Steve Ballmer completes the Clean Breakup with Microsoft as he leaves the Board of Directors

Ending a long term relationship can be hard.  And, one of the worst things you can do is have a messy long breakup.  Steve Ballmer posts on his choice to leave the Microsoft Board.

Given my confidence and the multitude of new commitments I am taking on now, I think it would be impractical for me to continue to serve on the board, and it is best for me to move off. The fall will be hectic between teaching a new class and the start of the NBA season so my departure from the board is effective immediately.

As some words of advice come it is best to make a clean break.

Unless you’re planning on being friends afterwards (check out our opinion on that topichere), instead of laying in bed with Netflix, a bottle of wine, and your ex’s comfiest sweater, you should probably hand that sweater back. If you’re in possession of certain items that once belonged to them which now haunt you, how about giving those babies back? While you’re at it, get that second key to your apartment back in your hands (cross your fingers hoping that they didn’t make a copy to eerily show up uninvited.) For both your sakes, any loose ties should be cut and forgotten.

In the Microsoft Layoffs treasure to be found, Got mine within an hour

The Microsoft Layoffs are all over the news.  The announcement that up to 18,000 would be let go over the next year got people’s attention.  When you go through the various Microsoft announcements it doesn’t say that Microsoft is letting go of bad performers.

The first step to building the right organization for our ambitions is to realign our workforce. With this in mind, we will begin to reduce the size of our overall workforce by up to 18,000 jobs in the next year.

Microsoft is eliminating roles.

It’s important to note that while we are eliminating roles in some areas, we are adding roles in certain other strategic areas.

So if you happen to be an amazingly good person with years and years of experience and Microsoft decides your role is no longer needed, then you could be one of those who has their role eliminated.

One of my good friends who has been at Microsoft 21 years had her role eliminated.  At first it was sad that she had her role eliminated.  Then in our e-mail discussion we discussed what she could next and how we could work together.  Out of the 18,000 having their job reduced there are good people and some awesome.  I have found one of the awesome ones, and there are many more.

There is a huge perception issue that because you are let go, you are a bad performer.  Wrong.  There are great people in those who were let go which is why there are dozens of recruiters ready to hire.  Local Seattle News KiroTV covers some perspectives on the local job market.

“It's probably a good time to be laid off any time in the past 5 years,” said Hilwa.

Seattle tech companies can't hire people fast enough.  Amazon continues to grow its empire in South Lake Union and tech giants like Google and Facebook continue to expand in Seattle. 

University of Washington professor Ed Lazowska told KIRO 7 he sees the layoffs as a positive.

“I believe that those who are displaced from Microsoft in the Seattle area will rapidly find new employment in the field,” said Lazowska.

What will the New Microsoft Data Center Group look like?

We haven’t seen a major reorganization of a company’s data center group for quite a while.

Reading PCWorld’s description of the coming changes at Microsoft.

“Nothing is off the table in how we think about shifting our culture to deliver on this core strategy. Organizations will change. Mergers and acquisitions will occur. Job responsibilities will evolve. New partnerships will be formed. Tired traditions will be questioned. Our priorities will be adjusted. New skills will be built. New ideas will be heard. New hires will be made. Processes will be simplified,” he wrote. “And if you want to thrive at Microsoft and make a world impact, you and your team must add numerous more changes to this list that you will be enthusiastic about driving.”

Specifically, Microsoft will “modernize” its engineering processes, so that they’re more in tune with customer needs, and are more data driven, faster and more focused on quality, according to Nadella.

MICROSOFT

Bill

Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Satya Nadella, the only three CEOs to ever lead Microsoft. Nadella says the Microsoft of tomorrow may not resemble the Microsoft of yesteryear.

The goal is to “reduce the amount of time and energy it takes to get things done” in the engineering team by having fewer people involved in making decisions, and more accountability.

It is quite possible that the Microsoft Data Center Group aka GFS. http://www.globalfoundationservices.com will have significant changes. This group has been in existence since about 2005 when Mike Manos was the first Sr Director of the Data Center Services Group.  9 years later a restructuring seems like a good possibility especially when you take into account statements Satya Nadella is saying “Nothing is off the table in how we think about shifting our culture on this core strategy.”

Maybe GFS will not be touched at all and it will be exactly as it is now, and the rest of Microsoft will change. :-)

Time can support credibility, Google vs. Microsoft outage reports

One of my friends has made the switch from Google to Microsoft.  Well actually I have many friends who have made the switch.  There are also many who have Google to go to Microsoft.  One friend who made who knows how Microsoft works and Google made the point on how the outage reporting posts from the companies differ. 

Microsoft had an Outlook outage with this post on the event.

On Monday and Tuesday of this week, some of our Office 365 customers hosted in our North America datacenters experienced unrelated service issues with our Lync Online and Exchange Online services. First, I want to apologize on behalf of the Office 365 team for the impact and inconvenience this has caused. Email and real-time communications are critical to your business, and my team and I fully recognize our accountability and responsibility as your partner and service provider.

Google reported on one of its outages with this.

Earlier today, most Google users who use logged-in services like Gmail, Google+, Calendar and Documents found they were unable to access those services for approximately 25 minutes. For about 10 percent of users, the problem persisted for as much as 30 minutes longer. Whether the effect was brief or lasted the better part of an hour, please accept our apologies—we strive to make all of Google’s services available and fast for you, all the time, and we missed the mark today.

One way to look at the contrast is Google is specific with the time of 25 minutes, 30 minutes longer.

Microsoft says they have full understanding of the issues, but doesn’t provide the specifics on time.

We have a full understanding of the issues, and the root causes of both the Exchange Online and Lync Online services have already been fixed.

Google had another outage where specifics are reported down to the minute.

Issue Summary

From 6:26 PM to 7:58 PM PT, requests to most Google APIs resulted in 500 error response messages. Google applications that rely on these APIs also returned errors or had reduced functionality. At its peak, the issue affected 100% of traffic to this API infrastructure. Users could continue to access certain APIs that run on separate infrastructures. The root cause of this outage was an invalid configuration change that exposed a bug in a widely used internal library.

Timeline (all times Pacific Time)

• 6:19 PM: Configuration push begins
• 6:26 PM: Outage begins
• 6:26 PM: Pagers alerted teams
• 6:54 PM: Failed configuration change rollback
• 7:15 PM: Successful configuration change rollback
• 7:19 PM: Server restarts begin
• 7:58 PM: 100% of traffic back online

Outages are painful for all companies.  

Suggestion for when you report your own outage if you include the time of events, then your communication can be viewed as more credible.  Using terms like “some” or “brief” doesn’t work when you are the one who is affected by the outage and brief would mean a minute of outage.

Google, Microsoft and others form Consortium for 25/50 Gbps Ethernet Switches in Data Centers

LightReading reports on Google, Microsoft and others forming a consortium for 25/50 Gbit/s switches to increase speed and reduce cost of data center networking.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – A consortium of companies including Arista Networks, Broadcom Corporation, Google Inc., Mellanox Technologies, Ltd., and Microsoft Corp. today announced the availability of a specification optimized to allow data center networks to run over a 25 or 50 Gigabit per second (Gbit/s) Ethernet link protocol. This new specification will enable the cost-efficient scaling of network bandwidth delivered to server and storage endpoints in next-generation cloud infrastructure, where workloads are expected to surpass the capacity of 10 or 40 Gbps Ethernet links deployed today.

The 25 Gigabit Ethernet Consortium was formed by the above leading cloud networking technology providers for the purpose of supporting an industry-standard, interoperable Ethernet specification that boosts the performance and slashes the interconnect cost per Gbps between the server Network Interface Controller (NIC) and Top-of-Rack (ToR) switch.

ZDnet says the consortium is a response to stalls in the IEEE process.

The consortium was formed after plans to create official Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) specifications stalled at a meeting last March, due to a perceived lack of support.

...

The tech giants say that in essence, specifications published by the consortium "maximizes the radix and bandwidth flexibility of the data center network while leveraging many of the same fundamental technologies and behaviors already defined by the IEEE 802.3 standard."