

Why Your Startup Shouldn't Hire a Marketer from Microsoft - meadhikari
http://www.rocketwatcher.com/blog/2010/12/why-your-startup-shouldnt-hire-a-marketer-from-microsoft.html

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ajg1977
Conversely you may find a person who, when free of the political,
hierarchical, and prone to play it safe environment that is Microsoft
marketing (or many departments in many large corp's), will become a fantastic
hire and combine their new found responsibility with years of experience to
completely out-manouver companies with far bigger budgets.

At the end of the day, if you place more weight on a the employment history of
the candidate than the person, you may as well just flip a coin when
determining whether they will meet your needs.

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goombastic
Very to the point. I got in the wrong way, I am a startup marketer currently
in a large company, and trust me it's nuts. The one thing people think about
last is selling. Everything is about the running political score and I just
don't get it. We have marketers who make 210K sitting around doing nothing
much, even worse, they aren't interested in technology or the stuff they sell.
Damn man, it sux, the money is good for the while though.

~~~
yesno
The feeling likewise: most C-level executives don't care about the well-being
of their employees.

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CPops
Good overview, but it's important to keep in mind that there are definitely
some very talented people at Microsoft that have their creativity and talents
strangled to death by layers of horrible management.

Reading some of these blogs about Microsoft's internal culture (Mini-Microsoft
and others) illustrates this pretty clearly and makes for very fascinating
reading.

~~~
jdp23
Very true. I generally agree with what the article is saying -- and there are
exceptions to every rule.

MiniMSFT and others are indeed fascinating reading.

~~~
rbanffy
I would never hire MiniMSFT. Taking him/her out of Microsoft would ruin some
fun reading.

edit: OK... I would hire him/her, but only after he/she left Microsoft.
Denying MiniMSFT such a rich source of inspiration would be inhumane.

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neworbit
Reasonable enough to say that people with big-company backgrounds often have
expectations that amount to "first I'll hire 4 people to do the job you are
expecting me to."

I would hire someone from Microsoft over someone from IBM any day. But I
agree, I'd rather try and find some disgruntled Yahoo worker and at this point
that ought to be easier.

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sedachv
From personal experience, all four of the Microsoft marketing employees I've
interacted with have been complete tools.

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savoy11
The daily Microsoft bashing HN post. There are literally thousands of startups
started by ex-Microsoft marketers, developers, sales people and they are doing
great. Microsoft is definitely doing great as well.

People are smart and can adapt. They will fight for politics and budget in big
organization and they will get work done at startups. Labeling someone as
"non-hire" just because they worked in Microsoft is plain stupid. Neglecting
so much success and real on the field experience - definitely not smart.

By the way, using the same logic - marketers from Google and Facebook shoud
not be hired too? Or this will not appeal to the HN community, no Microsoft,
so noone to hate.

Of course reading the OP author bio confirms that - senior positions at
Siebel, IBM, etc - they are obviously THAT MUCH different from Microsoft,
really. So much hypocrisy. So much bullshit.

Come on.

~~~
axod
The microsoft bashing here is pretty minimal. Hackers in general do not like
microsoft because it makes sub par lousy buggy ill thought out products,
operates morally questionable business practices, and is fairly incompetent
with new products.

Microsoft got lucky, once, by being in the right place at the right time (And
having the right connections).

I'm not saying I agree with the OP or not, but any microsoft bashing that goes
on is more than warranted. They have crushed businesses, held back innovation,
wasted millions of hours of peoples lives trying to make IE not completely
suck, etc

They do not innovate to improve users experience, they act to defend their
monopoly. Look at the mozilla vs IE story. Once IE was dominant, they shelved
development of it for years - it had served its purpose, which was to crush
mozilla and hold back innovation of the web as a platform.

~~~
rbanffy
> Microsoft got lucky, once

To be fair, they got lucky a good many times. They wrote a BASIC interpreter
(MITS even paid them to work on that) for the nascent personal computer
industry that was mostly there when needed.

Microsoft's BASIC was the first language many of us learned to program in. The
other day I solved Google's "are you a programmer" tests using both an Apple
//e and a TRS-80 Model III (emulated with MESS). It was nostalgic.

~~~
kenjackson
I think it might be fair to say that MS has gotten "lucky" more times than
probably any other tech company, including Apple. Maybe only IBM has gotten
"lucky" more often, but they also have a much longer history.

~~~
rbanffy
Microsoft didn't have to count entirely on luck - the were also aided by some
really incompetent competitors...

I remember shopping for a new desktop PC right after OS/2 2.0 was launched.
IBM charged more for a PC with their own OS (even though it included Windows)
than for one with Windows alone, the sheer boneheadedness of that baffled me
so completely the person on the other side of the phone taking my order
thought I hung up. In the end, I forked out the extra US$ 50 or so and got the
OS/2 box. The OS was really nice, very advanced for the time.

At that time, running a Unix GUI on a PC was a ludicrous proposition.

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supermanwillfly
I am really amazed by the irony in the writer's bio:

"I’ve held senior positions at large global companies including IBM, Nortel,
Siebel Systems (the world’s leading provider of CRM solutions acquired by
Oracle), and Sybase..."

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3pt14159
I know her personally. This is what she currently does:

April comes into a startup that has a proven business model and brings it from
30ish people to IPO or acquisition. She is extraordinarily intelligent,
technically knowledgeable, approachable, and successful. She is one of the key
people in the Toronto tech scene, and even if she cut her teeth on big tech,
she really is a growth phase startup person at heart.

With respect to this post, I actually don't care much for it, but some of her
other ones are _gold_. Specifically I've liked:

[http://www.rocketwatcher.com/blog/2010/10/marketing-
metrics-...](http://www.rocketwatcher.com/blog/2010/10/marketing-
metrics-101-for-b2b-startups.html)

[http://www.rocketwatcher.com/blog/2010/05/a-new-marketing-
fr...](http://www.rocketwatcher.com/blog/2010/05/a-new-marketing-
framework.html)

[http://www.rocketwatcher.com/blog/2010/11/startup-
marketing-...](http://www.rocketwatcher.com/blog/2010/11/startup-
marketing-101-2.html)

[http://www.rocketwatcher.com/blog/2010/09/competitive-
intell...](http://www.rocketwatcher.com/blog/2010/09/competitive-intelligence-
startup-style.html)

~~~
supermanwillfly
Interesting, thanks for sharing. I'll check those out.

