“I get a steady trickle of e-mail from Microsoft employees
who dislike many of their employer’s actions, and I know many good,
concerned reporters who work at ZDNet, the Washington Post, USA
Today, and other media outlets who do not follow any secret
“editorial agenda.” There are plenty of real conspiracies out
there. We shouldn’t waste our time making up fake ones, and we
should never assume that all employees or associates of a company
or government agency are part of a faceless, marching mass that
always does exactly what its leaders want.”
“Let’s start with Microsoft. Remember when they asked us to pull
some reader posts? That was the work of a few people in an obscure
legal department, not a case of a leering, drooling Bill Gates
calling a cowering subordinate and screaming, “Slashdot sucks! Kill
Slashdot, kill, kill, kill!” And obviously not everyone at
Microsoft agreed that it was a good idea to keep the matter alive,
because it has since been allowed to die quietly. (We haven’t
written anything further on the subject because there has been
nothing to say. No news is good news.)”
“There is no giant, singleminded conspiracy at Microsoft, just
thousands of people trying to get through the day. This is how
things really work at any large company. Good decisions get made
and so do bad ones. Projects get started. Some of them work out and
some of them don’t. Orders issued from the top sometimes get
carried out effectively and efficiently, and sometimes they don’t.
I often suspect that some of the worst software (and the worst Web
sites) I see are so crappy because the workers actually putting
them together are unenthusiastic about management’s plans and are
either consciously or subconsciously dragging their feet — or, in
this case, their coding fingers. I’m not implying any employee
conspiracy, either; these tend to be individual decisions that,
collectively, may look like a consipracy to an outsider (or a boss)
when there really isn’t one.”