I was reading an article about Sony's struggles to keep themselves profitable today. It is a company whose products I have used a lot while growing up - there was this implicit assumption that if it was from this company, it would meet a certain quality standard. Today though, the inevitable has already happened. They have been disrupted, and they are feeling the pain.
Microsoft is another example of a company that is becoming more and more irrelevant. These days when I see someone take out a laptop that runs Windows, I think they must be either dated or works in consulting and is just doing powerpoint slides everyday ;). Perhaps I feel this way because I worked for MS a while ago. Perhaps I am wrong about what I think about Microsoft. Perhaps everyone will start thinking Windows is cool and start using it again. Perhaps Satya Nadella can save that company. But my guess would be that it will not happen. They have been disrupted so many times over - they missed internet, they missed mobile, and most recently they missed social. And with each new wave that came along, they tried coming up with similar products to try to beat the disrupting company out of their own space. I wonder why they dont know any better. Its not like the individuals there dont know that this is not going to work - at least at a grassroots level they all know. When they decided to work on a product to compete with iPhone sometime in mid 2008 to hit the market 2 years from then, there were people who worked there who asked why they were doing it - Apple was going to come up with something better by 2010, why were they making something that would have features that were competitive with the iPhone released in 2007? There was no answer coming forth. They did it because thats what "management" decided the strategy was. I guess the management thought that Apple was like Netscape. Clearly, that proved wrong.
Corporations are so much like people.
The birth of a company is a lot of hard work and pain. Its infancy is a lot of learning and work. Then it goes through a phase of maturing and figuring out what its place in the world must be. Then it tries to make a decent living out of its chosen path. After a while, a newcomer eats its lunch and it is left struggling to figure out how to compete. Some manage to reinvent themselves. Most retire. In the end though, all of them die. And these are just the successful ones. There are many others who die along the way. Some die in their infancy, never having managed to take off. Some get killed. Some commit suicide. Banks seem to have a strong preference for suicide. And goverments seem to like covering it up and making it look like it was accidental poisoning.
Whats interesting to note though, is that the life cycle has been shrinking into a smaller and smaller time scale lately. In the 1950s, the average age of a company that was in the S&P 500 was around 75. These days it is more like 10.
Apparently corporations mature a lot faster these days. Just like cattle and livestock. And people.
To fuel this type of insane growth, people are perhaps working harder than ever before - with the introduction of laptops, our work now stretches into our homes, making it harder for us to detach from work at will. And since more and more people are willing to put in this type of work, everyone feels pressurized to do the same thing.
So here we are - a set of people running faster than ever before to make more wealth than ever before to spend on more stuff than ever before, dying faster than ever before with more diseases than ever before.
Sometimes I wonder what the point of it all is. The Amish lifestyle makes so much sense sometimes.
And yet I know I will not let go of my job or my chosen life no matter what conclusions I come to logically. I know in my head that it is all in vain, yet I do exactly what everyone else does. Perhaps it is peer pressure. When I was in school I used to do things to make sure I wasnt going to buckle in to peer pressure. Apparently it wasnt enough - I am still swayed be everyone else's measure of success. I still care about what impressions people have about me. One day hopefully, I will be able to rid myself of that and take a more zen like approach to work and life. And some other day, hopefully, everyone else will feel the same way and do what they love.
Microsoft is another example of a company that is becoming more and more irrelevant. These days when I see someone take out a laptop that runs Windows, I think they must be either dated or works in consulting and is just doing powerpoint slides everyday ;). Perhaps I feel this way because I worked for MS a while ago. Perhaps I am wrong about what I think about Microsoft. Perhaps everyone will start thinking Windows is cool and start using it again. Perhaps Satya Nadella can save that company. But my guess would be that it will not happen. They have been disrupted so many times over - they missed internet, they missed mobile, and most recently they missed social. And with each new wave that came along, they tried coming up with similar products to try to beat the disrupting company out of their own space. I wonder why they dont know any better. Its not like the individuals there dont know that this is not going to work - at least at a grassroots level they all know. When they decided to work on a product to compete with iPhone sometime in mid 2008 to hit the market 2 years from then, there were people who worked there who asked why they were doing it - Apple was going to come up with something better by 2010, why were they making something that would have features that were competitive with the iPhone released in 2007? There was no answer coming forth. They did it because thats what "management" decided the strategy was. I guess the management thought that Apple was like Netscape. Clearly, that proved wrong.
Corporations are so much like people.
The birth of a company is a lot of hard work and pain. Its infancy is a lot of learning and work. Then it goes through a phase of maturing and figuring out what its place in the world must be. Then it tries to make a decent living out of its chosen path. After a while, a newcomer eats its lunch and it is left struggling to figure out how to compete. Some manage to reinvent themselves. Most retire. In the end though, all of them die. And these are just the successful ones. There are many others who die along the way. Some die in their infancy, never having managed to take off. Some get killed. Some commit suicide. Banks seem to have a strong preference for suicide. And goverments seem to like covering it up and making it look like it was accidental poisoning.
Whats interesting to note though, is that the life cycle has been shrinking into a smaller and smaller time scale lately. In the 1950s, the average age of a company that was in the S&P 500 was around 75. These days it is more like 10.
Apparently corporations mature a lot faster these days. Just like cattle and livestock. And people.
To fuel this type of insane growth, people are perhaps working harder than ever before - with the introduction of laptops, our work now stretches into our homes, making it harder for us to detach from work at will. And since more and more people are willing to put in this type of work, everyone feels pressurized to do the same thing.
So here we are - a set of people running faster than ever before to make more wealth than ever before to spend on more stuff than ever before, dying faster than ever before with more diseases than ever before.
Sometimes I wonder what the point of it all is. The Amish lifestyle makes so much sense sometimes.
And yet I know I will not let go of my job or my chosen life no matter what conclusions I come to logically. I know in my head that it is all in vain, yet I do exactly what everyone else does. Perhaps it is peer pressure. When I was in school I used to do things to make sure I wasnt going to buckle in to peer pressure. Apparently it wasnt enough - I am still swayed be everyone else's measure of success. I still care about what impressions people have about me. One day hopefully, I will be able to rid myself of that and take a more zen like approach to work and life. And some other day, hopefully, everyone else will feel the same way and do what they love.
Neetha, this is the best post of yours on this blog. So nicely structured. I especially liked the line "set of people running faster..." which sums up our lifestyle. :)
ReplyDeleteComing to Microsoft and its products...I have been using windows smartphone lately and it sucks on all fronts. I sometimes loose my mind trying to operate it. I was much happier with tiny old school cell phone that can be used only for telephoning. I realized how they are now very far behind android and ios technologies in mobile front. I believe it is next to impossible for them to even get little more viability in mobile market unless Satya Nadella becomes another Steve Jobs who resurrected Apple from the edge of bankruptcy. I still love MS office though! I am no great technologist but if I am asked for opinion I would ask Microsoft to just concentrate on its OS and make it better because there are people at my home (and many more) who knows nothing but Windows.
Only saw this comment now.. Thanks..
ReplyDeleteThe product I worked for at MS was supposed to ship on Windows Phone... So I have done some development on it. At the time though, it was somewhat decent, but iPhone came along and all that changed.
I doubt that Satya Nadella can be the next Steve Jobs. I look at him more as another Steve Ballmer. People who grow in executive rank within a mature company are usually not strong on innovation or disruption. Their strength is in managing existing customers, and I guess thats what he will try to do. Unfortunately, thats not enough to turn MS around. Turning Apple around meant that Jobs had to come back and bring a brand new (and really competitive) product out. I doubt thats going to happen at MS. But I am pretty sure they will continue to churn out new versions of Windows for a while - they have enough paying customers to make that the right thing to do.