re: Trying to Contact

J. Peter Bruzzese — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 20:15:26 GMT

Greetings,

You are a difficult person to locate email for (although I could guess @microsoft.com) I'm a a friend of Bharat Suneja and work on developing screencasts for Exchange. I have 150 videos on my site www.exclusivelyexchange.com.

I notice you like the video method of teaching others and I thought I might be able to assist in the future. Anything I can do to help the Exchange Team would be wonderful.

Thanks!

J. Peter

jpb@cliptraining.com

re: How to make better software for users? Here's to so-called "soft" skills and fewer jerks.

Josh Maher — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 19:41:39 GMT

This is a bit interesting... especially in the context of effectiveness.

I know most employees at MS are Type A individuals, so it is a somewhat natural fit for them to be difficult to work with. I think the top turd mentality is what MS is still looking for in the majority of employees (best coder, salesperson, etc). In fact, the MS strategy has always been to become top turd in the industry (maybe difficult to work with, but everyone needs them, so.... they win)

Although they don't realize that those top turds they are trying to hire - are still turds and not fun to work with. As they discover this, they find a need to have a good working environment and work to retrain people, incent them to change their styles, etc. As a result they end up with a conflict.

How can you be overly aggressive with a strategy while telling the people involved in the strategy to not be aggressive?

How can you meet a shortened timeline, while telling the people required that they need more vacations & corporate training?

Perhaps there are areas where this conflict isn't as present (either the product groups are less aggressive in their execution or the top turd mentality is encouraged).... but as an average, I think the conflict exists.

Maybe it's an aging employee population, the lack of surge in momentum, or too many other good players with continually better ideas/execution. But it is certainly something that has been plaguing The Soft for a while now.