Perdido Street School: Microsoft, Public Education And "The Wire"

Perdido Street School: Microsoft, Public Education And "The Wire":

Microsoft, Public Education And "The Wire"

Good Slate piece comparing Microsoft to The Wire to explain why Bill Gates' company is failing:

And it had a lot to do with bad management. There’s too much personnel turnover in the drug trade for managerial rot to really set in—for the Microsoft analogy on The Wire, you’d look not just to Avon Barksdale’s intransigence but to his nemeses in the Baltimore police department, with its toxic strains of authoritarianism, politics-playing, bean-counting, and pure sloth. Consider Windows Vista, the much-maligned follow-up to the genuinely decent Windows XP. It took five years to produce something that was far worse than its predecessor. Three years into it, in mid-2004, they threw out all the code and started over. There was a big reorg then, too, just like now. Reorgs are the product of endless turf wars between executives and keep managers occupied with PowerPoint charts. Reorgs keep