Yeah, I don't know if this is really appropriate to the Raspberry Pi group, but I think the people who post here might find it interesting. We do talk a lot about how engineers can thrive in a large organization, and about organizational (mis)behavior in general. So, sure, it's appropriate. And it's a great lesson in how a mighty company can destroy itself.
Here's an interesting upcoming article in Vanity Fair: Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant, excerpt here: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/07/microsoft-downfall-emails-steve-ballmer
My favorite part is this reader comment:
InTheKnow23 wrote:As someone who spent 7 years in Microsoft until recently, I cannot state strongly enough how dead on correct this article is. I see some defensive postings below such as "What about XP?!" when the fact is that Windows ME and Windows Vista were two of the worst OS' ever released. The stack rating system [described in the article] is one of the absolute worst management techniques I've ever encountered. As the article says, it pits team member against team member (e.g. "one of us MUST die regardless of how we do as a team"). Innovation requires taking risks and stepping outside of the box. The stack ranking system pretty much ensures that neither take place - people do not take risks and instead focus each day on how to SURVIVE vs. how to make the Microsoft more Successful. If you try to push for new ideas and new processes, you are simply labeled a troublemaker and will soon be culled from the herd.
When I worked for large organizations in my younger years, I observed the following Law of Large Organizations:
In any Large Organization, Loyalty will always be rewarded over Competence.
The Law of Large Organizations ensures that large organizations will eventually become ineffective as they weed out the "troublemakers" mentioned by InTheKnow23 and there's nobody left to tell them that they're doing it wrong until it's too late. I'd always suspected that this Law was strictly enforced at Microsoft -- it's satisfying to see my hypothesis confirmed.
