[sf-lug] For John S. What is happening inside Microsoft...

[Bobbie Sellers]

On 08/09/2012 09:15 AM, jim wrote:

>
> (my response to the linked article)
>      I worked in a place that had similar "stack ranking"
> policies. There it didn't seem to affect morale, which
> was notably good.
>      As a contrast,, the former CEO of Costco remarked
> that culture is not the most important thing, it's the
> only thing. This refers to the zeitgeist of the community
> of employees.
>      In short, I think the criticism is better directed at
> upper management's policies that neglect to nurture each
> engineer and to work to match each to an appropriate task
> area.

     I think the point of the article is that the MS upper management
is not doing the job the way you describe but instead perverting the
idea.   I hope you read all three pages of the article.  It describes
teams working against each other to slow down project completion.

     The Surface internals design is surely the result of such work.

     The exterior is fine from the little we know.  Some correspondents
have suggested the models will both be HD High Density TV capable
at 1280 x 800 for the consumer model and HDTV 1920 x 1080.  I
don´t have a clear source for this just MS remarks that were made
pre-Retina.  Android tablets are more competition for Apple than
this will be IMO.  When the Android machines get the benefits of
the new higher resolution displays they may run both iPads and
Surface out of the marketplace.

     Bobbie
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, 2012-08-08 at 11:23 -0700, Bobbie Sellers wrote:
>> At a recent meeting John Strazzarino asked a question about that ugly
>> company and this is where
>> I got the information to reply to him.
>> It was originally a post on my Team Amiga Mailing List.
>>
>> Analyzing one of American corporate history’s greatest mysteries—the
>> lost decade of Microsoft—two-time George Polk Award winner (and V.F.’s
>> newest contributing editor) Kurt Eichenwald traces the “astonishingly
>> foolish management decisions” at the company that “could serve as a
>> business-school case study on the pitfalls of success.” Relying on
>> dozens of interviews and internal corporate records—including e-mails
>> between executives at the company’s highest ranks—Eichenwald offers an
>> unprecedented view of life inside Microsoft during the reign of its
>> current chief executive, Steve Ballmer, in the August issue. Today, a
>> single Apple product—the iPhone—generates more revenue than all of
>> Microsoft’s wares combined.
>>
>> <http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/07/microsoft-downfall-emails-steve-ballmer>
>>
>>
>>
>> I know this is a Linux mailing list but I think keeping up with the big
>> ugly company
>> is a healthy thing to do. By the way on the new Windows 8 they have made
>> using
>> the ugly blocky interface mandatory rather than letting it be bypassed
>> by the user.
>> <http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-said-to-block-ability-to-boot-straight-to-desktop-in-windows-8-7000002219/
>>   >
>>
>>
>> Reading up on the specs such as they are for the Surface I learned that
>> they have the regular
>> model with multicore ARM. This means that secure boot cannot be
>> bypassed. That stricture on
>> ARM appliances using Microsoft was already announced.
>>
>> The Surface Pro comes with much more RAM and a 4-core i5 processor so I
>> guess it might
>> be more susceptible to alternative FOSS operating systems. I have to
>> wonder what sort of
>> battery life that might afford. But so far no specs for the display or
>> the battery life on any model.
>>
>> What they are showing about the Surface might as well be computer
>> generated images.
>>
>> Bobbie Sellers
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
>