[rhyperior]

I’ve worked through all 3 CEO eras of Microsoft. Satya’s biggest mistake will be breaking the internal culture that made Microsoft what it is, for better and worse. Classic “be careful what you wish for” or perhaps law of unintended consequences, imo.

And yes, part of that involves the way they’ve changed the hiring and retention objectives.

[keeda]

I'm curious to hear more about your take on why the culture change could be a mistake. From speaking to a couple of long-timers at Microsoft, while they didn't seem to have complaints under Ballmer, they did seem to welcome some aspects of Satya's culture change, specifically how it had become much more collaborative internally. To me, that seemed like a fix for the internal dynamics at MSFT depicted in that popular comic about Big Tech org-charts: https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts

[jeffhwang]

I thought there was grumbling about Ballmer adopting GE’s stack ranking employee evaluation system where every team has to grade at least some people as below par. So that led to weird incentives like not collaborating across teams, sabotage, etc.