04.08.11
Gemini version available ♊︎Microsoft Employees Turn Against Microsoft as the Company Crumbles
Summary: Microsoft workers who speak out against their employer these days
We wish to thank Jan for bringing to our attention this important item which we missed last month. It’s titled “Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing” and it is written by a B0ng employee, starting as follows:
I worked at Bing back in 2008 and I’ve seen it at the peak of its power. This story is about an amazing group of technologists, where were on a task of solving the hardest problem in the world – Attacking Google at it’s home territory. Let me say that again: Attacking a market incumbent on an area of it’s core strength – It’s hardest in technology companies. Time and again people have tried doing it and failed, and it’s not just about the money.
A blogger who supports us, Penguin Pete, has also just declared that “Microsoft’s Monopoly Is Now So Bad That Even Microsoft Employees Complain”, citing Microsoft staff:
I’ve never seen anything like this story, and I don’t think there’s ever been a precedent in history. A story summarized at Electronista seems to show a Microsoft employee complaining that the company actually has smaller monopolies within itself destroying it from the inside. What can happen when a single corporation does the closest thing to enslaving the entire human race that any entity has ever done and goes unchecked, unchallenged, and uncontrollable for so long? Its empire fragments into a bunch of warring sub-monopolies, that’s what.
To make matters worse, only a minority of Microsoft employees approves Ballmer's reign, despite all the Kool-Aid. These are all signs of a rogue company. █
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twitter said,
April 9, 2011 at 12:03 pm
The Posterious article is mostly incoherent propaganda but, despite the swagger, obscenity and Microsoft wold view, there are some gems worth noting. The stuff about how great Bing actually was, what a wonderful and high paying place Microsoft is to work at and how smart people are at Microsoft can be dismissed as the usual big company propaganda. Complaints of bureaucratic interference are to be expected in an organization where everything had to once pass Bill Gates’ personal inquisition and “killer question”. It should also be obvious when the company insists on “eating their own dogfood” while the rest of the world is deploying gnu/linux. The Google scraping scandal makes Bing’s technical failure obvious. Bing’s continued market failure is also obvious, despite Yahoo take over, Facebook friending, IE defaulting and so many other tricks. Here’s what I think is interesting:
Continued bad attitude. Microsoft can’t just enter a market, it must “overthrow” the leader and take everything. Malice seeps from every paragraph.
Labor law bending. The author claims that managers hired overseas directly against company policy and had people drive from Canada to get around US H1B guest (rightless) worker restrictions. The larges single exploiter of H1B slave labor has people make a four hour round trip drive each week so they can exploit yet more foreign workers. This is amazing.
The exit of talent from Bing. It’s nice to see this admitted in what might be official propaganda, but it’s a simplification that ignores the root causes of Bing and Microsoft’s failure – lack of software freedom.
Because Microsoft so extensively indoctrinates their own employees and so often astroturfs, it is always difficult to tell PR from real employee voices. We know from Comes emails that not a word is published in the “Microsoft controlled press” that does not pass PR inspection. Employees who do speak out are often punished like that poor employee who posted pictures of Macs on Microsoft’s loading docks. Microsoft is run by bullies and what comes out is never pleasant. The sooner the company fails, the better off everyone will be.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz Reply:
April 9th, 2011 at 5:17 pm
Microsoft is not a producing company, it’s a power grabber.