My former ZDNet colleague, Mary Jo Foley, has an interview with a former Microsoft employee, featuring the headline “Can an open-source backer thrive inside Microsoft? This one says no.”
But the piece makes clear, even if the headline doesn't, that the problems of Hamilton Verissimo had little or nothing to do with open source. As Nick Eaton of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer rightly inferred after reading the interview, they are endemic to the company's corporate culture.
I've been following Microsoft for almost 30 years myself, and it's clear that culture changed in 1995 when the company, having achieved near-monopoly status with its Windows operating system and Office suite, decided to “embrace and extend” this monopoly into the Internet through its Explorer browser.
The government objected, there was an epic struggle and (supposedly) Microsoft “won”. It “won” in that the U.S. government ended its oversight of the company.
But, again as I've written here many times, the company lost. And it continues to lose. The evidence is all over Verissimo's interview. Microsoft has become highly bureaucratic, a place where it is much easier to say “no” than to say “yes,” and a competitive company can't be that way.
A competitive company has to try stuff, put stuff into the market, even if that stuff doesn't fly, even if it fails. Google fails all the time. Google Answers failed. Google Wave failed. Google Buzz failed. And that list doesn't include a host of products, like Blogger and News, that have done nothing for the company's bottom line, and almost nothing for its top-line either.
The difference between the corporate cultures of Google and Microsoft is that Google is willing to fail, even fail spectacularly, while Microsoft is not. This attitude of “no” doesn't protect Microsoft from failure, either, because Microsoft has failed in mobility, failed in search, and failed online for years because (again) it doesn't move quickly enough.
The original corp
orate culture of Microsoft, instituted under Bill Gates, made it a great place to work 20 years ago because it wasn't afraid to fail. Its present corporate culture, under Steve Ballmer, makes it a rotten place to work.
The fault isn't all Ballmer's – the antitrust case (and the bureaucracy Microsoft created to fight against it) had a lot to do with it. But the case is over because Microsoft has failed, and failed spectacularly, over many years. It has become a widows-and-orphans stock, its performance over the last decade mirroring that of Verizon and AT&T rather than any competitive company.
Firing Ballmer, in and of itself, won't change the culture. There are literally thousands of lawyers, PR flacks, and bureaucrats filling the Redmond campus, barnacles that have to be shaved off with a knife before the ship is fit to sail.
It's time for Microsoft to get its own Lou Gerstner.
