Forbes - Microsoft's Midlife Crisis

Just a quick post regarding the below Forbes article - it makes for a very good read and is on-target with the issues I've posted about and especially with the comments that folks have added to this blog:

Microsoft's Midlife Crisis by Victoria Murphy.

(http://www.forbes.com/home/technology/2005/09/12/microsoft-management-software_cz_vm_0913microsoft.html )

Snippet:

What has gone wrong? Microsoft, with $40 billion in sales and 60,000 employees, has grown musclebound and bureaucratic. Some current and former employees describe a stultifying world of 14-hour strategy sessions, endless business reviews and a preoccupation with PowerPoint slides; of laborious job evaluations, hundreds of e-mails a day and infighting among divisions so fierce that it hobbles design and delays product releases.

I've been asking some folks what it would take for them to consider coming back to Microsoft, to understand the level of change they are looking for. The two big responses I get:

1. Get rid of the process-ridden bureaucracy that inhibits our productivity and passion.
2. Throw out the stack ranking and replace it with something intelligent and fair (e.g., peer reviews or such). No curve.