This Is The Organization That Steve Ballmer Is Trying To Change

Microsoft announced a reorganization called ‘One Microsoft’ to try and break the turf battles that permeate the company, re-organize by function and deliver a coherent strategy.

A picture is worth a thousand words.  Manu Cornet creates some wonderful cartoons, many of them about technology and technology companies. This one is an interesting drawing of Microsoft’s organization.

Source: Manu Cornet

One small indication of the fiefdoms at Microsoft was the Print Dialog boxes. I noticed a long time ago that when you went to print from Word, Excel or PowerPoint that the layout of the print pop-up windows were different. I even mentioned this to Jim Allchin around 2005 and he shrugged it off as no big deal. Either he didn’t care or hopefully knew it was a problem but didn’t want to let on that it was.

While this was a minor irritant it was a visible indication that the core groups didn’t work together as this should have been a key and easy UI to be consistent. It has taken decades to correct this.

A current example of the warring factions is Office recently becoming available on smartphones and not tablets, except the slow selling Windows Surface tablets or accessing Office via the Web. It is obvious that the Windows group is keeping Office from being made widely available even though Office 365 is now available for smartphones via a $99 per year subscription. I believe Microsoft should make it available natively on all platforms so that it generates more revenue and creates a bigger moat around it. Otherwise there is a higher likelihood that it could be marginalized over the years.

In the email to the entire company Steve Ballmer said ‘Going forward, our strategy will focus on creating a family of devices and services for individuals and businesses that empower people around the globe at home, at work and on the go, for the activities they value most.’

Does the statement about family of devices mean that Microsoft plans to become more like Apple ? Given its track record of hardware (except for the xBox) I believe it will be very tough for Microsoft to gain meaningful traction with hardware products. It then exposes the company to conflicts with it hardware partners.

Manu has also drawn organization charts for Amazon, Apple, Facebook , Google and Oracle which probably depict realist views (maybe except Oracle) on how employees and departments relate to each other.

It will be interesting to see if Apple maintains the same management style under Tim Cook. It does appear that he is changing it to some degree by wanting better collaboration.

Source: Manu Cornet

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