October 02, 2008

My 15-Year Award

I received my 15-year service award at our group meeting last week. Here it is in all its crystal glory:

It is quite a clever design; the only actual orange on it is the band around the middle, but it reflects internally so that it looks like the top is orange also. Here's a view from the top:

I was inspired to bring in my other service awards, which pre-date the new-style awards. Here they are getting to know one another:

Hmmm, seems like something is missing from that photo. Oh right, you can't see what they are saying to each other:

I also noticed there was a Facebook group Microsoft Old-timers, whose qualification is 15+ years at the company. Bing!

Posted by AdamBa at 09:58 AM | permalink | Comments (2)

September 30, 2008

Howard Lincoln is a Gigantic Idiot

Today's paper had a cringe-inducing interview with Howard Lincoln, chairman and CEO of the Mariners, in which he clearly explains how he knows nothing about baseball and how the Mariners are doomed to mediocrity, at best, while he is in charge. Lincoln is not a baseball person; he's a lawyer who wound up running Nintendo, then moved over to the Mariners after Hiroshi Yamauchi, former president of Nintendo, became majority owner of the team. Lincoln is Yamauchi's Mariners factotum, who now serves, as he puts it, "at the pleasure of the board and Nintendo". I suppose I should appreciate Lincoln's "honesty" and "transparency" but instead I feel bad for my kids, who are likely never going to experience winning baseball in Seattle. Actually, I guess he reminds me of nothing so much as the current Bush administration, in his steadfast devotion to a failed strategy and his apparent belief that changing your mind indicates weakness. "When it comes to signing 33-year-old outfielders to big free agent contracts, you can't blink!"

The Mariners woes at least generated this great headline in the paper: 100 bleepin' losses! on the occasion of, well, their hundredth loss. On September 10 the Mariners had a record of 57-87 and needed to go 6-12 in their last 18 games to avoid 100 losses. They responded to this challenge by reeling off a 12-game losing streak, eventually finishing 61-101. To put this in perspective, even in the pretty grim early 1990s when I first moved to Seattle, they never lost 100 games; they hadn't sunk so low since 1983.

Posted by AdamBa at 07:13 PM | permalink | Comments (4)

September 25, 2008

Why Do We Resent Each Other?

At the Company Meeting last week, there was an interesting small subtext to Steve Ballmer's speech that I don't think anybody really picked up on.

It's a tradition that if you are in, say, the Office team, and somebody mentions "Office" at the Meeting, you cheer. Ballmer took note of this habit and then asked how come we don't cheer for other groups? At face value the question seems silly; the practice has always struck me as a benign gesture, sort of like a comedian getting cheers when they ask if there is anybody from Brooklyn here tonight. But Ballmer mentioned it twice, and I think what was really bothering him was something deeper, which I have also noticed.

What I have noticed is that it's not just that people don't cheer when the name of another group is mentioned; they seem to be actively sitting on their hands. This is most apparent during a demo of a product. The group whose product is being demoed is of course excited and/or nervous. But it seems like there are other people in the crowd (which, remember, is all Microsoft employees) who are actively rooting for the demo to go badly--as if that will "show them", even if it's unclear why that team is "them", and what it would really show. It's not just a single demo; they feel that way about the group as a whole.

This certainly was not the case way back when; there was friendly rivalry between Systems and Apps, but we (in Systems) certainly wanted Apps to do well, and were happy for them if their product was doing well. Even in the days of Windows NT vs. Windows 9x, which were a bit more antagonistic, when it came down to somebody suing to try to block the shipment of Windows 98, we all united as Microsoft to boo and hiss.

Now it seems different. I think there are people at Microsoft who are glad what Wii is outselling Xbox, who feel vindicated by the fact that Live Search's market share is not growing, who cackled under their breath when a demo at the Meeting popped up an error message. Understand: I have stated before, and still feel, that I don't understand WHY we are doing the Xbox and would be happier, as a shareholder, if we weren't doing it. But given that the decision has been made that we ARE doing it, I would certainly like to see them succeed, both because we would make more money, and also because I know people who work on Xbox, and they are certainly smart, hard-working people who deserve to achieve massive market success as much as anybody in Windows or Office. It's not a zero-sum game; Zune doing well doesn't take a bigger slice of the pie away from your team, it just makes the pie bigger.

I think this sense is what was really nagging at Ballmer, and I concur. It's fine to disagree with some business decisions we've made; but they've been made, and we should move forward as Microsoft, not as a bunch of infighting teams. In fact, I challenge you, if you work at Microsoft, to support other product groups. You don't have to cheer out loud, but don't jeer in silence either.

Posted by AdamBa at 09:42 PM | permalink | Comments (5)