I wasn't really aware of what was going on at Microsoft in 1984, but if what is claimed in that is true then if helps contextualizes for me what is currently going on at Google because they've been making similar claims in recent years. If the beast that I know as Microsoft used to be a forward thinking awesome place to work then there's a lot of reason to people Google will eventually morph into a similar beast. Get enough people together and bureaucracy and mediocrity will carry the day. You can get creative and take longer to get to that point, but ultimately unless you halt employee growth or create something so loosely federated that it cannot really be thought of as a single company you're driving toward Microsoft.

It works like this. Every startup company has programmers who actually create things and shape the world. Replacing any of such people is a bit hit. Switching from one person's vision to another is difficult if there were only two or three people in the company to begin with.

Once you have thousands of employees, each one is now given a role that is replaceable. Do this specific task, every day. If you quit, we find somebody else. The job becomes boring, just so the company can easily replace you.

In other words, startups just care about the product. But big companies have the same mentality towards their own employees. They no longer limit a system to product development, but systemize employees as well. Employees are no longer there to innovate, but to be a cog.

That's why the same companies that start out being created by visionaries, suck to work at when they are huge, because now they are looking for cogs. Hiring is just part of a system to replace some previous cogs.

I already keep hearing of Googlers jumping ship because the company is now a "big company" with the associated bureaucracy and overhead. They still have the nifty perks and all, but apparently the culture isn't what it once was, and this is probably unavoidable as a company grows.

- informal lounges for design/discussion/rap sessions

Maybe if they spent the time writing software instead of practicing rap music. Talk about wrong time, wrong place.

Funny! Didn't "rap" mean something like "free form brainstorming" in the 70s? I noticed it in the Simpsons:

----

Flanders: Reverend, I'm, uh, I'm afraid something terrible has happened.

Lovejoy: Well, sit down and rap with me brother, that's what I'm here for.

Flanders: [sits] I was talked into doing a dance called "The Bump," but my hip slipped and my ... my buttocks came into contact with the ... buttocks of another young man.

It was just hip/black slang for "talk."

Interesting we're reading this on Google. It never occurred to MSFT that a usenet archive would be good to have.

Well, it's not like Google was keeping it, either. Deja should get most of the props here, I think.

I heard that in addition to the archives they bought from Deja News, there was also a guy within Google who did a lot of work to reconstruct posts from old tapes accumulated by individual people.

Wow. It reads like a checklist of all the things that have gone wrong in MS - albeit things that go wrong in most (all?) large corps.

Sounds like the Google Blog, only more awkward.

MS had "no venture capital owners or cash crunches to limit us" in 1984?

Microsoft almost ran out of money back in their Micro-Soft days as language designers for iffy computer kit companies. Gates has been conservative about cash ever since, which is why they avoided paying a dividend for about a decade after they went blue chip.