It’s now a few days after my previous post on the vista delay. The rumour machine on the Vista delays is now rolling. A few days ago this wild claim about 60% of vista being in need of a rewrite started circulating. Inacurate of course but it woke up some people. Now this blogpost on a blog about Microsoft (fequented by many of their employees) made it to slashdot. Regardless of the accuracy of any statements in that post, this is a PR disaster. Lots of people (the entire IT industry, stockholders) read slashdot.
There’s lots of interesting details in the comments on that post that suggest that MS has at least these problems:
- Management is clueless and generally out of touch with development progress. Claims on release dates are totally disconnected from software development planning. Release dates announced in press releases are wishful thinking at best. This is one of the reasons the date slips so often.
- Middle management is worse. Either they have failed to communicate down when to release or up when their people tell them release is actually impossible. Either way, they have failed doing what middle management is supposed to do: implement corporate strategy and communicate up when that strategy is not working as expected.
- Software engineers within MS are extremely frustrated with this. Enough to voice their opinions on a public blog. A lot needs to happen before I start criticizing my employer in public. I know where the money comes from. Really, I’d probably leave long before it would get to this point. So, I interpret this as MS having a few extremely frustrated employees that might very well represent a large silently disgruntled majority. Steve Ballmer seems to be rather impopular in his own company right now (never mind his external image).
- The best MS software engineers are leaving MS and are replaced with being people of lesser quality because MS now has to compete in the job market. I remember a few years ago that MS could cherry pick from the job market. Now the cherries are leaving. Really, if your best people are leaving and you have billions in cash to fix whatever problem is causing them to leave, you are doing something wrong (like not fixing the problem).
- Microsoft employees are spilling stock influencing information on public blogs. Opennes is one thing but this is an out of control situation. Regardless of whether they are right, these people are doing a lot of damage.
It’s probably not as bad as the comments suggest but bad enough for MS, if only for all the negative PR. Anyway, I might be revisiting the predictions I made in my previous post. I have a feeling some of them might prove to be correct in a few months already. Very amusing :-)