On Microsoft’s new structure

http://www.bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts/
http://www.bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts/

Microsoft finally unveiled the new much-rumored organizational plan. Glad to see Microsoft moving audaciously. This is long overdue.

However, knowing that organization, I don’t know if there is much chance that it will be successful. The whole organization has been set up to compete with each other for decades. This kind of cultural change is probably beyond what is possible at this point. The battle lines are too well established, the rivalries too set in stone.

The culture of Microsoft has always been one of intense competition. Successful individuals and managers rise more on their ability to outshine their peers rather than cooperate. A new high-level alignment or a single memo will not change that. If Microsoft really wants to be nimble and more collaborative, they need to clear house.

Furthermore, organizing engineering as massive silos that are parallel to the other massive silos representing other business functions is exactly the wrong way to do this. Every new effort will require coordination between massive groups with conflicting priorities, politics and agendas. Everything will be harder. The company itself is so massive that having responsibility for the success meet at the tops of these tall functional mountains will not be sufficient to make these efforts work. The people with responsibility will be too far away from the details to be effective. Layers upon layers of management (each with their own goals, agendas and success metrics) will need to be navigated to get any level of cooperation.

It’s going to be a tough few years for the employees at the company. For the front-line engineers, their day-to-day work will probably not change much, but at the higher levels, there is going to be tremendous pain as the new structure and corresponding power battles work themselves out. In the end, I expect very little will change on the inside, or the outside.

I’d be delighted to see Microsoft prove me wrong.

Why the flurry of new content

A couple years ago, I decided that I would keep my blog for “long form” posts and then use the other services that I had accounts on for other stuff (short posts on twitter, links and pictures on tumblr, etc). That was fine. Of course, I don’t write long form posts very often; which meant the blog was left fallow for long periods of time. It also meant that I had to do lots of extra work to have that content appear in a consolidated form in other places, like my home page or my lifestream.

Recently, I had to fix up my wife’s blog after it was hacked, and I realized just how much of her content was hosted on other sites. Also, with twitter’s old-API retirement killing some of my tools and the various consolidation (and shutting down) of services that are going on, it started making more sense to me to go back to primarily hosting my content on my own server. This gives me more control on the things I create. So for the moment, I’m going to try hosting all my content here and then echoing it out to those other sites. Essentially, the content will live here, but I’m going to try using those other sites just for promoting it. I did consider hosting my own videos here, but that is still hard to justify since I can’t link to it from youtube or vimeo, so I’ll keep posting content there and just including it here. If necessary, I can move that content here in the future.

This does continue the now (9 year!) tradition of this blog being a grab bag of random thoughts, images, video and audio from me. That is a primary violation of the blogging rule that you keep your blog to be narrowly focused if you want people reading you on a regular basis. I have no big dream of being a “blogger” though. When I have tried to split off single-topic blogs (like digital-motion.net), I’ve had a hard time keeping them filled with new content. That violates the even bigger rule about keeping your blog up-to-date. I have a set of things I care a lot about: software engineering, imaging, music, food, politics, and motion design. My interest in each of things (or at least writing about any of them) ebbs and flows. Rather than have six blogs, it makes more sense to just have the one. Again, all of this is subject to change, which is the way I like it.