![]() In fact, I’ll go one further and reference Mobile is eating the world, autumn 2013 edition by Benedict Evans where he cites these four companies as “setting the agenda” whereas when Microsoft is mentioned, it’s only to speak about it’s “growing irrelevance”. For the purpose of this blog post, I’ll take this implication at face value and will consider these 4 companies as leading examples of what other companies should aim to emulate in the technology industry. ![]() The implication being that these were the four leading companies in the tech industry. The Four Horsemen: Facebook, Amazon, Google and AppleĪ few years ago, Eric Schmidt described the "gang of four" companies driving innovation and growth in tech as Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple. The purpose of this blog post is to point out that one often needs multiple data points before coming to sweeping generalizations when discussing something as complex as the success or failure of technology companies. Although I've now been at Microsoft for 12 years and a manager for the last three of them, the purpose of this blog post isn't to defend or expand on the details of performance reviews at Microsoft. This reads as a very damning indictment of the Microsoft performance appraisal system. One of the most valuable things I learned was to give the appearance of being courteous while withholding just enough information from colleagues to ensure they didn’t get ahead of me on the rankings.” Worse, because the reviews came every six months, employees and their supervisors-who were also ranked-focused on their short-term performance, rather than on longer efforts to innovate. “People responsible for features will openly sabotage other people’s efforts. “The behavior this engenders, people do everything they can to stay out of the bottom bucket,” one Microsoft engineer said. ![]() And the reviews had real-world consequences: those at the top received bonuses and promotions those at the bottom usually received no cash or were shown the door. …įor that reason, executives said, a lot of Microsoft superstars did everything they could to avoid working alongside other top-notch developers, out of fear that they would be hurt in the rankings. The system-also referred to as “the performance model,” “the bell curve,” or just “the employee review”-has, with certain variations over the years, worked like this: every unit was forced to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, then good performers, then average, then below average, then poor. Kurt Eichenwald's article persuasively makes that argument in the in excerpt belowĮvery current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed-every one-cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees. Whether it's almost decade old complaints such as Mini-Microsoft’s Microsoft Stack Ranking is not Good Management or more recent forays into blaming it for the company's "decline" such as Kurt Eichenwald's 2012 Vanity Fair opus Microsoft’s Lost Decade or the follow up The Poisonous Employee-Ranking System That Helps Explain Microsoft’s Decline from Slate, there are many who would lay the practice of ranking employees on a vitality curve as the root cause of any problems facing Microsoft today. To conduct this ranking, I secured a conference room-remember offices?-under the guise of a calendar event named “Important Meeting” and assessed piles of apples by taste, texture, and sheer apple-ness of each variety until I’d meal-replaced myself to pectin shivers.It isn't hard to find criticisms of Microsoft's employee appraisal system. Apple Association’s list of the popular varieties in America, which collectively account for 90% of domestic sales, plus a handful of other regionally abundant apple varieties that would have been weird not to include. If only there weren’t 7,500 varieties of apples in the world! Even though many have provocative names like Ashmead’s Kernel, Westfield Seek-No-Further, Delikates, Stayman, Criterion, and the twin lovers of industry, Enterprise and Wealthy, it would be nigh-impossible to try every apple out there. So I limited my taste test to a selection from the U.S. It only makes sense to rank them- all of them. You can almost smell the “ generic apple promotion” of National Apple Month (it’s September, naturally!) in the increasingly chilly wind. Like denim jackets and air, apples are everywhere in autumn (and also year-round, but you get it).
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