Am I the only one who finds Ray's language hard to parse?
In the first few paragraphs alone, Ozzie uses:
- the realm of the service-centric ‘seamless OS’
- shifted Office from being PC-centric toward now also robustly spanning the web
- intrapreneurial leaders stepped up to build and deliver an innovative service
"Intrapreneurial"... I think the last time I heard that word was in the 90's at IBM (along with "rightsizing" and other business jargon that I forgot). Then came the Internet boom and brought along a new layer of lexical detritus.
intrapreneurial is a term for being an entrepreneur within the confines of a larger organisation. It's a business school buzzword for people working in a larger company to feel like they're just like real entrepreneurs, but doing it with the might and resources of a large organization behind them.
Or, as otherwise known, 'doing your job'.
To be fair, though, creating new products/services within a larger organization can provide significant challenges. You could argue that Google promotes intrapreneurship with the 20% time projets.
This isn't a Redmond problem, it's a Ray Ozzie problem. You don't get a ton of writing by Sinofsky published on the public internet, but he's a fascinating and thought provoking writer by comparison.
I find it striking that the biggest, tangible impact that everyone has pointed to when discussing Ozzie's career at Microsoft is some memo that he wrote 5 years ago.
I found that my eyes were unable to focus on any of the text within fifteen seconds of opening this link. Buzzwords floated in and out of view as I scrolled from top to bottom at speed.
"Certain of our competitors’ products and their rapid advancement & refinement of new usage scenarios have been quite noteworthy. Our early and clear vision notwithstanding, their execution has surpassed our own in mobile experiences, in the seamless fusion of hardware & software & services, and in social networking & myriad new forms of internet-centric social interaction."
Ouch!
Coming from the Chief Software Architect, that's quite an indictment.
By shooting the messenger, Ballmer gets rid of the bad news.
Two years ago, before shedding my managerish responsibilities here, I had to remind my team that I didn't care if they wait until the next briefing to tell me the good news, but that I want to know of bad news as soon as they learn them, even if that means waking me up in the middle of the night.
In the first few paragraphs alone, Ozzie uses:
I'm reminded of this recent John Gruber quip on Microsoft's "language problem": http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/10/11/microsoft-langua...What do they feed people in Redmond that makes them such ineffective writers?