"Microsoft...[have] become so insular that their job postings are full of incomprehensible jargon and acronyms which nobody outside the company can understand."
Sounds like something I heard about GM last year. Their managers had no idea what the competition was like because they all "had" to drive their own cars.
I can imagine that this must be a hard thing to overcome in a car company. When you work for a car company, you want to be proud of your product so you want to buy from your company. However, most families have at most 2 cars, so you have very little incentive to buy and really understand a competitor's product.
I can see how in Microsoft you have the same forces at work. When building infrastructure or programming there is so steep of a learning curve regardless of what technology you choose that it is all but impossible to really understand all possible choices. Couple that with the inherent Microsoft desire to dogfood everything, and you get a lot of people understanding only the Microsoft way. Once you start going down that path, it's very easy to create your own mini-languages. It's all very incestuous, and not a good way to run a company. I think this is why Microsoft seems to have a hard time understanding Apple and Linux.
>regardless of what technology you choose that it is all but impossible to really understand all possible choices. Couple that with the inherent Microsoft desire to dogfood everything, and you get a lot of people understanding only the Microsoft way.
I don't actually think this is the case. More than half the people I met at Microsoft over the summer use iPhones (the rest generally had a Palm Pre or an Android phone; I met maybe 2-3 people with Windows Mobile), and many of them have Macbooks for their personal laptops. It was also quite common for people to use Google rather than Bing (though Softies are generally quite enthusiastic about Bing). Linux use probably is lower, simply because they use MS development tools to develop for MS platforms, but I certainly didn't get the impression that everyone at MS only uses MS products.
FWIW, I have heard from friends at Apple that using competitors' products there is frowned upon...
I need to find the source, but when top GM brass was given a new model to demonstrate, they were given a ringer -- the whole car gone over with a fine toothed comb to iron out the slightest defect (source: http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/inside-gm-mystery-of-crap-i...).
So not only were they less aware of what they were competing against, they had a false idea of what they were competing with.
According to The Reckoning by David Halberstam, it was sort of worse than that--may still be. Executives' cars were put into the service bay as soon as they drove into work, and readjusted as needed. Daily.
A more non-dogfood arrangement is hard to imagine.
Additionally, he tells a story of someone bringing a speaker to an executive meeting who had deep knowledge of the Japanese auto market. They were allowed to speak, so long as they did not talk about Japanese autos or the Japanese auto industry.
I don't see MS as being in that sort of situation. However, as a very large successful organization (whose early genius builders have moved on), there are cultural perspectives that are hard to shake.
> 2. Be a Perception Change Agent. The CSI Lead needs to drive perception across a number of key audiences (IT Pros, Government Elites, BDMs, IT Journalists, etc.) Ability to implement programmatic marketing that will CHANGE THE WAY PEOPLE think about Microsoft, specifically those with a ‘hostile’ or negative perception of the Microsoft platform.
If I was Microsoft, and I wanted to change perceptions of my company, I'd start by changing the reality. Perceptions of MS are poor largely because the reality is poor. But MS want to change the one without the other. This is called bullshit, and is unlikely to work for an organisation as much in the public eye as MS.
Having worked for some large companies, the public perception of the organization is thought to be subject to various PR and marketing efforts. What MS has always excelled at, is the PR angle, relying less on advertising. That is the #2 element you quote there.
Part of the reality of MS is that they have a very healthy cash flow from the products that are sold in an institutional fashion, that is, to the enterprise and preloaded on consumer devices. Any organization in that successful situation can't innovate like we have come to expect small companies to do--serious changes in their "reality" will threaten territories that are bringing home the bacon.
And it has to be a difficult proposition to continue to convince people to pay you money for software that, to a first order of approximation, costs nothing.
Microsoft must have an interesting internal situation going on. On the one hand they want to work with open source - at least, that's what they claim. On the other they want to "compete" with Linux. Since there is enormous overlap between open source projects and Linux projects, that must result in some cognitive dissonance for MS employees.
The words "evidence" and "compete" have special meanings inside Microsoft:
As I understand it, "evidence" is proof that your work was received well by the community you are targeting. Rather than sales figures, "evidence" is the currency of the division that this job is in.
"compete" is a blanket term for "not Microsoft": Mac OS X, Linux, (Free|Net|Open)BSD, Plan 9 are all part of "compete".
Does Microsoft expect applicants to know what all these internal terms mean? Or is this a listing more for internal candidates?
If you’re looking for a new role where you’ll focus on one of the biggest issues that is top of mind for KT and Steve B in “Compete”, build a complete left to right understanding of the subsidiary, have a large amount of executive exposure, build and manage the activities of a v-team of 13 district Linux& Open Office Compete Leads, and develop a broad set of marketing skills and report to a management team committed to development and recognized for high WHI this is the position for you!
Looks internal, but it also looks like they're hiring marketing folk, not engineers. I think that's more likely the reason that it sounds like gibberish. If a marketing person saw an ad looking for someone with experience in T-SQL in Perl (or whatever), it would probably sound equally bizarre.
Lots of those acronyms and abbreviations are microsoft internal, i think. They're not generic marketing. I also think they disclose a lot about the nature of internal senior management structure- who reports to who.
An example: "KT and SteveB" are probably Kevin Turner (COO) and Steve Ballmer.
You're right. Those are Microsoft internal jargon.
"compete": Term used for "not Microsoft" (I came from "compete")
"v- team": This position will have contractors working for them. Contractors working for Microsoft have usernames in the format: /[a-z]\-[a-z]+/. Contractors or "Vendors" have usernames starting with 'v-'
"...to win share against Linux and OpenOffice.org...". Looks like somebody is scared. I like that very much :D
But seriously, who would take that job? Somebody who understands a lot about Linux but then decides to "fight" against it?
How did you get 10 upvotes for a two sentence comment, the first boasting about how you don't understand something(!), and the second being an incomprehensible mash of a two word quote, a misspelled dismissive phrase and an unclear acronym ('For The Win'?).
