“Your privacy is very important to us….”

-->

This is a common refrain you hear from any company that is facing a data breach or violation of your data, whether involuntary or otherwise.  We have come to take that statement as more of a marketing speak or damage control PR, than anything substantive. The phrase signals defensive stand of the speaker.

Very recently we heard this from Microsoft. The Hotmail service provider, allegedly, read the emails of one of its ex-employees suspected of unauthorized sharing of company’s sensitive code with outsiders, using Microsoft’s own email and other data storage services! (WTF?)

Hurricane in a teacup

It was interesting to hear the commotion from EEF,  and a raging online  discussions about Microsoft’s “frisking” of user’s emails.  Some people likened access of email by Microsoft to breaking a trust that has been taken for granted.   Perhaps, in all this hue and cry, we may have forgotton that it is we, the users, who have given our consent to the tech companies (via ToS fine print) to peek into our inboxes or sniff at our outgoing emails if they so wish.

In fact Microsoft wanted to drive home this point home when its Deputy General Counsel stated (in the blog post referred above) that “Courts do not, however, issue orders authorizing someone to search themselves” (emphasis is mine). Clearly the company asserts its ownership of your emails and related data as “their” property! The software giant believes it is not just a carrier of your messages as you always believed, but owns it as well. 

Consider that USPS, by law, needs a warrant to read your mails. Private companies, however do not. They get this authority from the contract you agreed to while signing up for their services.  All for the convenience of a free email services and gigabytes of free storage. In return we do not seem to mind if our messages are read or acted upon.

 We accepted this slowly. First it was algorithms pioneered by Google that read our emails in exchange for serving more tailored ads. We tacitly agreed to the artificial distinction between a person reading our email against an algorithm designed by a person to read our emails. 

Back to the basics

Why not go for a paid email service (think Centmail-now defunct) where you pay for every email you send and forbid service provider to read your email without a warrant? No I am not talking about paid secure email services using state-of-the-art encryption to protect your mail from snooping or hacking.  Rather an email service where the sender pays to send a message in exchange for the protection of law. Granted you will be deprived of the filtered ads for your perfect vacation at unbelievable prices. But the search engines would do that gladly and there are apps for that.

Such a service would greatly reduce (if not eliminate) the massive scourge of SPAM choking our networks and inboxes, and generating all the headaches that come with it- SPAM firewalls, SPAM detection and filtering, whitelist & blacklist, domain & IP blocking.  It will also give a better control over malware spreading recklessly through emails.  

Paying for sending billions of emails would take a good amount of air out of SPAM and Malware economy. It would also make it easier to track the sources of malicious attacks that started from emails.

Looking beyond Emails

This kind of an approach would re-trigger the old protest, echoing phrases like “stifling innovation.”  Such protests presupposes that innovation does not have a leg to stand on unless it makes its services free. The reality is we are too hooked to things that come with the label “FREE.”

Interestingly the Gen X and the Millennium crowd do not treat email the same way as boomers do. Email for the digital generation is not a primary vehicle of connecting with each other.  For them mobile messaging  and social media is the current gold (ask WhatsApp and a bunch of VCs investing heavily into messaging apps).

Email has attained maturity and has become a de-facto formal means of communication like its predecessor, the postal mail. There is no reason to barter away your fundamental rights of protection against search and seizure, for a free service and suffer abuses or breaches of privacy in return ... or to act outraged if the “free” service provider goes beyond your presumptions.

Rank or Yank: Problem for one but Solution for the other!

This week Stack Ranking system shot up to the top of the news, when two large tech companies, Yahoo and Microsoft, took opposite stands, on this (controversial) employee performance system. Stack Ranking is an HR practice that is resorted to, for putting employees into pre-defined buckets to identify the “C” level workers.

GE Famed Forced Ranking System

Microsoft, that has taken some heat, and has been flayed in the media for following this practice, announced that it is moving away from this form of force fitting. Yahoo, on the other hand, decided to adopt this system and walked into HR Crosshairs.

These developments added fuel to the fire, reigniting the debate once again. The question being asked is that whether this system, introduced by Jack Welch, back in 1980 at GE, is still useful in today’s workforce environment. Remember that the workforce in US has moved steadily away from manufacturing. Today it is turning into predominantly knowledge based force. GE, since then, has abandoned this system of performance evaluation.

Are tech managers up to the task?

There is, of course, plenty of ammunition on both sides to go on. Some HR advocates take the view that the forced stacking system is sound, but is not being implemented properly. Others believe that embracing the system is symptomatic of incompetency in the middle management, in that the managers are unable to coach “under-performers.” This highlights the point that often the goals are not set well, or there is a strong element of subjectivity in evaluation. It is not unheard of that employees try to game the system where "anyone's loss is your gain." 

However, the proponents of this system concede that this should be used only for a short time.

In tech companies this problem becomes exacerbated since SMEs often rise to the position of managers. More often than not, they have no training or skills in talent management.

One of the issues with the forced stack ranking is that it tends to fit the employees on a standard “bell curve” – with a leading edge of top performers, most in the average “meets the expectation” category, and the trailing edge of under-performers, who would be on the chopping block.

The “bell curve” is a representation of a “Normal Distribution” or “Gaussian Distribution” in statistics. Like many things in life we tend to fit most “occurrences” into a “bell curve.”

Does Talent Follow the Bell Curve?

There is some belief that things in nature follow the Pareto Principle, or its more popular moniker- the 80/20 Rule. Scientists have shown that this behavior has been pervasive and, has been observed in both natural and man-made artifacts. This distribution has been found to exist in place as diverse as in social networks, biology, urban planning, website visits, political landscape and other sociological phenomena.

The 80/20 Rule: Note the steep fall

This distribution has been recognized to exist in workplace also, where we all agree that 80% of employees in any team deliver only 20% of the work.

A typical Pareto curve shows a tall head that drops quickly and sports a long tail. It has been found that the long tail of a Pareto Curve persists far longer than a trailing edge of a “bell curve.”

A Company of Super Performers

This does not mean that if a company fires 80% of its work force and hires instead, few super-workers, it will turn into a hyper-performing company.  We are yet to see the rise of such a super company that has only the highest performing employees. 

Maybe it is time that the HR Gurus need to consider the implications of Pareto Principle in workplace, and suggest an alternative approach to the forced staking into a bell curve. Note that a stacking system focuses on individuals over the team. The emphasis is growing on work collaboration where output is often highly interdependent. 

The 21^st Century workforce that is rapidly transforming into knowledge workers engaged in a flatter system will demand such a change. We see than in Generation Y whose expectation at the work place is very different from the one just two decades ago.

Organizations, that are agile at the cutting edge, have a different problem to solve. In their case innovation drives the growth.  This often requires flashes of genius with a team to do the quick operational heavy lifting. More often than not, innovation is not a big bolt from the blue, but a series of little flashes that need to be tested quickly and discarded if need be.  

In such organizations morale is the key. Talent usually does not indulge in game playing to beat the staking principle and, if the atmosphere gets murky they are the first ones to leave.

Will Bing soon be looking for a new parent?

-->

Businessweek reported that the potential Microsoft CEO candidate, Stephan Elop,

“…would consider ending Microsoft’s costly effort to take on Google with its Bing search engine, and would also consider selling healthy businesses such as the Xbox game console if he determined they weren’t critical to the company’s strategy,..”

 

-->

Maybe just a Test Balloon?

At this point this could just be second guessing, based on the opinions of some people who are said to be familiar with Elop's thinking. Search experts, however, were quick to analyze such a move. +Greg Sterling  made some great arguments here.

One obvious speculation was to whom Microsoft could sell Bing to!

+Danny Sullivan, of Search Engine Land held the view that Bing is too strategic for Microsoft to “just walk away” from the search engine. Bing is deeply integrated with the Windows Phone and other Microsoft products.  In his view it would be too disruptive for Microsoft to disengage from Bing. 

Yahoo and Apple are the two names being bandied about. 

-->

Possibility of search engines overseas, like Alibaba, Baidu and Yandex  acquiring Bing is being mentioned. This does make some sense, since the next (and potentially explosive) round of growth in Internet will come from Asia (and Africa). Along with more people accessing Internet, demand will rise for search engines that are better customized to the regional needs (my earlier post).

-->

But Competition also spawns Innovation

Competition is another reason why Bing needs to exist. Healthy rivalry does not let players sit on their hunches. It spurs the urge to innovate and to do better. Blackberry learned that lesson too late.  Microsoft’s Web Based Office 365 (and recently announced real-time collaboration), are two current examples.

 Note the differences between how Bing and Google describe Bing

 The problem that is generally associated with Bing, is that it continued, for far too long, into “me too” mode, trying to grow by doing the similar things as Google. It did not create much deeper differentiation.

Bing found it difficult to shake off those colors!

 Where search engines have not gone before

Search is one of the fundamental processes of discovery. But it is, by no means, need to be uni-dimensional.   

Facebook is proving this by building their Graph Search. By thinking differently, Bing could grow into other, less explored frontiers in searching, area that will be as natural as Googling something today.   

It is not that Bing lacks the brainpower to step into the unchartered waters. It is their managers that lacked the will (or vision) to venture forth.