OMG. I learned this a few years ago working in a corp environment with stubborn senior people with big egos. Basically, to get one of these types on board with your idea you have to find a way to convince them the idea was originally theirs. Sounds strange I know..
You can put your black hat and game this by making sure you suggest whatever you’re after to more people/sources of info that your target listens to. Bonus points for going through intermediaries that obscure the source of the idea.
At some point, your senior decision maker has his “epiphany” as what you want is “what everybody is talking about”.
Interestingly this is something we talk about with my partner as a lot of times one of us would suggest something, the other might be dismissive, but then someone else would suggest, it gets done and and I/she would get upset that “you listen to them but not to me”.
But in reality whats going on is that we are both waiting to accumulate enough data points to make a heuristic work.
Once that became apparent we’re much more understanding to each other.
As for managers, if they smart enough, they would notice that a lot of the things you’re suggesting ends up what being done, and at some point they would value your points a lot more. But hardly anyone would use only one source of input to make their decisions.
- pitch the idea to as many folks as possible. Not just to the ones who are going to okay it. Even if only a small portion of each idea resonates with each person, you now have them all slightly on board, which is all you need to get a foot in the door. The more people on board, the more you can back yourself up with to get the okay
- do proof of concepts yourself. I always carve out some time to implement a MVP of my ideas, and then use that to hook people.
- make a design doc. I hate doing this personally, but a lot of people respond well to the idea of one, even if most won't read it. It's just the idea that it's well thought out, even if the design doc is mostly fluff and will change dramatically. People love procedural work.
"I was thinking about what you said, and you were totally right, if we <insert your idea> then we can achieve <insert their goal>. I'm really glad you said that - you really gave me a new perspective on this."
I forget where I read it, but I recall reading several times that this was how people at Apple had to present stuff to Steve Jobs to get him onboard with it. He'd initially dismiss it, then come back with the exact same idea as if it were his own.
EDIT: According to this URL, it was from the Isaacson biography: https://www.nhbr.com/emulate-steve-jobs-with-your-eyes-open/
Not disagreeing that corp envs are full of senior people with big egos, but this looks a little different from the opposite perspective.
Imagine you're a hypothetical "ideal" egoless senior corp person, and you have 20 people coming to you with their ideas. You know >51% of them are likely bad ideas (or at least it would be a bad idea to adopt most of them simultaneously). How can you tell which are worth adopting? If you trusted any of the suggesters absolutely they probably would've been promoted already, so it's difficult; you "stubbornly" reject most of them (probably some of the good ones too), or at the very least put them on the long finger for consideration later.
When you do get on board with an idea, yes there is still the problem of proper attribution and credit, and often there's non-benign human factors involved in muddying the waters there. But often ideas are Venn diagrams and defining them as atomic things from a single source isn't really practical.
Central plot of the movie Inception ;-)
People are far more willing to promote an idea they played a role in creating than one which they are just a passive party to. In large organizations, getting buy-in is critical to moving anything forward, so you need to have higher-ups going to bat for your ideas.
One way to use this approach to your career advantage is to make sure you are a few steps ahead once the idea takes hold. This makes it clear that you also had the idea, and you were smart enough to consider the consequences of it.
You sometimes see other people never face the same situations you face repeatedly. That is life telling you that you need to learn and that they’ve already figured that part out. That is why when they face the situation it doesn’t seem so intense.
Not every "idea" that crosses one's mind is worth taking credit for. They are not that great to begin with.
Because there can be massive monetary rewards for it? (Sorry if that’s the obvious answer we’re all pretending isn’t there.) We’re talking about the Xbox project, where one of the leaders is so rich he pays people to help him cook ancient Egyptian bread for something to do.
It makes you wonder how many of your own ideas were actually that from others.
I recently got a call from a recruiter asking me if I was interested in a job programming in Go...
Not strange at all: that is the way my mother has always operated with my father.
There is nothing strange about that, unfortunately. It's just how people work. Things like this are also why I sincerely hope that humanity eventually dies off and is replaced by literally any species, natural or artificial, that bases decisions on logic and facts.
There is no such thing as a meritocracy when humans are involved, no matter how much we delude ourselves to believe otherwise.
I was thinking about this recently while watching Raised By Wolves. The Androids express feelings and emotions, but this isn’t necessarily unrealistic. That could be a useful way to encode goals and evaluate priorities.
Also, the parts of Windows that Xbox does ship with are the most important ones for Microsoft shareholders. Nobody would want to edit their documents from their Xbox. That would in fact be harmful because some people might not buy a proper PC then (as is observable years later with the advent of smartphones). But the Xbox uses the DirectX API as well as builds on all the Windows-isms. So if you built a game for Windows, it's not hard to port it to Xbox, and vice versa.
A lot of the code in the NT kernel running on XBox was written specifically for the console. The filesystem drivers, the TCP/IP stack, the HAL, and possibly other components were rewritten from scratch for XBox specifically. It wasn't just locked down, a significant portion of "Windows" was entirely missing, and a decent chunk was replaced with new, Windows-incompatible code.
I suppose it depends on what "based on" means, though. It is technically based on Windows, but not like most people would take that to mean. e.g, when you say "based on linux", you don't take it to mean, "based on our custom kernel based on the initial loader and memory management and debugger functions in linux with the rest scrapped and replaced with a custom stack".
Using a little hyperbole there, but yeah. It does use DirectX, and is more Windows than not. But I can definitely see why someone might see it as a "lie" that it's "based on Windows".
I’m sure that it shares plenty code with Windows. You might say that the OS is based on Windows. But it’s definitely not Windows.
Ha. It seems like every big company is like this... blind to some obvious truths because of their massive success.
Steve Ballmer might be the funniest dude ever to run a tech company. Every story with him is absolutely golden.
Meanwhile Xbox has been a product driver - a big mostly positive influence on Windows gaming and on other platforms.
also, he is the only CEO I routinely saw at the “corporate gym” in Redmond before the pandemic struck. No bodyguards, no nothings. Like a regular dude going to the gym, hanging out in the sauna/jacuzzi. He had a super positive attitude towards the staff and other people that would strike up a conversation. While I did not the to have the image of a naked Ballmer burned into my retinas, I do appreciate that he did not let all that wealth go to his head.
It's only acceptable for him to do that because of his position. Imagine a factory worker doing that to the CEO "just cause it's funny". That's the same with other funny-but-inappropriate behaviors we should discourage at work.
EDIT: not that im saying Steve was in the right, who knows what their relationship was like
Hard to believe someone wrote that non-ironically...
Wikipedia tells me 3,000 Japanese soldiers died in the Battle of Midway. [1]
If I gloss over the fact that they were soldiers and not civilians, and ignore the injuries, in terms of one-day death toll, it's the same as 9/11. Sure, the Japanese military was the aggressor in WWII, but it seems rude to mention 3,000 human deaths for a cheap "take that!"
I mean, the Confederates sure don't like it when we remind them that they lost the American Civil war. They were in the wrong, but they're still real sensitive about losing. In polite company I wouldn't mention it. [2]
As an optional fun fact, Midway Games was probably using the same allegory when they picked their name. [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_midway
[2] The Internet, of course, not being polite.
Really? I always thought this was because they were founded in Chicago, near Midway airport. (The airport itself was named after the battle though). Midway games got started in video games licensing games from japanese companies Taito and Namco, so I never thought about an adversarial explaination of the name.
Edit: specifically the line "referring as it does to the World War II battle in which US forces defeated the Japanese."
Right, yeah, people hated Microsoft's software so much that they bought it by the bucket load.
Also that comment about midway being problematic. Why is it problematic!? Did WW2 not happen? Who'd actually be offended?
It's the shopping channel of software. Whether or not you wanted it it comes bundled.
I'm pretty sure it'd be a lot less popular if every OEM had a check box that said Ubuntu that deducted the license fee. MS frowns upon that sort of thing, though.
It compares the "battle" between Sony and Microsoft to an actual war in which a lot of people died. It also sets up the XBox as some sort of patriotic push to defeat the agressors that attacked us without warning.
I'd be offended if I was working for the PS2 division at Sony at the time, I think. I also think I'd be offended if I was working on games for the XBox - it's entertainment, not war!
These are companies that trivialize violence with games in the first place. I doubt you would be working for them if a war analogy offended you.
[1] https://www.cgmagonline.com/2017/08/14/microsofts-xbox-never...
For kids who may only have chromebooks at school, and macs at home, an Xbox may be the first time they make a Microsoft account. That account then goes on to accumulate digital assets and stays with them until much later when they're ready to make bigger financial commitments.
Anecdotally, for the past few years, gaming has been the only reason for me keep a Windows device around at all.
- The sale price of the Xbox itself pays for the per-unit cost of the machine
- The percentage Microsoft gets of the sale price of games, adds just about enough to pay for the development and marketing costs, so at that point, the business doesn't do much better than breaking even
- But when you add in the ongoing revenue from online gaming, that's where the profit comes from
Can anyone confirm or refute this?
MS probably gets some value from more people getting Microsoft accounts, too.
This pretty much describes the guy. I was at Microsoft during the final years of BillG being very hands-on with most core products (pre-lawsuit). I really wish I had worked with him more, but here is my anecdote that speaks to the guy’s brilliance:
My boss had gotten a fairly angry email from Bill sometime in 1995 if memory serves right. Chicago had taken much of his and Microsoft’s attention since the early 90s, that we didn’t see the internet coming.
When it came, nobody was alarmed. Bill had apparently gone on a learning tour of sorts shortly afterwards, but most of the people in the industry knew nothing about what the internet made possible. We knew you could share documents, and it was growing fast, and that Bill thought it was important. Nobody “got” the internet, just like nobody “got” the power of controlling the OS before Microsoft.
At the time, we were working on IIS (internet information service server) and a little behind schedule. Bill had also somehow caught wind of some Palo Alto startup talking to set top box companies to deliver an internet-connected OS (turned out to be WebTV, which we bought later) and was furious. Comes in, yells about how we can’t get the web resource model working, all that. Four letter words. Fairly typical angry boss rant. And then he collected himself and said something we thought was absurd - something akin to this: IIS and Internet Explorer will be Microsoft’s two most important products. We were struggling to get static HTML documents serving properly, and Bill goes on a monologue about how much of commerce will shift to the web, most video will be delivered online, we’d have free live video calling on handheld computers and the web as a platform would end Wintel. Thousands of machines running IIS that we could loan to web companies (sound familiar?).
Bill understood no matter how far we got with Windows, the days of a platform tied to an OS were numbered - in the same time period that Windows 95 was selling like hotcakes. There is no other person I think who could analyze situations objectively like that. It’s like if Steve Jobs launched the iPhone 3G and a month later gives Apple a speech on how the iWatch will kill it.
It was all absurd at the time - stuff of science fiction. Even a few years later during the dot com boom, much of it seemed far fetched.
Then Android and Chrome, iPhone, M1, AWS, and Amazon all happened, and I realized Bill was right. It took a little longer than predicted, but every single laughable thing the guy said that day turned out to be true. I really do think if it wasn’t for the anti trust case, Bill would have seen a lot of this through - for better or worse. It’s easy to look back and say Microsoft lacked the vision to succeed in the internet age - and it’s almost true - but Bill had formulated all this in a few weeks of “exploration”.
In a different universe, I think Microsoft abandons consumer Windows earlier than we can imagine, and builds “AWS” and “Chrome” around the IIS/IE combination. With reason to abandon the Wintel cash cow, IE may not have been so distastefully bad. Guess we’ll never find out though.
Instead, we would have TCP/IP replaced my Microsoft QUIC(tm), accompanied by a 40,000-page specification riddled with "just to what IIS does" explanations, thereby ensuring no other browser could ever emerge.
From what I heard, by 1999 they knew they had mispredicted their internet strategy, but everyone was too fearful of the US government to make drastic changes. One friend said they couldn’t mention competitors by name in their org. So they stuck to their guns and doubled down on enterprise servers and OSes. I don’t recall when MsSQL started, but it was another step in that direction.
At the time, most web sites were official company sites (basically HTML ads). A few news sites (Bloomberg was an early one). Some research labs and universities.
When we started IIS, there were maybe 3 million internet-connected users worldwide, and the web server we were running couldn’t handle the traffic coming to Microsoft’s web site - that would be single digit QPS.
Bill not only comes in and says “video calling”. But also free, worldwide, and on a PDA. Making a video ad showcasing the concept back then would have cost more than building the product itself today. Everyone can predict the future, very few can predict the future with an error of +/- 5 years. Nobody will bet a company richer than god on it.
Some of my ex-Apple colleagues used to “joke” that Bill’s gift was to see a piece of technology, and hit the fast forward button, and Steve (Jobs)’s gift was to see the future and hit rewind to the present day. Both hit the button too hard at times (Apple Newton, Lisa, IIS, WebTV).
Bill saw the internet, and knew it was the platform of the future a week later. The OS didn’t matter, the chipmaker didn’t matter, the form factor didn’t matter. It was all about content and services at the edge.
Unfortunately for Microsoft - and fortunately for other companies - cannibalizing Windows wasn’t on the menu. It didn’t matter what Bill thought. There was the board, shareholders, Steve, Dave. Even rank and file employees would not be receptive - someone on every team was vesting enough stock to become a millionaire each week, why would you talk about changing course? It’s really true that after a certain size, your maneuverability is severely restricted. So they doubled down into trying to make Windows + IE the internet, and nearly succeeded.
Two things had to happen before others saw the same things Bill did. Javascript running in the browser (1997), and Google figuring out hardware didn’t matter on the server side (2000). Java was a token threat. Bill knew it would not be performant enough on clients for Applets to succeed. They had to rebuild their language to put every fixed-size object on the stack because sorting an array<int> on a typical machine took forever. That’s why Java still doesn’t have operator overloading. That Java battle would be on the server, and we didn’t have a good language to bring to the battle there. Wired and co loved to paint a picture of Microsoft v Java as Goliath v David. Not true - Java was a speedbump.
The real threat was dumb terminals (aka web browsers). Even today, the world could run on Mac OS / iOS and Safari. If Microsoft was okay with sacrificing Windows market share and instead controlled content and services, they would be much more valuable. OS wars ended in 1995 - I think we had prototype of Excel running inside IE by 1999. It wasn’t very usable, but was maybe 3 years of clock speed improvements away. Wait for 3 years and you have an incredible product. Nope - some people decided to pour more resources to tying IE to Windows. Idiotic strategy when a web browser at the time would be a two-week project since every OS kernel shipped networking primitives by now. Rendering HTML/XML was trivial.
Once the DOJ walked into Microsoft, it was all walking on eggshells from then on. More people saw the vision, but were too scared to act.
It was also Microsoft's highest selling console ever [2]. Note that the PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 each individually outsold it though. As a result, Microsoft has never outsold Sony with an x86 PC-like console, despite trying multiple times.
Ironically, recent PlayStation consoles have been x86. Maybe Microsoft kind of won in the end? It still doesn't run Windows through, so maybe Microsoft was right from the start?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_cons...
Kinda like how ios version 1 was based off OSX.
...so let’s make a game console?
You might criticize this, but their perspective helped them punch through to where they are today. (Founders, at least. Not sure about hired CEOs like Pichai and Ballmer.)
