Chat Wars: Microsoft vs. AOL
This passage hits pretty hard in terms of company culture. I think this is what Peter Thiel meant by "dont fuck up the culture" to Airbnb."Those were the years of Microsoft’s long, slow decline, which continues to this day. The number of things wrong with the company was extraordinary, but they can be summed up by the word bureaucracy. Early on at Microsoft—and even later, when we first started Messenger—you could just do things. You had a good idea, you ran it by your boss, you tried it, and if it worked, in it went. After a while, you had to run everything by a hundred people, and at some point the ball would get dropped—and you’d never hear back."