Starting to Evolve Our Organization and Culture | Hacker News Reader

Starting to Evolve Our Organization and Culture

microsoft.com

18 pointsr0h1n11 comments

The first step to building the right organization for our ambitions is to realign our workforce. With this in mind, we will begin to reduce the size of our overall workforce by up to 18,000 jobs in the next year. Of that total, our work toward synergies and strategic alignment on Nokia Devices and Services is expected to account for about 12,500 jobs, comprising both professional and factory workers.

This is why people don't trust executive-types. Satya, why can't you just say: "We're laying off 18,000 people total, and 12,500 people from Nokia."

Because while that's the top-line for the 18,000 people affected (12,500 today), he'd desperately like that not to be the only thing the other 100,000 people who are staying hear. He wants the rest of the people to first hear: "We're changing for the better, and while these layoffs are a bad thing, it's necessary pain we have to go through to be better in the long run." That means wrapping the bad news with as much context and transparency as you can, every time you talk about it.

I agree with your overall sentiment that you can't just lay bald facts out there, devoid of context and expect great things to happen.

However,if I were famous enough to propose a Sokoloff's Law, it might say "If your goal is to increase transparency, you've failed once the phrase 'realign our workforce' or 'work toward synergies and strategic alignment' creeps into the draft."

"He wants the rest of the people to first hear: "We're changing for the better, and while these layoffs are a bad thing, it's necessary pain we have to go through to be better in the long run."

Right, but the question remains, why did he not just say exactly what you just said? Why use the business school/managementese style language? Why not use language that is human and expresses empathy?

He probably did say that. To a PR person, who paraphrased it.

When I worked for a Fortune 500 company, the department head in my department did not write his own anything. He had a staff writer (I applied for the position at one point). And I am reasonably sure that the staff writer also got his stuff edited or reviewed by someone to make sure it contained no typos, etc. before it went out as the Face of The Department.

So I would be kind of surprised if Satya actually wrote this at all. Someone else wrote it. He put his name on it and posted it. Being the face of the company is part of his job.

Does anyone else feel like Microsoft hasn't actually done anything in over a decade? OK well .. except with the Xbox lineage. It seems like in every other part of the business they've made a bunch of dumb purchases, epic-failed in all areas - including their previous core competency of the consumer OS space - and brought in this Steve Jobs-esque clone CEO guy who is gagging to be seen as doing something while offering precisely zero believable direction.

It must be hard for them seeing all the areas die for them at once: Bing, Exchange, Hotmail, Office, Windows, XBox, mobile, embedded...

Satya Nadella's only been CEO for 6 months. You can't effect major changes in a major multinational corporation overnight, especially not until you've had sufficient opportunity to come up with a good direction for that change. If anything, I would consider that a promising and reasoned approach, as opposed to announcing a layoff of 18,000 people within the first month of his appointment.

Steve Jobs did not invent innovation or style and he certainly didn't patent them, so there's no need to claim anyone else with a hint of competence or ambition is just some cheap knock-off. If you raise his pedestal any higher you'll only spend your own life living in the shadow.

My point was it's a sinking ship, this guy is too little too late and yet to prove any efficacy. I think you misinterpreted the Jobs mention... I'm not a fan of the original, and frankly find the similarities with other tech presentations highly amusing. Skivvies. Round glasses. Slightly wasted, career-corporate bearing. Ease with which non-words of utter boardroom befuddlement spill out of their mouths. And so on...

I think I get your point on the Jobs mention, that you weren't dismissing him as a wannabe-Jobs so much as the culture and manner Jobs most prominently embodies. That's pretty fair, I think.

Though a Jobs-related counterpoint, Apple was in a pretty rough place at one time, too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Amelio#Apple_Computer

I think it's still much too early to count Microsoft out, they've still got a whole lot of runway ahead of them before they run out, and cutting such a huge part of their work force could just buy them even more runway, enough to get their bearings and recover. I think it would be pretty interesting to see a post-Microsoft tech world, but I can't imagine that happening until a worthy successor dethrones them, rather than simply fading away.

I think it's still much too early to count Microsoft out, they've still got a whole lot of runway ahead of them

The name will surely live on in some offering or other, but the dynasty has already faded.

it would be pretty interesting to see a post-Microsoft tech world, but I can't imagine that happening until a worthy successor dethrones them, rather than simply fading away.

With regards to the primary three product lines: the OS and the office suite, plus the corollary server solutions, Ubuntu + Redhat seem to be pretty effective at stealing former Microsoft clients, particularly governments. Hell, even Amazon's getting in on the act with EC2 sales to the CIA.

That's fairly strong evidence on its own, but in addition the world has shifted away from desktop and Microsoft's strongest position against this is essentially office work requiring a keyboard and XBox/gaming rigs. SteamOS is going to add further challenge to the console space, and encourage development in a cross-platform direction, and we've already seen open and largely interoperable source office solutions proven at scale.

If you had to point at a successor, I believe it's the Linux world in general, but from the consumer's perspective Ubuntu.

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