December 10, 2005

Microsoft — is the intensity gone?

More and more Microsofties are complaining that the company is corporate and bureaucratic and, to be specific, empty nights and weekends.

I haven’t visited them for a few years now, and have no special insight into whether it’s true. But I can tell you this: It sure wasn’t that way in the past. I still recall a passionate, raised-voices discussion Bill Gates and I had about industry futures … after midnight … while dressed in black tie … at his girlfriend’s apartment. And that wasn’t an isolated incident.

And this spirit kept up well into the 1990s. I was on the phone with Jon Roskill (an influential marketing manager for Visual Basic, in essence, whatever his exact title is or was) on a Monday, and he commented that he was having trouble getting his head back into work after a long absence. I politely inquired as to the nature of his time off. It turned out he’d left work at 3:30 pm the prior Friday and gone camping for the weekend.

Yes, it seems Microsoft has changed a whole lot over the past decade …

Comments

One Response to “Microsoft — is the intensity gone?”

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