Microsoft Departures/Google Takes Over World

If a company is only as good as its employees, then Microsoft is probably getting worried. More than 100 former Microsoft employees have defected to Google to date, and others have gone elsewhere. Lenn Pryor, director of platform evangelism, left for Skype Technologies. Stephen Walli, who worked in the unit set up to parry the open-source threat, split for an open-source consulting firm. Joe Bedaand Gary Burd, respected engineers, left and helped set up Google Talk. Mark Lucovsky, who had been named one of Microsoft’s 16 Distinguished Engineers, defected to Google last November. (Btw, their names are links to fascinating personal blog entries regarding their departures.)

Why so many departures? From Business Week: Many Microsoft employees have been getting increasingly fed-up with the way the company is run. They’re frustrated with the increasing bureaucracy, including the many procedures and meetings Chief Executive Ballmer has put in place to motivate them. They feel trapped in an organization whose past successes seem to stifle current creativity. "There’s a distinct lack of passion," says one engineer, who would talk only on condition of anonymity. "We’re missing some spunk," he says.

This spring two MS researchers sent Chairman William H. Gates III a memo in which they wrote: "Everyone sees a crisis is imminent" and suggested "Ten Crazy Ideas to Shake Up Microsoft." I’ve Googled that memo, but no details about what those 10 ideas are have made it to the web. I even used, gasp!, other search engines, but found nothing. (Which proves my theory, if Google doesn’t have it, it doesn’t exist). I’m very curious. Anyone with the inside scoop, please comment here!

News stories about these Microsoft departures have been all over the web lately. Specifically, the one story (as those links show) that’s getting a lot of attention is that of a computer scientist named Kai-Fu Lee who left Microsoft in July to head Google’s Chinese research and development center. Microsoft sued to stop Lee from working for Google, citing his noncompete agreement. However, on Sept. 13, Superior Court Judge Steven Gonzalez ruled that Lee could work for Google, provided that he does not recruit any former Microsoft colleagues nor will he be able to work on projects he previously led at Microsoft. In court, Lee detailed how the 20+ Microsoft-led Chinese product-development centers  tripped over one another, duplicating efforts and even fighting over the same job candidate. He called Microsoft "incompetent." After the judge’s ruling, he praised Google, noting, "the culture is very supportive, collaborative, innovative, and Internet-like — and that’s bottoms-up innovation rather than top-down direction."

The tide is turning. Sometimes I wonder if we will looking back to these days, these months, as the time when Microsoft was still king, before Google took over the world. (On that note, here’s a link to an 8-minute video from the year 2014 about how Google did just that.) Other times, I remind myself that as amazing as Google is, is still needs to run on an OS…..or does it? Some, like Jason Kotte of Kotte.org, speculate about the future where there is a GooOS…a Web OS based on the distributed platform that is the Google empire. Wouldn’t that be amazing?