Microsoft's Midlife Crisis

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Microsoft's Midlife Crisis

What has gone wrong? Microsoft, with $40 billion in sales and 60,000 employees, has grown musclebound and bureaucratic. Some current and former employees describe a stultifying world of 14-hour strategy sessions, endless business reviews and a preoccupation with PowerPoint slides; of laborious job evaluations, hundreds of e-mails a day and infighting among divisions so fierce that it hobbles design and delays product releases. In short, they describe precisely the behavior that humbled another tech giant: IBM in the late 1980s. Tellingly, IBM reached a point of crisis just over three decades after it started selling computers to commercial users.

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Some employees complain that they spend hours tracking down collaborators in far-flung groups instead of talking to customers and taking products to market. Working on a huge project requires checking in with management constantly. "Instead of promoting the product to customers, I'd get stuck in the office until midnight preparing slides for my monthly product review," says David Ryan, 33, a marketer for Windows XP. He has just been freed up to pursue an incubation project in the server group, where he is happily exempt from most reviews. At Microsoft a "review" is often a progress report illustrated with 15 PowerPoint slides.

Other staffers say that almost every move requires a lawyer's signature and that even routine approvals can take weeks. Recently one employee waited a month while a $10,000 purchase order for outside development work was held up by legal. By the time the lawyers were done, the budget for the deal had evaporated. Dennis Reno left Microsoft two years ago feeling burned out from bureaucracy. He'd worked 18-hour days but got little done because he was bogged down by paperwork. "The smallest issue would balloon into a nightmare of a thousand e-mails," says Reno, who is now at Plumtree Software

http://www.forbes.com/2005/09/12/microsoft...soft_print.html