Tag: microsoft

Disrupting the incumbents

Industry incumbents like Nokia and Microsoft are finding their market positions disrupted as Apple, Hauwei and Samsung reinvent the marketplaces.

One of the truisms of modern business is that no incumbent is safe, Microsoft, Nokia and Hauwei are good examples of just how businesses that five years ago dominated their industries are now struggling with changed marketplaces.

In the last two days there’s been a number of stories on how the smartphone and computer markets are changing.

According to the Wall Street Journal’s tech blog, PC manufacturers are hoping Microsoft’s changes to Windows 8 reinvigorates the computer market.

Those hopes are desperate and somewhat touching in the face of a structural shift in the marketplace. These big vendors can wait for the Big White Hope to arrive but really they have only themselves to blame for their constant mis-steps in the tablet and smartphone markets.

Now they are left behind as more nimble competitors like Apple, Samsung and the rising wave of Chinese manufacturers deliver the products consumers want.

All is not lost for Microsoft though as Chinese telecoms giant Hauwei launches a Windows Phone for the US markets which will be available through Walmart.

Hauwei’s launch in the United States is not good news though for another failing incumbent – Nokia.

Nokia’s relationship with Microsoft seems increasingly troubled and the Finnish company is struggling to retain leadership even in the emerging markets which until recently had been the only bright spot in the organisation’s global decline.

Yesterday in India, Nokia launched a $99 smartphone to shore up its failing market position on the subcontinent.

For the three months to March, Nokia had a 23 percent share of mobile phone sales in India, the world’s second-biggest cellular market by customers, Strategy Analytics estimates. Three years ago it controlled more than half the Indian market.

India isn’t the only market where Nokia is threatened – in February Hauwei launched their 4Afrika Windows Phone aimed at phone users in Egypt, Nigeria, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Angola, Morocco and South Africa.

The smartphone market is instructive on how many industries are changing, almost overnight the iPhone changed the cell phone sector and three years later Apple repeated the trick with the iPad, in both cases incumbents like Motorola, Nokia and Microsoft found themselves flat footed.

As barriers are falling with cheaper manufacturing, faster prototyping and more accessible design tools, many other industries are facing the same disruption.

The question for every incumbent should be where the next disruption is coming from.

In fact, we all need to ask that question as those disruptions are changing our own jobs and communities.

Is there a tablet to cure the reality distortion field?

Microsoft founder Bill Gates puts up an argument for Windows 8 tablets. But is he living in a reality distortion field?

It’s hard not to be impressed by the calibre of guests CNBC’s Squawk Box when they’re able to get Warren Buffett and Bill Gates on together for an interview.

During the interview Bill Gates made an interesting assertion about Apple’s iPad, ““A lot of those users are frustrated, they can’t type, they can’t create documents, they don’t have Office there.”

Bill’s undoubtedly right, some iPad users are frustrated by the device’s limitations. However for every irritated iPad user there are a dozen baffled by the lack of a Start button on Windows 8.

The reality distortion field though is strong, “Windows 8 really is revolutionary,” says Bill. “It takes the benefits of the tablet and the benefits of the PC and it’s able to support both of those.”

The Microsoft founder is enthusiastic about the company’s Windows tablet, “you have the portability of the tablet but the richness, in terms of the keyboard and Microsoft Office, of the PC.”

It’s notable Gates mentioned Microsoft Office, particularly given the question was about the cloud. It’s clear one of Microsoft’s priorities is to maintain their strength with productivity applications and move with their customers onto the cloud.

The problem though for Microsoft is that Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android are dominating the cloud focused operating systems, leaving Windows behind.

Making matters worse for Microsoft is it’s clear Windows 8 tablets are never going to catch their competitors. Consulting group Gartner last year predicted the global market for tablet computers will double over the next three years, but Microsoft will capture barely 10% of the sales.

 OS

2011

2012

2013

2016

iOS

39,998

72,988

99,553

169,652

Android

17,292

37,878

61,684

137,657

Microsoft

0

4,863

14,547

43,648

QNX

807

2,643

6,036

17,836

Other Operating Systems

1,919

510

637

464

Total Market

60,017

118,883

182,457

369,258

Sitting in a reality distortion field is fine when things are going well and you dominate your world, but Microsoft – despite still being insanely profitable – no longer dominates the markets that made it into one of the world’s leading companies.

The challenge for Bill Gates and Microsoft’s management is adapting to those changes, projecting your own frustrations onto the users of a competitor’s product, isn’t a recipe for success.

Breaking out of the gilded cage – Microsoft’s challenge with Windows

How can Microsoft adapt to a market that’s shifting away from the products which have delivered spectacular profits over the last thirty years?

Update: With the announcement that Steve Ballmer will be stepping down as Microsoft CEO, the future direction of the company now becomes the biggest challenge for his replacement.

Over the last three weeks the news for the personal computer industry has not been good. How does Microsoft, the business that leads the sector, move on from the product which has been its mainstay?

Three stories in the last three weeks have shown how dire the situation is for personal computers, Windows and Microsoft.

Consulting firm IDC’s report that global PC sales had dropped a stunning 14% was a clear signal the PC era is ending.

A Gartner report two weeks ago warned that Microsoft faces a slide into irrelevance as Android device sales dwarf Windows’ numbers and Apple sales catch up with PCs.

Industry commentators Asymco made similar observations about the state of the PC industry noting that Apple takes 45% of all profits from an industry that is in decline.

In the past Microsoft has responded quickly to industry threats, one of the great management feats of the 20th Century was Bill Gates’ turning the company around to meet the challenges of Netscape and the newly popular internet.

So how can Microsoft meet the challenges of today’s much more competitive world, while protecting their impressive revenues and profits?

Replace the management

Steve Ballmer was employee number 30 at Microsoft having been hired in 1980. Since his appointment as CEO in 2000 the company’s stock price has wallowed.

Regardless of Ballmer’s performance, 13 years is a long tenure for a CEO in an industry that has radically changed in the last decade. A new perspective in the executive suite may well help the company leverage its strengths and weaknesses.

Microsoft’s management problems shouldn’t just be blamed on Ballmer however, a stunning Vanity Fair profile of the company last year blamed human resources policies, specifically ‘stack ranking’ employees, for poor performance.

Overhauling the company’s notoriously siloed management would give Microsoft much more flexibility in meeting the cloud and mobile challenges to its business.

Ditch Windows

At the core of Microsoft’s success is the Windows operating system which in 2012 delivered a quarter of the company’s revenue but has reported no growth for two years in a stagnating PC market.

It is still a cash rich business though and as a stand alone entity, the operating system division could still be an attractive private equity investment.

The story of Michael Dell’s attempt to take his company private is instructive as investment companies fight for a stake in a business with a turnover is less than Microsoft’s Windows division and far less profits.

Double down on Windows

The counter view to floating the Windows division is to double down and concentrate on the company’s core business. While the PC industry is fading, the need for embedded systems in machines is growing.

Microsoft though hasn’t executed well with non-PC operating systems – the continued failure of tablet versions of Windows XP is a good example – so it may mean a new management team to guide the company down this path.

Claim the cloud

The biggest cash generator for Microsoft is their business division that includes their Office and Dynamics products. These are most at risk by the market’s move to cloud services.

Paradoxically, Microsoft has a track record on the cloud products having acquired Hotmail in 1997, developed the Azure platform and taking steps to move its business products across to Office 365.

Microsoft’s experience with Hotmail is instructive of the company’s uncertainty with cloud services having renamed the product constantly. Currently its incarnation as Outlook.com indicates further integration with Office 365.

With a focused management, Microsoft may well be able to compete against both Google and Amazon on the cloud by leveraging its traditional market strengths and its army of evangelists, developers and support partners.

Buy Nokia

So far the alliance with Nokia has been underwhelming with Windows Phones being met with market indifference.  A purchase of the struggling mobile phone giant would give Microsoft more depth in understanding the mobile marketplace.

A more interesting aspect of Microsoft buying the mobile vendor would be the acquisition of Nokia’s mapping technology. This would give Microsoft an advantage over Apple and give them an opportunity to compete with Google in the still developing mobile and local markets.

For Microsoft, sticking with the status quo is tempting – a business with seventy-three billion dollars income and $17 billion in profits still makes it one of the world’s most impressive businesses.

The risk though is all of the company’s major revenue streams are being challenged by mobile and cloud service and Microsoft have to adapt to a world very different to the one they grew in.

As Gartner have pointed out, the company risks becoming irrelevant in an era of mobile devices accessing cloud services.

The Challenge for Microsoft’s management and board is to find the spark that keeps the company relevant in a marketplace where the company is no longer the dominant player.

Fire and be dammed, the poor management at tech companies

Quick firing firing of employees who make mistakes shows a weakness in the management of many tech companies.

Microsoft manager Adam Orth has joined the ranks of those fired after some poorly thought out comments found their way onto the Reddit discussion boards. The firing of Orth illustrates a weakness in the management of tech firms.

Orth’s firing follows the “forked dongle” affair where two developers lost their jobs over sexist comments at an industry conference.

What’s notable in all these firings is how Playhaven, SendGrid and Microsoft’s management all summarily fired their employees for what at worse could be described as a ‘lapse of judgement’.

One of the conceits of modern management is that risk can be eliminated, the mark of a poor manager is to act quickly to get rid of anything that could potentially be a risk.

These tech companies are good illustrations of this – neither Adam Orth, Adria Richards or the Playhaven developer deserved to lose their jobs over this, all it required was an apology and commitment to be more careful about what they post on the public internet in future.

All of us, including the sensitive and incompetent firing managers, have something on the internet that could embarrass us or our employers. In an era where people are quick to take offense, it’s easy for something taken out of context to spin out of control.

That’s a risk beyond the control of middle managers at software companies.

Hiding from risks or attempting to purge them is not the way to run an organisation. Strong, good managers can do better than that.

Management manual image by Ulrik through SXC.hu

Hurtling into the post PC era

The latest computer sales figures are not good for those businesses who depend up personal computers.

Consulting firm IDC quarterly report on PC shipment figures this quarter shows a stunning 14% drop of global computer sales. On those numbers, the PC era is definately over.

Across the board the figures are horrible with double digit declines across the board. Market leader HP reported PC sales had fallen by nearly a quarter yet they retained their market lead as all of their competitors reported similar falls.

What’s also notable is the PC industry’s ultrabook attempt to wean consumers off cheap nebooks has backfired terrible, as the analysts note;

Fading Mini Notebook shipments have taken a big chunk out of the low-end market while tablets and smartphones continue to divert consumer spending.

Instead of buying higher priced ultabooks, consumers have abandoned portable PCs altogether and gone to smartphones or tablet computers.

The PC manufacturers must be rueing how they let the tablet computer market slip through their fingers during the 2000s.

Failing to ship decent tablet computers is symptomatic of a bigger problem for the PC manufacturers – their inability to innovate.

The PC industry is struggling to identify innovations that differentiate PCs from other products and inspire consumers to buy, and instead is meeting significant resistance to changes perceived as cumbersome or costly.

As IDC point out, even if they do introduce new products, consumers are wary that any “innovation” is going to be cumbersome. Basically the PC manufacturers have lost their customers’ trust.

How this affects Dell’s proposed buy out remains to be seen; it’s hard to see how investors would not be concerns at a 10% fall in sales, although Dell was one of the better performers.

For Microsoft, this news should further accelerate their moving products and customers to their cloud and enterprise products. For their Windows division it looks like there are tough times ahead.

The decline of the PC market is itself a study in product and innovation cycles. It could well be that the personal computer is going the way of the fax machine.

For some businesses that will be tragedy, but the market – and the opportunities – move on.

They do it different over here

Microsoft and Apple discover the downside of being multinationals in China

Among expats in Thailand the saying was “the locals can ignore the law, but multinationals can’t.”

Thailand has some pretty strict laws on employee wages, workplace safety and council permits. Pretty well every business ignores them except the multinationals.

Generally Thais don’t complain about businesses not complying with the rules and the authorities are reluctant to take action.

Unless you’re a multinational, in which case the slightest irregularity in pay risks a visit from the police.

A few days in the Bangkok Immigration Gaol while the misunderstanding is sorted out is a good lesson for any sloppy farang country manager who hasn’t been ticking all the boxes.

The recent protests in China against Apple and now Microsoft over warranties illustrate a similar situation in the PRC.

What’s fascinating though is how the complaints against Microsoft and Apple are part of the rising Chinese consumer movement.

It’s a tough life being a consumer advocate in China, leading protests against well connected local companies or their government cronies could be a career limiting move, or much worse.

On the other hand it’s safe to criticise an American corporation and its much more likely to get results.

So managers of foreign companies in China have to be far more responsive to complaints than their local counterparts as Apple and Microsoft have learned.

For multinationals there is an upside to this, foreign companies tend to get better staff as they don’t mess people around with pay and their products are seen as being better because they do honor warranties.

It ends up being swings and roundabouts, but it does emphasise the traps for inexperienced expat managers who can unwittingly get themselves in trouble.

Apple and Microsoft have learned their lesson about customer service in China, you wonder how many others are still to do so.

ABC Nightlife technology – April 2013

For the April Nightlife tech spot Tony Delroy and I be talking about the mobile phone turning 40, the end of the Internet and Windows 8.

For the April 2013 Nighlife spot Tony Delroy and I looked at the mobile phone turning 40, Windows 8 coming to an end, Blackberry’s chances of succeeding and what happens when the internet goes dark.

Danny Hillis gives a great discussion of what could happen if the internet was turned off along with the history of the net in this TED talk.

If you missed the show, you can download it from the Nightlife website.The next show will be on May 16 and we hope you can join us then.

Apple and the argument for hybrid cloud computing

The argument between cloud computing purists and hybrid advocates continues with both sides suffering setbacks

There’s two different philosophies about cloud computing, hybrid and ‘pure’. In recent days the hybrid school hasn’t been doing so well, but the matter isn’t settled yet.

Pure cloud computing means doing everything in the cloud with all your software running over the net with the data stored on other people’s computers and everything is accessed through web browsers.

Hybrid cloud is where some of the work is done on your computer or smartphone with data often being synchronised between the device and the cloud storage.

Most smartphone and tablet computer apps do this and increasingly software like Microsoft Office and Apple iLife have a hybrid cloud computing angle.

Apple’s hybrid cloud service, iCloud, promised Apple users the ability to work on any device – laptop, desktop, tablet or smart phone – with the synchronised with central servers. Every Apple product you own can then access your iCloud data.

Recently though stories in the The Verge and Ars Technica report how Apple’s developers and customers are becoming steadily irritated by the lousy reliability of the company’s iCloud service.

Incumbent software and hardware vendors like Microsoft and Apple are pushing the hybrid idea for a good reason, it allows them to maintain their existing PC and laptop based products while being able to offer cloud services like their competitors.

For Microsoft and Apple, along with companies like Oracle, Dell and MYOB, the hybrid cloud gives them an opportunity to wriggle out of what Clay Christensen called The Innovator’s Dilemma.

Customers actually like the hybrid cloud as many distrust ‘pure’ cloud offerings as they don’t trust the providers or their internet connections. Basically they like to have a copy of their data stored in house.

The problem with the hybrid cloud is that it’s complex as Xero’s founder Rod Drury, one of the ‘pure cloud’ evangelists, said at his company’s conference last year, “hybrid technologies are cumbersome and add far more complexity into software. Cloud technologies are the right technologies.”

Complexity is what’s bought Apple’s iCloud unstuck as even some of best developers struggle with getting their programs to work with it.

All is not well for the ‘pure cloud’ evangelists either, as the shutting down of Google Reader has shaken many technologists and made them question whether the cloud is as safe as they would like.

Added to this uncertainty about the cloud is lousy service by providers, arbitrary shutting down of user accounts and the corporate boycott of Wikileaks – all of which have forced people to reconsider the wisdom of saving all their data or running applications in the cloud.

So the debate between the cloud purists is by no means over and it may well be that some form of hybrid, even just for local backup to your own computer, may turn out to be the common way we use cloud services.

What is for sure though is cloud software is biting deeply into the revenues of established software companies as people find the attractions of running programs and storing data on other people’s computers outweighs the risks.

Like all relatively new concepts it’s going to take a while for us to figure out how to use cloud computing most effectively in our business. The first step is how we manage the risks.

The Five Stages of abandoning a product

Microsoft show us how to kill a product with the slow abandonment of Windows 8

Killing a technology product is never a clean process, as Google well know. Microsoft show the way to deal with a failed project and we’re seeing their five stages of abandoning a product as they prepare to retire Windows 8.

The stages of Microsoft are abandoning a product are well known – the failure of Microsoft Vista is the best example, but not the only one.

As Microsoft smooths Window 8’s pillow and prepares for its imminent demise we can see the process at work.

Denial

At first the company denies there is a problem, the flashy advertising campaigns are boosted and the various ‘in the camp’ commentators get informal briefings from company evangelists to fuel their snarky columns about people getting Microsoft’s latest product all wrong.

This usually goes on for around six months until the market feedback that the product is dog becomes overwhelming – usually this happens at the same time the first reliable sales figures start appearing.

Anger

As the consensus in the broader community becomes settled that the new product isn’t good, the company’s tame commentators turn nasty and lash out at the critics for ‘misrepresenting’ the new product.

This is usually a touchy period for Microsoft and other vendors as they can’t risk being too aggressive but they have to allow their allies to both let off steam and try to recover the credibility they lost in hyping what’s clearly been a market failure.

Bargaining

Once it’s clear the perceived wisdom that the product isn’t very good isn’t going to be shaken, the vendor comes out with special offers and pricing changes to try and coax users over to the new service.

With Windows 8 Microsoft tried something unusual, rather than cutting prices, Microsoft announced they would increase the cost of Windows 8.

The idea was probably to panic people into buying the product and giving Microsoft a revenue and market share bounce for the quarter.

It didn’t work – the consensus that Windows 7 is a better product meant people stayed away.

Depression

As the realisation that pricing tweaks and promotional stunts won’t work sends the company, and its supporters, into a funk.

For experienced industry watchers, the silence around a product that’s been heavily hyped and defended for the previous year or two is a good indication that the next version is being accelerated.

Acceptance

Eventually the vendor accepts the product has failed and starts working on its own exit strategy – hopefully one that doesn’t see too many executives sacked.

With Microsoft’s this process starts with a quiet announcement that the replacement version of Windows is on the way, in this case Windows Blue.

At the same time, the tame commentators start talking about ‘leaks’ of the wonderful new system that is in the pipeline. Early beta versions of the new product start popping up in developers’ forums and file sharing sites.

Eventually you get stories like this one that appeared in The Verge yesterday – Windows Blue leaks online and we can be sure the Microsoft public relations machine has subtly moved onto the next version.

Vale Windows 8

So Windows 8 is coming to an early end. In one way this is a shame as it was a brave gamble by Steve Ballmer and his team to solve the ‘three screen’ problem.

Computer users today are using three or more screens or devices – a desktop, a smartphone and a TV or tablet computer.

Microsoft were hoping they could develop a system that unified all these platforms and gave users a common experience regardless of what they were using.

It appears to have failed, probably because the different devices don’t have the same user experience so a keyboard based system doesn’t work on a touchscreen while a touch based system sucks really badly on a desktop or laptop computer – which is Windows 8’s real problem.

Unrealistic expectations

Another problem for Microsoft were the unrealistic expectations that Window 8 would halt the slide of personal computer sales.

PC manufacturers have been baffled by the rise of smartphones and tablet computers – vendors like Dell, HP and Acer have miserably in moving into the new product lines and they hoped that Microsoft could help arrest their market declines.

This was asking too much of Windows 8 and was never really likely.

So the cycle begins again with Windows Blue, the question is whether it will be the last version of Windows as we move further in the post-PC era.

Microsoft’s China crisis

Microsoft’s Chinese partner is blocking Skype messages and possibly passing user details onto PRC authorities. This security concern could damage both Microsoft and Skype.

That the Chinese Public Security Bureau is blocking your messages – and may even be reading them – would make anyone pause before they used a service.

Bloomberg Businessweek reports Microsoft Skype is doing exactly this with its Chinese customers. Anything deemed inappropriate is censored and referred to servers belonging to TOM Online, the company that runs the Skype service on behalf on Microsoft in China.

The Bloomberg story goes onto detail how one Canadian researcher is reverse engineering the Chinese blacklists, giving us a wonderful insight into the petty and touchy minds of China’s censors and political leaders.

What raises eyebrows about this story is how nonchalant Microsoft is about this issue, in a wonderful piece of corporate speak the software giant answered Bloomberg’s question with the following bland statement;

“Skype’s mission is to break down barriers to communications and enable conversations worldwide,” the statement said. “Skype is committed to continued improvement of end user transparency wherever our software is used.”

Microsoft’s statement also said that “in China, the Skype software is made available through a joint venture with TOM Online. As majority partner in the joint venture, TOM has established procedures to meet its obligations under local laws.”

Microsoft have to fix this problem quickly, glibly saying the Chinese government eavesdropping on conversations is a matter for partners is not going to be accepted by most customers.

It would be a shame should Microsoft’s Skype investment fail – Skype is a very good fit for Microsoft, particularly when the technology is coupled with the Linc corporate messaging platform, so squandering goodwill over protecting users’ conversation seems counterproductive.

One of the great business issues of this decade is the battle to protect users’ privacy. Those who don’t do this, or don’t understand the imperatives of doing so, are going to lose the trust of the marketplace.

Twenty years ago, Microsoft could have risked this. Today they can’t as they struggle with a poor response to their Windows 8 operating system and their mobile phone product.

Losing the trust of their customers may be the final straw.

People like us – could poor hiring practices bring down Silicon Valley?

Are poor hiring practices putting Silicon Valley at risk?

A strange little story appeared in Business Insider a few weeks back, 9 Things Your Resume Needs if you want to be Hired by Apple or Google is a curious view into the mindset of Silicon Valley.

Purporting to be an extract from a book written by a former recruiter who claims to have worked for Apple, Google and Microsoft, the story exposes a weakness in Silicon Valley and the technological elite which may cause the very disruptions they have unleashed to work against them.

The nine items are fascinating for the elitist, US-centric view of the world they portray and each is worth investigating on their own.

If you graduated from an elite college, your chances of getting an interview vastly improve

Yes, where you went to school does matter to the tech giants. Of course there are exceptions, but McDowell says an Ivy League or other top university will get you noticed.

There’s not much more to add to this, except to note that the vast majority of students whose families can afford such an education are from the upper middle class.

The Googles and Apples like to see relevant internship experience.

If you waited tables when you were 19, that isn’t attractive.

If you are lucky enough to get into a an Ivy League school on a scholarship or manage to scrape together the money you may still not make the cut.

To the author, only those with sufficient wealth to participate in unpaid internships are going to get jobs at the top Silicon Valley companies.

Your major matters

Sorry liberal arts people or chemical engineers, you’ll need another way in to Google or Apple.

This is an interesting one, Silicon Valley boosters often talk about the creative process and how coders are artists however according to the recruiter that’s just lip service.

She encourages students to pick majors that are directly relevant to Google or Apple. Finance, accounting, marketing or computer science majors have the best shot of being noticed by a tech recruiter.  At the very least, minor in one of those fields.

A focus on finance, accounting and marketing is the same as any old corporation – you could be going for a job with AT&T, Goldman Sachs or the government with qualifications like that. So much for unique.

Dissing chemical engineering is particularly interesting as Chem Eng graduates have passed one of the toughest university degrees. Whats more, the demands of mobile computing devices means battery technology is one of the most pressing issues facing Silicon Valley at the moment. Chemical Engineers are the folk who will solve this problem.

Big tech companies like to see people giving back to their communities.

Volunteering can be a great way to buff up your resume. That said, McDowell warns: “don’t serve soup in a soup kitchen.”

Instead she suggests hunting for a sales or marketing position, or offering to help a charity with its website and design.

This is a really obnoxious statement – basically saying we want to you volunteer, but we don’t want you to help people.

Just how many sales and marketing people are needed by soup kitchens, volunteer fire brigades or community pantries is open to debate.

A bigger issue with this mentality is that it favours bureaucrats and paper shufflers rather than doers. Which again is something anathema to the public statements of Silicon Valley’s leaders.

They also like good spellers and speakers.

Writing and communications skills aren’t just necessary for media jobs. They’re important in any career you’ll have.

Well, duh.

If you are buddies with college professors, that’s a plus.

Professors aren’t just impressed by how you do in their classes.  McDowell suggests helping them with research projects, asking for help and attending office hours, or becoming a teaching assistant.

That doesn’t hurt, but it’s pretty basic vanilla advice and again it’s tough luck if you have to do a shift at the local fast food restaurant so you can feed yourself.

Show you understand multiple positions at Google or Apple

If you want to work at one of the top tech companies, it helps to have at least a basic understanding of multiple positions in the organization.  McDowell calls this being a Generalist.

On one hand this advice makes sense but on another many technical roles are not generalist positions.

Generally having a knowledge of the company’s structure and roles is going to look good to any interviewer, assuming you can get past the gatekeeper at the recruitment company.

Entrepreneurs have a better shot of being hired.

This is a funny one, if you’re a real entrepreneur then the thought of working in cubicle at Apple or Microsoft while answering to a middle manager straight out of a Dilbert cartoon ranks with getting hot pine needles thrust under  your toenails.
One of the conceits of modern corporate life is that they value entrepreneurs and the free-wheeling spirits – the truth is they don’t and the first true hint of entrepreneurialism among the ranks will be smothered quickly with a deluge of paperwork.
Funnily enough, being a successful tech entrepreneur is a path to getting a good job at a tech company although it’s more likely to happen as an acqui-hire than through a recruiter.

Good news: Your GPA doesn’t matter very much

Most people think tech companies, Google in particular, harp over candidates’ GPAs. McDowell says there is little truth to that rumor.

This is only good news if you’ve ticked most of the other boxes, which means you’ll be considered if you’re middling graduate from Stanford or Harvard but forget it if you went elsewhere, regardless of how good your marks are.

The danger of recruiters

What the Business Insider story really illustrates are the risks of relying on third party recruiters as gatekeepers to filter out new employees.

Regardless of how good the recruitment consultant is they are going to apply their own cultural filters and biases onto the selection process and as a result knock out most good candidates.

More importantly, a company risks developing a monoculture if the recruitment process is too effective at filtering out people who don’t fit a narrow stereotype.

A new breed of officemen?

Reading the Business Insider story leaves one with the feeling that many of these companies are beginning to look like IBM in the 1960s – monocultures more concerned about the colour of an employee’s tie and choice of shirts rather than the talents they bring to the organisation or the value they can add to customers.

This is probably the greatest risk of all to the tech industry, that they end up with an insular group of people with fixed mindsets.

Should that happen, then the wave of disruption Silicon Valley has unleashed on the world will end up being the industry’s undoing as smart kids working out of garages in Michigan or slums in Delhi will out innovate the staid, comfortable incumbents.

It’s also interesting to consider how many other industries are now suffering after several decades of similar recruiting practices where leading businesses are now dominated by insular, unworldly monocultures.

Image courtesy of Alexfurr on SXC.HU

On being evil

Microsoft learn what its like to be the weakest kid on the block while Google consider a future of being evil.

“Don’t be evil” are the opening words of Google’s corporate code.

When it was framed in the late 1990s there was one company in particular everyone in the tech industry thought of when the word ‘evil’ was being used.

At the time Microsoft defined evil in the technology industry. The main reason was their crushing of real or potential competitors like Netscape, Java or the troubled IBM joint venture of OS/2.

Topping everything though was Microsoft’s tactic of fake error messages designed to scare customers away from the competing DR-DOS system in the early 1990s.

So it’s rather delicious that Microsoft seems to be getting a taste of its own medicine twenty years later as Google Maps returns an error message on Windows Phones.

This is particularly galling for Microsoft as Windows Phone is essential for the company’s resurgence and, as Apple have learned, maps are a critical feature for smart phone users.

It’s too early to accuse Google of having become evil as Microsoft did during their period of dominance as Tim Wu discusses in Why Does Everyone Think Google Beat The FTC but the search giant is flexing its muscles on many fronts.

For Microsoft, they are learning what life’s like when you’re not the toughest, meanest kid on the block.

Karma can be a real bitch.