Company: Microsoft
Date: 2015-01-05
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Senior

Tough Transition
Pros: [+] Breadth of career opportunities -- Work locations all over the world and in many different disciplines
[+] Much emphasis placed on Azure and O365, central to winning the biggest shift in IT since the PC.
[+] Company encourages cross-training and transitioning to different disciplines, although sometimes difficult, in practice.
[+] Exciting transition to cloud and mobile business underway -- Many new career opportunities in these businesses.
[+] CEO is leading culture change, breaking many legacy assumptions, restructuring product groups, where necessary, and attempting to make the company less insular, more innovative, more open to cross-team collaboration, while eradicating the toxic, back-stabbing culture, associated with the former evaluation system, known as stack-ranking, as extensively reported on this site.
Cons: [-] Not all of the restructuring has hit the right targets.  The SMS&G sales and marketing groups have only made minor changes -- the usual "pruning" of non-conformists, instead of removing the inward-facing roadblocks to change.
[-] Outside of Azure and O365, prospects are mixed and direction less sure.  
[-] Windows revenue (client and server) declining.  
[-] Still unsure how to monetize consumer-facing services.  
[-] Mobile and device strategy is fragmented.
[-] Although top-down efforts to change toxic culture are encouraging, everyone who has risen through the ranks, during the past 10 years, did so in the context of the old culture.  Many of the leaders still look at their careers as a zero sum game, where they win only by making someone else lose.
[-] As in most large companies, norms of equity preclude offering sufficient rewards for taking entrepreneurial risk.
[-] Sales and marketing is the most risk-averse part of the organization -- most in need of a shakeup.