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Technology Stocks : Microsoft Corp. - Moderated (MSFT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (11265)	3/11/2006 2:17:23 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Respond to of 19789

I was clicking around Google news and I found this gripe piece about the "new" Microsoft ranking system for engineers. I have read about this before in the Time article about disgruntled employees so I decided to read it. What I find REALLY amazing about it, is why didn't msft have this sooner? Every big company falls into a pay and management funk using approaches like this, and I thought everybody knew it. otoh, there isn't much else you can do when you have 60K employees. When these plans take over, all the good people leave. Doh. It happened at HP, IBM, everywhere. In the 90s this was mitigated with stock options and contractors. So you could have a great engineer working in a dept as a contractor making 50% more than you could pay him/her as an employee. Your dept was judged on output so if you could arrange this and it worked, all was fine. Or you could do what cisco did and relegate your "rank and file" of average workers to the griping and acquire all the stars in small companies. That works too. But to think top engineers are going to be happy with this system is naive. What is causing considerably more ire than pay levels, however, is a performance review ranking system that uses a bell-curve model to decide who gets high scores and who takes the low ones. Microsoft Corp. has over 60,000 employees, and like almost all large corporations, it uses a performance review process to rate them. The idea behind any corporate performance review system is to provide an accurate and fair assessment of employee contributions, but some employees say Microsoft’s system promotes politics over fair reviews. According to employees, who said they would be fired if they spoke on the record, the annual review amounts to little more than a closed-door popularity contest in which managers “fight” for higher scores for their team, or defer to higher-level decision makers who mandate how many workers drop to the bottom of the review scale. washtech.org

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (11265)	3/11/2006 2:23:55 PM
From: QwikSand	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 19789

OT Reply: I'm not sure what you mean when you say that the video on demand business is taking off. At least in the US, isn't 99% of what you could call video on demand made up of PPV movies delivered by cable service providers? (Not counting hotel porn.) Whatever video downloads the iTunes store sells are still pretty much at the noise level, right? (Edit: I'm also not counting pirated video content on illegal file-sharing networks, which is probably where the real majority of "video-on-demand" is in the U.S.) I remain skeptical about people watching videos on mobile screens, even if they're Ultra Mobile :-). I doubt young people are watching much video on the ipod video. They screw around with clips from video phones, but the more important video-on-demand direction is to large screens. This might well change over time as our brain-reaming culture reduces student attention spans further down into the millisecond range...then they may start using small screens and downloading Desperate Housewives. But for now I think it's the other way: home entertainment. Apple's first step into that area was supposed to be the mac mini (which they seem to have botched), not the Ipod. But if the content delivery infrastructure gets straightened out (a big if), a general-purpose computer with the right UI (simple, spare, there when you want it, totally unobtrusive when you don't) and the right physical media connectors could do a lot in an entertainment center. So of course I could be wrong, but I see them coming out with stuff that supplements home entertainment centers and plugs into an existing large screen, rather than stretching iPod screens into competition with Pioneer and Panasonic and Sharp and Sony and LG and co. Microsoft wants to do the same thing of course, but their carved-in-stone corporate cultural baggage of "everything is Windows" (viz., the fabulous Origami and their oblivion-seeking Entertainment Center PC's) makes it harder for them to come up with the right home-entertainment product. Everything isn't in fact Windows. --QS