At the time they felt very strongly about it. The employees were adamant about the fact that they had a certain way of doing things and they were concerned that Microsoft would disrupt whatever it was they had.
I don't know if it was the right thing for either party, but that's what happened.
I was applying for a job at a wealthy gaming corp. However, they wouldn't invest in a smoother video-calling software like Zoom, as they just used Teams bundled in their existing Office license.
I got late to a meeting because Teams would crash. When I opened Teams a few minutes before the call, my laptop froze. I thought my laptop performance would improve once enough memory has been allocated to Teams, but it never recovered from the freeze. I had to reboot and start Teams. It finally connected a few minutes after the proposed start time. The HR staff were in a bitter tone by then.
I couldn't get the job. I wish Microsoft would compensate me for a loss caused by their product. They shouldn't be allowed to ship sloppy software under their massive userbase and Microsoft brand (a supposed promise of quality).
Back then, Microsoft had a reputation for ruthless and underhanded corporate behavior. I suppose it shouldn't be surprising, were bad behavior also going on internally.
Microsoft has basically become a hostile software company. All of this aggressive and constant insistence to use their stuff just so that some line on some VP’s graph goes up.
This is what we get when incentives are misaligned.
It sounds like our experiences at Microsoft could hardly have been more different. Virtually everything I learned at Microsoft could be filed under "whatever you do, no matter how desperate you are, never do it this way". The systems were unreliable, inefficient when they worked, and the number of person-hours routinely wasted on tool management was staggering. The culture was unhealthy, competitive and individualistic, sometimes to the point of hostility. You saw cross-team communication, I saw at least a quarter of every working day wasted in routine status meetings, in which two or three of the ten or twelve people present spent an hour making a couple of decisions while the rest of us tried not to look too bored...
Of course Microsoft is a big place and different divisions work differently. I'll never take the risk of landing in such a mess again, though.
Perhaps, once they’d reflected on it, they decided it wasn’t fair, just like you have. It seems as though a few here want to demonise Ballmer and Gates for something they ultimately didn’t do. So they had a conversation about it.
I completely agree with the following from the article:
"Even when Microsoft has a great product on its hands, even when its product, engineering and design teams manage to hit one out of the park, it won’t matter once the business team comes in and ruins it for everyone."
The whole history of all screw ups from Microsoft just confirms that.
Its disgusting, and everyone who works at Microsoft should be ashamed of it.
It is disgusting, but I fail to see how e.g. the team working on the C++ compiler should be ashamed for something another completely seperate team was forced to do by management (assuming something like that is responsible for this). In my opinion MS has gone too big for that, with a bunch of seperate departments almost acting as standalone entities (i.e. seperate companies) who can take a lot of decisions on their own without much interference between them, just all sharing the MS name. E.g. there's the research going on, there's VS/Office/Windows etc.
This is what Microsoft did, and later admitted it was bad for the products and users and teams.
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