Vanity fair microsoft review

Here's one big internal problem with Microsoft, according to Vanity Fair :. Beyond that, Eichenwald blames the usual stuff. He says that Windows was the most important thing at Microsoft, and the company wouldn't bend for new products:.

For you. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options. Get the Insider App. Click here to learn more. Just as with e-books, opportunities for major product developments slipped away. But despite the fact that Microsoft had the jump on its competitors with Windows CE, it still lost the race for the wildly successful smartphones.

And they completely blew it. And they completely blew it because of the bureaucracy. The achingly slow processes at times bordered on the comical. Marc Turkel, a product manager, told me about an initiative he oversaw around that involved multiple groups.

Turkel began negotiating with the different managers, then their supervisors, and then their supervisors as he tried to get the project finished. Finally, one day, Turkel was running another interminable meeting when he looked out the window. The building was finished.

The project was not. Sometimes, though, the problems from bureaucracy came down to a simple reality: The young hotshots from the s, techies who had joined the company in their 20s and 30s, had become middle-aged managers in their 40s and 50s.

When younger employees tried to point out emerging trends among their friends, supervisors sometimes just waved them away. An example—in , AOL introduced its instant-messenger program, called AIM, a precursor to the texting functions on cell phones. In , a young developer noticed that friends in college signed up for AIM exclusively and left it running most of the time. The reason? He spoke about the problem to his boss, a middle-aged man. Why would young people care about putting up a few words?

Anyone who wanted to tell friends what they were doing could write it on their profile page, he said. Meaning users would have to open the profile pages, one friend at a time, and search for a status message, if it was there at all. By the by-product of bureaucracy—brutal corporate politics—had reared its head at Microsoft. And, current and former executives said, each year the intensity and destructiveness of the game playing grew worse as employees struggled to beat out their co-workers for promotions, bonuses, or just survival.

What emerged—when combined with the bitterness about financial disparities among employees, the slow pace of development, and the power of the Windows and Office divisions to kill innovation—was a toxic stew of internal antagonism and warfare. For that reason, executives said, a lot of Microsoft superstars did everything they could to avoid working alongside other top-notch developers, out of fear that they would be hurt in the rankings.

And the reviews had real-world consequences: those at the top received bonuses and promotions; those at the bottom usually received no cash or were shown the door. Outcomes from the process were never predictable. Employees in certain divisions were given what were known as M. But even achieving every M. As a result, Microsoft employees not only tried to do a good job but also worked hard to make sure their colleagues did not. Worse, because the reviews came every six months, employees and their supervisors—who were also ranked—focused on their short-term performance, rather than on longer efforts to innovate.

You really had to focus on the six-month performance, rather than on doing what was right for the company. There was some room for bending the numbers a bit. Each team would be within a larger Microsoft group. The supervisors of the teams could have slightly more of their employees in the higher ranks so long as the full group met the required percentages. So, every six months, all of the supervisors in a single group met for a few days of horse trading.

On the first day, the supervisors—as many as 30—gather in a single conference room. Blinds are drawn; doors are closed. A grid containing possible rankings is put up—sometimes on a whiteboard, sometimes on a poster board tacked to the wall—and everyone breaks out Post-it notes.

Names of team members are scribbled on the notes, then each manager takes a turn placing the slips of paper into the grid boxes.

The best way to guarantee a higher ranking, executives said, is to keep in mind the realities of those behind-the-scenes debates—every employee has to impress not only his or her boss but bosses from other teams as well. And that means schmoozing and brown-nosing as many supervisors as possible.

Like other employees I interviewed, Cody said that the reality of the corporate culture slowed everything down. That was the only way to be visible to other managers, which you needed for the review.

I asked Cody whether his review was ever based on the quality of his work. He paused for a very long time. In the end, the stack-ranking system crippled the ability to innovate at Microsoft, executives said. Microsoft had some of the smartest people in the technology business. It had billions of dollars at its disposal, and the ability to throw that money into any project the executives chose. The information was conveyed through employee surveys conducted every six months.

And in response the company did … nothing in particular. And so Microsoft kept getting slammed by the competition. Apple released the iPod music player in ; two years later, senior managers at Microsoft were still trying to figure out how to compete.

Less than two weeks later, Allchin tried out a music device being developed for Microsoft by an independent hardware vendor. He reviewed the experience in a November 13 e-mail to a group of executives.

Years passed. Finally, on November 14, , Microsoft introduced its own music player, called Zune. Fifty-four days later, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, which combined a mobile phone, a music player, Internet capability, a camera, and other features not available on Zune.

In fact, Apple had already introduced its fifth-generation iPod, its less expensive iPod Mini, and was about a year away from marketing the least costly of its music players, the iPod Nano. Zune was blown away. By , iPod maintained an astonishing 71 percent of the market, the kind of numbers rarely seen anywhere outside of a North Korean election. Meanwhile, Zune limped along with less than 4 percent. Last October, Microsoft discontinued it, in hopes that customers would instead purchase a Windows Phone that, like the iPhone, has a music player.

In May , Microsoft undertook a project code-named Longhorn, which was expected to ship in late under the name Windows Vista. Executives had a number of objectives for Longhorn, including competing with the free operating system called Linux by supporting a programming language named C , which allowed for easier development of other software; creating a Windows File System, or WinFS, which could save different types of files into a single database; and creating a display system, code-named Avalon, that would give software the same appearance as a Web site.

As development took off, Microsoft engineers dumped a grab bag of functions into Longhorn. Huge teams were assigned to the effort, but despite all the work, the launch was postponed again and again. The program took as long as 10 minutes to boot up. It was unstable and frequently crashed. Tiger did much of what was planned for Longhorn—except that it worked.

E-mails flew around Microsoft, expressing dismay about the quality of Tiger. Vic Gundotra, another member of the group, tried out Tiger. The videoconferencing function? Scripting software? Tim Seely Doctor. Sophie Hunter Maria Osborne. John Woodvine Lord Bareacres. Barbara Leigh-Hunt Lady Bareacres. Nicholas Jones Lord Darlington. Sian Thomas Lady Darlington. Trevor Cooper General Tufto. Steven Elder Curzon Street Footman.

Niall O'Brien Mr. Tom Beard Officer. Thomas Grant Little Pitt. Jonny Phillips Mr. Richard McCabe The King. Veerendra Saxena Coventry Island Man. Bruce Mackinnon Casino Boy. Matthew Horne Casino Boy. Andrew Price Casino Stranger. Tom Sturridge Young Georgy. Matthew Faulk Writer. Mark Skeet Writer. Julian Fellowes Writer. Additional information Directors Mira Nair. Directors Mira Nair.

Studio Focus Features.