{"id":17847,"date":"2012-11-20T09:43:24","date_gmt":"2012-11-20T14:43:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=17847"},"modified":"2012-11-20T09:43:24","modified_gmt":"2012-11-20T14:43:24","slug":"microsofts-essential-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/11\/20\/microsofts-essential-problem\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft&#8217;s essential problem"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=4707\" target=\"_blank\">ESR<\/a> explains why Microsoft has been languishing in the doldrums for the past several years:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>This is why Microsoft looks so doomed and desperate. Yes, Steve Ballmer is a colossal fool who has never met a strategic decision he couldn\u2019t bungle, but in an important way that is symptom rather than cause. Dysfunctional leaders arise from dysfunctional cultures; the problem behind Ballmer is that Microsoft\u2019s culture is broken, and the problem behind <em>that<\/em> is that the monopolistic\/authoritarian goals around which Microsoft\u2019s culture was constructed are incompatible with any other kind of excellence.<\/p>\n<p>A more poetic way to put this is Tolkien\u2019s \u201cOft evil will shall evil mar.\u201d Google\u2019s \u201cDon\u2019t be evil\u201d isn\u2019t mere idealism or posturing, it\u2019s an attempt to sustain the kind of culture in which excellence is possible. (Whether and how long this will be a <em>successful<\/em> attempt is a different question.)<\/p>\n<p>Apple\u2019s turn is next.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>ESR explains why Microsoft has been languishing in the doldrums for the past several years: This is why Microsoft looks so doomed and desperate. Yes, Steve Ballmer is a colossal fool who has never met a strategic decision he couldn\u2019t bungle, but in an important way that is symptom rather than cause. Dysfunctional leaders arise [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831],"tags":[160,262,271,328,572,94,388],"class_list":["post-17847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","tag-apple","tag-culture","tag-ethics","tag-google","tag-leadership","tag-microsoft","tag-secrecy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4DR","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17847"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17847\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17848,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17847\/revisions\/17848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}