There was nothing surprising in that email chain at all, looking at it as someone with lots of experience in large companies.

In a twisted kind of way, the replies were reasonable and logical. They're not dumb, they can see it was crap. No one org can actually own this fix, so in that kind of situation it realistically requires someone like Bill to choose someone to drive it, and demand updates to ensure that everyone gets aligned. Telling his execs, especially in a company so notoriously political and "empire" oriented as it was, isn't going to work.

I actually liked that in Amazon, Jeff Bezos used to send out the infamous "question mark" emails on such a regular basis that they built an exec commitee specifically for the purposes of driving direct action on problems. Didn't matter where you were, or what you were working on, if that question mark email came you dropped everything to work on it.

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whstl an hour ago | parent [-]

Yeah. In context the answers make a lot of sense: it’s a dysfunctional company where ownership is non-existent and getting shit done is hard.

This is how learned helplessness looks like when you’re a high level executive.

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mike_hearn 5 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I think they also suspect/know that Gates won't revisit the issue. The email is a flame as the subject line admits. Gates wasn't going to go back every week for the next six months to track progress.

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ValentineC an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> This is how learned helplessness looks like when you’re a high level executive.

Must be nice being so useless, yet getting paid so much.

Though I guess these people must have been good at politicking to rise so high.

	▲	whstl 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I mean, you're 100% right, but what's the alternative? They wanna keep the salary. The machine rewards political people, not people who pick fights to improve the product. It's a perfect pair. :/