Amazon, Google employees bullish; 25% of Microsofties say things will get worse

http://www.geekwire.com/2013/survey-amazon-google-employees-bullish-future-25-microsofties-worse/

by scholia • 13 years ago

25 59 13 years ago

geekwire.com

adamman• 13 years ago

Microsofties?

abhinavg• 13 years ago

IIRC, the term used to refer to Microsoft employees is actually Softies.

teamonkey• 13 years ago

That can't be helping their self-esteem either.

mikecane• 13 years ago

ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW IN BUSINESS I LEARNED AT MICROSOFT http://www.amazon.com/REALLY-NEED-BUSINESS-LEARNED-MICROSOFT...

You'll find in that they refer to themselves as Microsofties.

bornhuetter4• 13 years ago

I'm not surprised Microsoft employees are feeling down. It seems most media outlets and popular blogs really have it in for Microsoft, and that must get to you after a while. No matter what they do right or wrong the media hates it at the outset.

And their management aren't really helping - campaigns like scroogled must make a lot of employees really squeam.

iamshs2• 13 years ago

Just like this story. The story is a rehash of results, without any analysis. The accompanying picture does not even mention Microsoft. What level were the employees at? Which division? What is the sample size? These statistics are never ever that simple as the story makes it out to be.

bornhuetter4• 13 years ago

I've done surveys like this before - it's usually just an email that goes around to all employees and asks them to rate the company, management, peers etc on various metrics from 1 to 5.

The picture in the article shows the top 10 most happy, which is why Microsoft is not listed.

But this is a pretty lazy, low value article.

scholia5• 13 years ago

If the sample is people going to Glassdoor looking for jobs then it's probably not the keenest employees. However, that would also be true of the Top 10 companies listed, and they all score much better....

rlu• 13 years ago

Also the article says that the question asked "over the next 6 months". That isn't really looking ahead much at all. This seems like it would be more worrisome (if worrisome at all!) if it was over the next 3-5 years.

hkmurakami2• 13 years ago

well it's probably as forward looking as Wall Street

QEDturtles• 13 years ago

Speaking of 3-5 years... What keeps MS relevant over that timeframe? I don't think they can count on Office forever...

w1ntermute• 13 years ago

> It seems most media outlets and popular blogs really have it in for Microsoft, and that must get to you after a while.

Journalists have been Apple fanbois for decades. Even when Apple was in the shitter, they were loyal. So it's no surprise that they're taking every chance they can now to gloat about Apple's success and Microsoft's (supposed) decline.

technoslut2• 13 years ago

Many Apple fans would say that Google is the favored child right now.

Journalists look for a good story (or the ability to make one) regardless of what device they use.

michaelpinto2• 13 years ago

People forget this but Microsoft is at their best when they're the underdog — just look at Lotus Notes, Word Perfect, Netscape, Apple in the 90s and OS2. If they had the right leadership and if they refocused they would be killing it.

hkmurakami2• 13 years ago

I wonder why you were downvoted for this comment. The world might not be a better place if MSFT "wins" again in past fashion, but your observations aren't exactly wrong.

scholia5• 13 years ago

Plenty of people hate Microsoft so don't expect rationality....

michaelpinto2• 13 years ago

I agree: It's the old Steve Jobs quote "choice is a good thing"

pyre• 13 years ago

  | the right leadership

I think that the lack of this is why they are where they are.

MartinCron• 13 years ago

Another underdog story: Xbox, which has turned out really well for them.

jmstout• 13 years ago

This is an interesting metric, often forgotten. Companies are just people. What better way to gauge future success than by the mood in the room?

wslh• 13 years ago

I am sure that Steve Ballmer was not interviewed ;-) he is more bullish than Page and Bezos together.

zalzane• 13 years ago

I'd be absolutely mortified if I was a Microsoft employee.

Microsoft's monopoly on desktop PCs may become worthless in the near future as the average consumer realizes they can do everything on a tablet and not have to bother with "slow and hard to use" PC.

Office/word are becoming more easily replaceable with the advent of google docs and many free/cheaper alternatives.

If their main revenue streams decline, they would have to enter a new market. Oh wait, the last time Microsoft broke into a new industry successfully was with the Xbox over 10 years ago. Ironically, Xbox is one of the few Microsoft products that I think have a long and healthy life ahead of it, but I don't think it will be enough to support much if everything else comes crashing down.

I hope someone corrects me on this because there's nothing more horrifying for me than the possibility of someone like Oracle buying up Microsoft IP/patents if they go belly up.

irishloop2• 13 years ago

I don't know, I work for a multinational manufacturing firm in the lighting industry and we have so many things tied up in Microsoft, it's hard to imagine we could extricate ourselves easily. Whether it's legacy Windows API applications still being used to track inventory or simply users' longtime use of Microsoft Office products, or ongoing development in a .NET environment, I do not think we (or many of our peers) are in any position to start moving away from Windows.

Your point may remain for consumer electronics, but much of Microsoft's revenue stream comes from corporate users anyway.

endersshadow• 13 years ago

zalzane is also forgetting a big word: SharePoint. It's going nowhere, and it locks in companies to the Microsoft stack.

jedmeyers• 13 years ago

SAP might help you with your manufacturing needs. AFAIK Philips Lightning is using their products (SAP Manufacturing Execution and ERP).

kvb4• 13 years ago

People have been predicting Microsoft's decline for years, but they just posted record revenues last quarter. They have a much more diverse set of profitable businesses than Apple, Amazon, or Google do - Office, Windows, SQL Server, Xbox, Visual Studio, SharePoint, Dynamics XRM, ... They have over a dozen different businesses bringing in more than $1B of revenue a year.

That's not to say that everything's rosy, of course, but people have lost perspective on what an impressive money-making machine Microsoft really is.

mtgx• 13 years ago

Yes, but then Google and Apple didn't gain hundreds of millions of new users every year with completely different operating systems than Microsoft's.

Also "record financial record" thing can be very misleading for a company. It's not a predictor of success for the next few years. Competitiveness in the current environment is.

RIM fell for the same fallacy for years. RIM actually had a "record quarter" in 2009, and they were still growing into 2010. The problem is they only tried to change when things started getting worse - around late 2010 or early 2011.

They really should've started changing course in 2007, or 2008 at most, after the iPhone came out. But they didn't. Because they also thought their financials are improving, "so they might be doing something right". But all they needed to do to see if they are or aren't doing something right is look if their phones are competitive with the iPhone (and later the Android phones). And they clearly weren't.

Microsoft's biggest problem, as with all companies getting disrupted, is that the new disruptive technology arrives at a significantly lower price. Sure you can buy Windows machines for $300-$400 bucks, but the are nowhere near as good as the Android/iOS ones in terms of performance and what you get for the money in terms of hardware. And the price point is only getting lower.

technoslut2• 13 years ago

Just because MS has their fingers in a lot of pots doesn't meant everything they do has value. Office and Windows is still their bread and butter while Office continually takes up a larger piece of the pie.

MS is at a crossroads. If they push subscriptions like Adobe has, they could see a mass exodus of consumers away from Office.

The future isn't bleak for MS. What the climate has been showing is that MS is at its best when it comes to business.

RivieraKid2• 13 years ago

And they were right, because MS is on the decline – it's loosing its strategic position. 10 years ago, they were much stronger. Since then, Apple and Google surpassed them in market capitalization.

nostrademons4• 13 years ago

Almost all of those are in industries that are actively being disrupted by new innovations: Office => Google Docs; SQL Server => MySQL, PostGresQL, NoSQL; Visual Studio => Eclipse, SharePoint => The Google suite of tools, etc.

If you read The Innovator's Dilemma, one of the hallmarks of disrupted businesses is that everything's fine until they go out of business. They keep moving up-market, into market segments with higher revenues and higher margins, until they're a mainstay of all giant enterprises. And then those enterprises realize that there's a competitor out there whose product wasn't suitable a couple years ago, but has just barely been able to do the job they need it to do, and switch en-masse. And then the big company, having run out of market segments to expand into, dies rapidly. Happened to IBM in the early 90s, Sun in the early 2000s...and Microsoft is next.

cookiecaper• 13 years ago

The problem with MS is that their whole business has been about propping up either Windows or Office. Both are in jeopardy now and Microsoft is panicking, trying to save these products without the reference frame of what they really are, other than the two businesses that every other Microsoft enterprise is designed to uphold. Even the Xbox exists simply as a way to underscore the foothold of DirectX and keep Windows PCs the primary platform for 3D simulation.

Look at Windows 8. MS saw the tablet market explode and started to panic, aware that this may replace a lot of Windows PCs that would otherwise be sold to casual users. So they decided to integrate tablet stuff into Windows, so that Windows gets on devices that have this desirable form factor for casual users, and then they get the added bonus that the programs that work on their PCs will work just fine on their tablets and vice-versa.

This is actually a somewhat compelling proposition, the issue is that the implementation was horrific. Microsoft, in their attempt to continue universal dominance, failed to realize that people still on normal form factors, including the business market, would not take kindly to a full-screen, huge tile start menu, which is impossible to actually replace with something real, only a bunch of rough hacks to try and get back to a normal-type start menu. That's an interface for a casual device, not a serious business device, but MS has pushed it onto everything.

Microsoft needs to come to terms, and it can continue and adapt to market conditions. They may have to give up a little bit of ground in the short-term, but they at least won't stamp themselves out of existence. OS X is a consumer-centric OS. Android and iOS are consumer-centric OSes designed for entertainment and/or casual use devices. Windows is still the undisputed king in user-facing business systems. They should really not be revolting their business users by forcing them to learn certain mouse gestures in certain menus to find a shutdown option, or blanking out their screens with humongous, disruptive context switches every time someone wants to open a program. This is much, much worse than the iOSification of OS X that some have bemoaned, for instance; while there is an iOS-like menu, it hasn't replace Spotlight or Finder, and you can use your Mac without that intrusion if you choose. Even Apple recognizes that the interfaces are not directly and universally applicable to the different devices.

If MS recognizes that they need to focus on enterprise and conservatively integrate reasonable niceties from consumer-facing systems, they have a future. If not, they'll continue to flail about trying to be all things to all people, unwilling to accept that the tech landscape has changed and Windows may not be the universal thing anymore, and kill themselves.

Without such aggressive Metro integration, no one would have had any gripes with Windows 8. MS should quickly repent and issue Windows 9 with Metro as an optional extension and a classic explorer.exe shell as the default, because that's what business users need and expect.

scholia5• 13 years ago

Is Microsoft's stack easier and cheaper to replace than Apple's? Or Google's? I reckon you could easily move a company off both of those....

Considering the number of companies who apparently can't/won't move off XP (or even IE6) or Windows 7, it looks as though the Microsoft stack is quite deeply embedded in businesses. As was IBM's, and IBM is still a $100 billion (annual turnover) business about 15 years after it became irrelevant.

maxbaroi• 13 years ago

If you think you can replace the Office Suite with Google docs, then you don't know how the other half lives.

It just wouldn't work for people whose primary programming and analysis tool is Excel on moderately sized data-sets. I just copy-pasted a 100,000 row query result from MS SQL Server into Google Docs. It's been about five minutes, and it still hasn't copied over.

That's not a pathological case. Where I work, people routinely use excel spreadsheets with tens if not hundreds of thousands of rows.

Granted, Excel would be the devil if its incompetence was malicious and not just stupid. And maybe when you reach that level you need to tell people they're doing it wrong and shouldn't be using Excel to manipulate things that are that size. But Excel just works for them so why would/should they switch over to Google Docs when it doesn't work?

I don't know Libreoffice's capabilities well. I only have it on my personal laptop, and in the six years I've been running Linux, I rarely had any need to use the office suite there. If someone would speak to that (either way), I would appreciate it.

ma2rten• 13 years ago

I have a theory that there are three main markets for computer usage, each of which has different characteristics: recreational, productivity and gaming.

The recreational market cares about media, information, news, music, video, 2D games, sharing pictures, Facebook, Skype etc. Typically these are typically the home users. They want free, but don't mind ads. They care about good design and intuitive interfaces. For them the PC is a large tablet. They are usually quick to adapt new technology, because there is nothing that binds them to one platform.

Then there is the productivity market. These involves all kinds of professional software: MS Office, AutoCAD, Photoshop, IDEs, financial software, video editing, Share point. Customers here are often Enterprises, who care about reducing cost and risk. They are normally slow to adapt new technology (yes I am look at you, IE6), but care about the latest buzzwords. If the prices for some software is too low they get suspicious. This market also includes hobbyists. They don't mind learning curves for software, which will tie them in.

Now MS Office (mainly Word, Excel and Outlook) is an interesting case, because it is the only productivity app that even most home users use. In many cases it is the only thing that ties them to Windows. I don't think there is any viable replacement for it yet, which has the same usability, functionality and compatibility (and I say that even though I myself solely use Google Docs).

Finally there is the gaming market. They care about running the newest 3D games on the lastest hardware, which makes them good customers because they regularly buy new computers.

Now it is easy to think the MS is on the way out on the recreational market, but a) that is not the only and maybe not even the biggest market and b) let's not forget that there is overlap (most recreational users are also productivity users). Microsoft may loose some revenue, but I don't think it they will get bought out for patents by Oracle any time soon.

tlogan2• 13 years ago

Actually, I do see more upside potential for MSFT than for Amazon or Google. Google seems to be already on its peak - same for Amazon (I don't think they will go down just peaked).

Here is my reasoning:

- Windows Phone: not really because they are great but retardness of Android phone manufacturers (especially Samsung) gives them an excellent chance to gain a significant market share

- XBox + Skype: they might become the central entertainment and communication system in nearly every living room in the world

- Yammer, SkyDrive, Skype, Web Office and other cloud solutions for enterprises: Definitely something companies are going to try.

As somebody else said, Microsoft is the best when they are underdog so I do understand why Larry is so concerned about Microsoft.

untog3• 13 years ago

retardness of Android phone manufacturers (especially Samsung) gives them an excellent chance to gain a significant market share

Are you serious? Samsung has a huge market share- more than every other Android manufacturer. And you're saying they are "retarded"?

tlogan2• 13 years ago

Yes - I'm.

Let me give you example from the past. Yahoo! Mail was the leading email provider before Gmail. And one of reasons of Gmail success is retardness of Yahoo!: they were actually actively working on making Yahoo! Email less useful (restricting IMAP support, restricting storage, adding more ads, etc.). The similar things Samsung is doing now.

The same could be said for MySpace. And Informix (their CEO actually went to jail).

In sort, past performance does not guarantee future result.

city412• 13 years ago

As an aside, why do you feel Windows phones are not "great"? Full disclosure I used to work for MS, but I have no product loyalty for any company. My previous two phones were iPhones, and for the first time ever I finally feel like I have a great smartphone with my Nokia Lumia (WP8).

I'm stumped why everyone is so down on WP8. Granted, the app store is pretty grim. If that is the main concern, then fair enough. But I feel like the phone/OS themselves are stellar.

RivieraKid2• 13 years ago

I agree with you and I expected that WP will start eating Android's share, because until recently, Android's UX sucked. Why were consumers buying plasticky phones with the slow and unintuitive Android instead of Lumia phones? Similarly baffling was that Palm Pre completely failed as an iPhone competitor.

Some of the possible reasons:

* It was a market failure, consumers weren't choosing what was best for them.

* WP came too late.

* Thanks to its flexibility and openess, Android was able to fill various market niches.

untog3• 13 years ago

WebOS was great, but failed. That could well have been marketing, and MS have that covered.

I did like my Windows Phone a lot, lack of apps excepted. But then I found out I had no upgrade path to WP8, so I went back to Android- which, in the mean time, had a huge upgrade to 4.0, so the UI isn't even so far behind any more.

nostrademons4• 13 years ago

I want to highlight a statistical quirk that biases the results of this poll:

Whenever you have a self-selecting population, approval ratings are measures of the liquidity of the population, not of how good a job the organization is doing.

If you're a Googler and you hate your job, you don't stay a Googler for very long. There are umpteen zillion companies that would love to hire you, or VCs willing to fund you if you choose to do your own thing. There are a number of such ex-Googlers on Hacker News. Google software is somewhat proprietary, but the core languages, skillsets, and architectures are common to a lot of firms who would just love to pick up accumulated ex-Google knowledge.

If you're a Microsoftie and you hate your job, there's a good chance that your skills are more specialized, or you've "drunk the Kool Aid" and can't imagine a life outside Microsoft. If you think things suck...well, you might not have any other options. Or you might not think you have options, having accumulated so much company-specific knowledge. And so you stay in a job that you hate even though you hate it.

It's the same with customers. The reason Facebook, Comcast, TWC, and Congress have such low approval ratings is because users are pretty much locked-in to those services: even if they hate them, they can't go elsewhere. Meanwhile, the reason Google has such a high approval rating is because it's pretty simple to leave most Google products (and ones that are easier to leave, like Search and Chrome, tend to rate more highly than ones with a large degree of lock-in, like Plus and GMail).

If you want to tease out companies that are actually doing things right, look for ones with both a high approval rating (indicating large liquidity) and a large & growing population (indicating that despite this liquidity, more people want to come in than go out).

scholia5• 13 years ago

Oddly enough, a lot of Microsoft staff got hired by Google....

Amazon, Google employees bullish; 25% of Microsofties say things will get worse

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