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If the activities for which someone shows ability is to get rid of competitors as quickly as possible, the company will suffer all the way to the end. That’s the point of the article. Rewarding employees for their ability to maintain their own employment regardless of how it impacts the company turns MS into a gov’t agency style place to work.

MS has been moving toward the Apple model — Apple’s strength is its control over both hardware and software. Previously, MS was the OS company and (other than in the late 1970s and very early 1980s, when it was making some peripheral cards; and its current business making or outsourcing mice and keyboards, and btw, I love the Microsoft 5000 mouse, I’m on my second one) didn’t worry about the hardware. IBM hired MS to write a knock off of CP/M, and Gates retained rights to “port” the OS under their own label after a couple of years.

The clones (Leading Edge, Compaq, many many others) eventually drove IBM right out of the hardware business, and their own OS/2 never caught on.

Google’s model has been mostly a copy of MS’ OS-only strategy, using the foundation of the open-source OS and office suites that had been hacking away at MS market share for a few years already. If the Linux flavors had a real installer, suitable for regular folks, that free OS would have taken over everything by now. Geeks.

That’s the point of the article. Rewarding employees for their ability to maintain their own employment regardless of how it impacts the company turns MS into a gov’t agency style place to work.

Which is why monopolies and companies that are 'too big to fail' need to be broken up. Companies will treat employees real good, if they know said employees could easily jump to competing firms.

The point of my post is that Apple (and perhaps Google) will eventually lose ground too, because they rely on specific people in specific positions. Once those people retire and are replaced by others, the company eventually changes because they relied too much on the person's individual capabilities.

Long-term viability reduces the impact of single contributors by developing systems of management (project management, support management, talent management, etc.). To grow this change, the rank and yank (or any HR reward system) has to put emphasis on handing down the knowledge to the next generation of worker, and not emphasize hoarding the knowledge in order to be at the top of the performance hierarchy.

In essence, top performance is no longer measured by output, but by knowledge transfer.

-PJ