Its 2014 levels of total distrust inside the company. Morale has been on the floor since end of 24, due to closing offices, laying off people. Contractors are being left in limbo more and more often.
Half of the people are just talking about layoffs and other are keeping thier mouth shut. There is sense that execs are making one bad decision after another. Xbox division knows this very well, the trust in that division is near zero, but now it has spread to even the orgs which were doing decently well.
Product quality is also completely dogshit/dogslop, we have done nothing in last 2 years except making our products worse. We do hear reports of boomer companies moving to Apple every now and then, and these rumours are increasing. Windows 11 is a disaster, Copilot is an convenience no one asked for. Users are contacting support every day asking how to disable all these features but execs keep ignoring users. The consensus among top guys is that customer is wrong and we need to teach them.
Trusting stock market more than the customers is now the industry standard.
Sounds like AI fanatics are running the show.
AInmates?
Regarding the last paragraph, users are now unpaid beta testers and products instead of … users. But again maybe it makes sense when a company is not making money in the retail market.
One of my teams runs a Microsoft product that’s been in place for a long time and has been an amazing product falling on hard times.
We had a service impacting issue and went through the typical Premier/Unified support gaslighting exercise. We finally escalated it to a batshit level and got to a real engineer. The dude was about the retire, was fed up, and knew exactly what was wrong. He claimed to have a fix pending approval that had been held up by his chain. We ended up getting a hot fix after a lot of drama with account leadership.
I was grateful to the guy, but kind of shocked that morale in that group was so bad. I used to be acquainted with a few people there over the years and every single one of them was either laid off or left. I never heard of anything like that at Microsoft at all, especially as a customer.
A classic cafe of enshittification. We’re not the customer anymore, we are the product.