One of the most entertaining reads as of late has been the blog of one Mini-Microsoft: A well-written anonymous Microsoft insider with an axe to grind about the way the company is being run, and with some disagreements about the direction the company is headed. "Let's slim down Microsoft into a lean, mean, efficient customer pleasing profit making machine! Mini-Microsoft, Mini-Microsoft, lean-and-mean!" he petitions from the front page.

Mini's position isn't novel in the world of corporate worker bees. Malcontent about one's workplace, one's superiors, and compensation is close to a universal gripe. What makes Mini's rantings interesting, aside from the often humorous writing, is that it emanates from a company long considered the exception - the company that defied all of the normal rules of corporate culture. Microsoft was the one organization, we heard, where you didn't have the traditional stratification between the lordly executive - forever blameless and masking incompetence through endless restructurings - and the lowly drones that were treated as replaceable cogs. Microsoft’s developer culture, where the productive intelligent developer was king in the quest to make the best software products, was the benchmark towards which every .COM dreamer aspired when they laid out their plans for world conquest. Microsoft was the “It” employer that Google has become.  

Of course as organizations mature they sometimes evolve in ways that aren't compatible with some of their employees. When that happens, pretty much inevitably over an organization’s lifespan, the disgruntled will often take to the airwaves (blogwaves?) to air their grievances, grouching and griping to all who’ll listen about how great things used to be, and how things should be done if management weren’t such idiots. While they might eventually adapt, or the organization might change to accommodate them, the disaffected are far more likely to eventually move on. That sort of transition is inevitable, and as no-one should consider an employer/employee relationship a lifetime commitment, it shouldn’t come as that much of a shock.

Having said that I don’t think that’s the case here and it really sets Mini’s blog apart from the endless reams of ex-BigCorporation employees publicly airing their historic dirty laundry. Mini has not only earned the admiration and support of a lot of Microsoft faithful, but his position is empirically supported by Microsoft’s underperformance as of late. No doubt Microsoft does have a serious problem, and is truly an organization in crisis. Perhaps the impression will change after a cluster of long overdue products are released over the next 16 months, but it certainly is the impression today.

The roots of the problems are obviously varied for such a large organization, but it is nonetheless enjoyable to armchair theorize. I was given the opportunity a short while back while I was speaking with a Microsoft rep. I was asked what I thought Microsoft’s #1 problem was (must be on the call sheet question list or something). My reply was simply integration – Microsoft is so dedicated to integrating all of their products and technologies starting at v1.0, tying and cross-integrating, that the speed of development slowed to a crawl. One doesn't have to work at Microsoft to understand the threat this presents. Suddenly every delivery slip suddenly affected dozens of products, and every technology risk took on a vastly increased role. The critical dependencies between projects because pervasive, and communication channels to design and deliver products and technologies increased exponentially.

Couple this with the fact that the upper-level of Microsoft has become so paranoid about their dependency on platform monopolies that they are seemingly incapable of letting their incredibly capable development teams solve problems in the most effective manner. Microsoft is, for reasons I discussed previously, by far its own biggest competitor, so everything any team does you can be sure had to be approved and agreed upon based upon the strategic interest of the status quo (in particular the Office and Windows hegemony). It wasn't surprizing, for instance, when the powers that be at Microsoft reigned in the hugely successful Internet Explo