Microsoft may have its head in the clouds a little too much at the moment, given that it just lost its corporate veep of online services. Dave Thompson, who headed up Redmond's Office 365 business, is retiring from the company later this year after 21 years at Microsoft. Microsoft shoved its productivity suite of apps into a …

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Friday 28th January 2011 13:50 GMT Anonymous Coward

Okey dokey

I do love these announcements, 'Such and such lead the delivery of such and such product to great success.".

Hmmm, what all on their own? Amazing!

So there weren't huge teams of dedicated coders sometimes putting in 75 hour weeks to make miracles happen then? OK it was all down to one person, cracking the whip to ensure that Exchange made it out the door on time!

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1. Friday 28th January 2011 15:04 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  The clue
  
  is in the word "lead".
  
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Friday 28th January 2011 14:06 GMT Anonymous Coward

2011

I've seen this before and if my theory is correct it doesn't bode well for my friends that work at MS...

When I saw it (company to remain unnamed) we had a significant exodus of leadership when our CEO (who was in essence an over-promoted accountant with a bad attitude and had no idea what our company was or did beyond the balance sheet) started handing out completely ridiculous financial targets. The Execs in question knew there was no way to actually make the numbers - which means no way to make their bonus - and pretty much said F-it and retired or quit.

Why I say this could be bad for the employees, is that their replacements (in our case at least) were frothing-at-the-mouth yes men that would do *ANYTHING* to make those numbers and what once upon a time might have been described as a hatchet became a meat cleaver - chopping off limbs instead of digits.

To my friends at MS, I hope I'm wrong and you guys have a wonderful 2011

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Friday 28th January 2011 15:27 GMT Magnus_Pym

Spot the difference

These two statements are not congruent. Can you see why, children?

"Microsoft continues to sell plenty of shrink-wrapped packets of its Windows operating system."

"the company claimed it had shifted 300m Windows 7 licences. "

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Sunday 30th January 2011 11:03 GMT SuccessCase

And most damning and indicative of all

Only 4 comments ( 5 now including this one at the time I started typing this post). If this were an Apple, Google or Facebook story there would be 50 or more. Nobody cares anymore. During CES I saw a lowly BBC tech correspondent interviewing Ballmer about tablets. The correspondent was young, wasn't rude, but he was just non-plussed by the whole thing and even a little bit dismissive of Ballmer. I found it fascinating to watch. Ballmer's plaintive pitch - our tablets will be better because they will have keyboards and Windows - clearly just didn't impress or excite the young correspondent. And it didn't even seem the correspondent was being deliberately "challenging" in the way journo's learn at journo school. He just wasn't impressed, and all the while Ballmer was frantically reaching for ever more complex and heavy looking tablet creations as though the journo could be educated to their benefit, when clearly it was the entire proposition and lack of a genuine fresh approach that was the problem "ah if that didn't impress you, how about this one with keyboard, pen, twist off screen and integrated cup-holder". I was thinking, if the multi-billionnaire boss of one of the largest companies in the world, can't inspire or enthuse a young journalist by granting him audience won't his own staff be feeling the same way? That's the problem right there! But we already knew that.

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