Did the competitive, dynamic culture of the early to mid-1990s slowly give way to something different? According to some observers it went from feisty to something more conventional as it approached the Millennium. If this is true, what happened?
It’s entirely conceivable that, while success at a young age at Microsoft in the 1990s conferred obvious benefits, it may also have had unintended consequences. There is no doubt that Microsoft treated its employees well, especially in terms of generous stock options, and so as the stock continued to rise in value, many of those who had been at Microsoft for years were now worth small—or not so small—fortunes. They were Microsoft millionaires. Ferraris became the vehicle of choice. Driving onto the Microsoft campus in a spanking new Ferrari showed your co-workers that you had “made it.”
According to several Microsoft veterans, too much success had adverse effects on the culture of the company. As a young, brash new employee, Alex St. John recognized the intelligence of his new co-workers. He realized quickly that he was in the company of people with really high IQs. “And these people knew it and thought very highly of themselves. You couldn’t tell them anything. They couldn’t hear anything. To change their point of view took astronomical arguing and convincing. And so I found when I arrived there that the company was very arrogant, that people there were just very self-assured.”
In retrospect, St. John has refined his opinion. “Microsoft was so concentrated in intelligence, and so competitive, even with itself, that people felt like they couldn’t own their job or identity without always appearing flawless and failure-less and infallible. And that emphasis meant that every decision had to be right, completely analyzed, completely logically supported by facts, because if you shoot from the hip and get caught doing it, three other guys around you will bust you and humiliate you for it.”
The conclusion St. John came to is that risk averse people who couldn’t ever admit to being wrong also couldn’t innovate. To innovate implies taking risks, and risks imply the possibility of failure. “The people who really were tremendously successful, who were tremendously innovative or doing something out of the box, not only had they taken great risks, but they’d often failed catastrophically many times. I was very comfortable with falling off the bike as many times as it took to learn to ride it.”
Microsofties
Rob Wyatt, a deep-level programmer who came over from DreamWorks with Seamus Blackley, saw a distinction between those who came to Microsoft to pursue a passion or to achieve a more personal objective, and those who were what he called, “entrenched Microsofties.”
“We’re probably going to leave when we’ve done it and go our own way. Ultimately all the guys who had the passion did that. We did our thing. We left when the time was right. For whatever reason we left and we all went back to doing what we did before. Went on to new endeavors. The people who were against that passion were the people who were the entrenched Microsofties who had been there for years. Their stocks had grown, their grants had grown. They were very much invested financially and career-wise in the Microsoft way. A lot of these guys couldn’t have got a job anywhere else because things were becoming open source, things were becoming standards and Microsoft to this day is still doing its own thing. So if you’ve been there long enough, you’ll have no use outside of that company. Which is one of the reasons I wanted to get out. It’s like I just don’t like the way this is. It’s like you’re kind of brainwashed into seeing it the Microsoft way.”
What’s Your Number?
People who came later to Microsoft had a different perspective from those who had been there for years. What newer employees observed was a privileged group who had lost whatever had inspired them in the first place. From the perspective of Mikey Wetzel, who joined Microsoft too late to participate in the stock boom that made so many wealthy, the company had gone from “the haves and the will haves” to “the haves and the never will haves.”
Wetzel didn’t necessarily resent people for having money, but for their focus on the money more than the work. In the days when the stock was rising, people would ask, “What’s your number?” because everybody had a number: the amount of money they would be worth when they decided to retire. Wetzel states that, where most people were busting their asses at work, arriving on time, staying late, some of those who had made their number would do what he called, “calling in rich…” “Instead of calling in sick, they’d call in rich.” Another symptom of change was called “resting and vesting,” where people who had little left to do in the company, but whose stock options hadn’t vested yet, were given middle manager jobs so they could stay in the company until completely vested.
Greg Meredith calls it “fuck you money.” Meridith, who joined Microsoft in 1998 after working with Oxford University’s renowned computer scientist, Samson Abramsky, saw Microsoft as a means to an end. “I went to Microsoft specifically to do business process orchestration. They didn’t know that. I really gave Microsoft essentially an incubation platform.” Using his background in mathematics, Meredith developed the highly successful BizTalk program as its principal architect. Like many before him, he faced obstacles, challenges from other groups, and even resistance from his own managers. At one point, when Microsoft was considering purchasing a company for $2 billion to do essentially what he was planning on doing, he told them, “Look, you give me $2 million and I can build what you want to build.”
Meredith witnessed first-hand the changes in Microsoft culture, from yelling in the hallways to get things done, to what he calls “the culture of civility,” but, he says, “They couldn’t pull it off because it wasn’t genuine.” To Meredith, the new culture felt more evasive than genuinely civil, and it didn’t work at all for him. “It wasn’t that I missed the yelling, I just missed the honesty.”
Meredith left Microsoft in 2004 to start his own company, his mission accomplished. One of the reasons he left was that Microsoft had forgotten the idea that to make good products, you had to listen to your customers. But, like Alex St. John, Meredith wanted to make products that would succeed, not just because the people around him thought they were doing something cool. To be truly successful, he needed to be in contact with the customers, and his bosses just didn’t get it.
Meredith worked with a lot of people during his time at Microsoft, and shared some observations. In particular, he talks about interacting with Bill Gates. “I remember the first face-to-face meeting I had with Bill. There was a room full of 12 people. We’re all sitting around, and I’m watching Bill very intently, and I’m observing a man who can listen, and can listen with a quality that was unparalleled in my experience. He could listen to a room of 12 people with a concentration that allowed him to be present for 45 minutes, and at the end of 45 minutes say, ‘OK. This is where we agree. This is where we disagree. This is the data I need to resolve the disagreement.’ I was like, Whoa. I’m in the presence of someone who is a completely different order of human being.’”
James Plamondon is another veteran who eulogized the impending death of the old Microsoft. “Old age had started to creep in. The company had become very set in its ways, and the idea that you would get ahead by out-yelling your competitor in the hallway—which was the old Microsoft approach—now the company had become much more Japanese. We have to work very hard not to offend our peers and compromise in ways that are disadvantageous to everyone in the company and all of our customers, except us.”
Plamondon saw “all of these Ivy League guys making their striped-tied decisions, which were not in the benefit of the platform, of the company, of the customer, but it was to the advantage of their little clique.” More than one Microsoft veteran referred to evolving internal culture as the “Microsoft Army,” a culture that assimilated you, made you into what it needed to succeed. In contrast, Plamondon liked to think of himself and his peers as “kamikaze nerds, damn it.” (Adding “damn it” was a necessary part of the description, apparently.) They were the guys whom Cameron Myhrvold referred to as having “great grenade jumping skills… willing to lie down on the railroad tracks, jump the grenade… whatever.” The question was, did any of those people still exist?
See Game of X vl: Xbox for the answer.