My Outlook just crashed. Gone is a proposal I needed to work on. I boot my Window 10 computer for the second time today, once because of the Outlook crash and earlier, because… Well, it had just been a while, and the system was slowing down, acting erratic.
Figure 1- That did not just happen. Computer crashes, files lost. (Stock photo, so not me, but whoever this is, I can sympathize).
I’m not in a good mood as I wait for the reboot. Looking around the coffee shop, I see nothing but hipsters head down over silver MacBooks. I am aware of how dark my ThinkPad is and how old I am. On my iPhone, I see the news Microsoft is laying off 10,000 people. Mostly in marketing and sales. Sounds like a lot of people, a small town’s worth, but it’s not the first time, not even the largest number to date. Microsoft laid off 18,000, the most in the company’s history back in 2014. It had laid of 7,800 in 2009. We may not be done. MS still has over 200,000 employees.
Figure 2- Good luck, Mr. Nadella. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella eyes the next generation of user. Picture from Microsoft site.
It’s been a while since I’ve heard good news from MS. Their last CEO, Satya Nadella, came on the scene 3 years ago, replacing Steve Ballmer, who replaced Bill Gates. Bill Gates is the last person who changed the world at Microsoft. Nadella was hoping to change the world with his first product as CEO, the HoloLens. That you have to Google what a HoloLens is revealing.
Microsoft has become the very company it displaced. IBM, a industry giant, bought into a Bill Gates operating system in the 1980s. Gates had dropped out of Harvard and his little company had just negotiated a sweet deal with IBM, one that would eventually turn the tables on the giant. In 2004, IBM got rid of its PC division. Microsoft was already a giant at that point.
But giants go to sleep and move slowly when they are awake. Google and Apple, once seedlings in the giant’s shadow have passed Microsoft in technology, acceptance and cachet. The smartest graduates from Stanford, MIT, CMU, Berkeley are being lured by Silicon Valley tech firms. It’s going to take a wad of money or a savvy recruiter to get them to move to Bellingham, WA.
Microsoft is hardly the in-place to work anymore. And God help you if you are working there now and are in Sales or Marketing.
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