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Technology Stocks : Microsoft - The Evil empire -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dragonfly who wrote (1252)	6/12/1998 2:07:00 PM
From: Robert Winchell	Respond to of 1600

I, personally, was defrauded out of about $40,000 in compensation, not counting the stock options that, under the law, I should have gotten, in my opinion. (There was a recent court case about this issue, so I should say "according to a recent interpretation of the law by a judge", it is being appealed, of course.) What is the story with this case? I'd be interested in hearing about it and your experience. You can send it in a personal message if you doin't feel like broadcasting it. To some extent, I blame myself- I had heard the stories, and I went there anyway. (Really funny how you haven't heard these stories. Maybe you don't know any ex-microserfs.) I really should have left right away. Oh, I know a couple people that did work there, and have heard a lot of stories about it. But to be honest, a lot of it sounded like stories I have heard about other biggies like IBM, Sun and Apple. I think MS had a different culture because they were really tapping the 20-somethings for a lot of their workforce. I heard a 2nd person account of a kid who worked at Netscape for a while and had some bizarre/scary stories about there too. I guess I'm glad I work for a small company!

To: Dragonfly who wrote (1252)	6/12/1998 6:19:00 PM
From: Kal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1600

Bill responds wired.com

To: Dragonfly who wrote (1252)	6/13/1998 10:38:00 AM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1600

Dragonfly - Although I have many close friends who are present or past employees at MSFT, and I have had some good times there, I would say that my experience with MSFT reinforces many of the arguments that you and others propose. I differ only in what the intent and culture that created those actions was based on. I believe that the creation and growth of an insulated MSFT culture, reinforced by the kind of pressure you describe, has gradually shifted the definition of normal behavior far from the mainstream of normal business culture and ethics. The most comparable experience I can recall is during the Viet Nam war when young high-school age men were trained by the army to think that subjugation and killing of large numbers of asian people was a normal and rational activity. Ship date and competitive feature set (by which MSFT means features that competitors are selling already in the market) are almost the only important drivers of product schedules. Quality gets lip service but only until it is 'good enough' which means that the revenue generated is greater than the back-end service pain. Innovation, as you have pointed out, is not a part of the culture and MSFT prefers to buy it after it has already been proven in the market. This is not a subjective assessment but a stated direction from the most senior executives at MSFT. As far as money, in their dealings with most outsiders and some insiders, the goal is to sell the banana but deliver the peel. ANYONE who accepts the first, second or third offer in any negotiation with MSFT will get the peel.