for the services you want. How many online initiatives does one company have to have before the user throws up their hands and says screw this. How many versions of an operating system does one company need before the users tells the company to go to hell and this doesn’t just apply to the consumer market either. Even now with Vista major corporations and big OEMs are telling Microsoft that they don’t want Vista and that they need to keep XP alive for much longer than Microsoft wants.
As Mary Jo points out at the end of her post regarding Vista
In fact, if I were Microsoft, I’d be using a good part of that $40-odd billion to hire a SWAT team to help Windows Vista. I’m not talking about hiring more developers; I’m talking about finding folks who could creatively find a way to market downgrades to XP as a selling point. Microsoft should be far more worried about its Vista image problem than about outsmarting Yahoo, at this point.
With the move to greater mobilization which can seen by an ever increasing number of laptops being sold there is no longer the room for a bloated 4Gig operating system bogging down systems that need to be light on their feet.
Microsoft desperately needs to figure out how it can make itself relevant to generations of computer users that don’t see the company as being the end all be all it once was - because it isn’t. Right now Microsoft is nothing more than a totally confusing mish mash of web services and products that leave users feeling like they are banging their heads against a brick wall. 
However the days of users being willing sheep milling around is long gone. There are just too many other options out there for them, whether it be operating systems or other software needs.
I don’t know how Microsoft will deal with all these important issues facing them but it definitely doesn’t involved putting an albatross around their neck with the take over of Yahoo. Along with that they need to really look inward and be placing some priorities on fixing the mess their complacency has cause. Then finally they have to realize that by not having a cohesive simple to understand platform the users will continue to find other options that are better for them.
Conversation Tags: Microsoft, Internet Society
