Microsoft india blog srivastava

Do you guys realize that these people are following this blog and what all they can do with this? That is likely to get more attention than just writing immature comments here about people having their pants down, their drinking habits, etc etc If you love the company, then dont rape it in public.

There are enough ways "anonymous" to make your point known and force the management. I have been following minimsft for a long time and continue to follow it even after leaving MSFT. This will be my ONLY entry and my identity is at the end. Just blaming squarely the senior folks, commenting very badly, asking them to leave is not going to have any effect that one wants to see What would happen if that rule is applied on a broad basis across the company at individual level? One thing I noticed and blame here is Microsoft itself.

MS has a culture to make people so comfortable in their lives that they cannot survive outside of MSFT!!! MS also has a culture of setting targets and commitments at IC never making people to work as groups.

So when something goes wrong people start pointing fingers If something not working NOT mine attitude Leaders, like all of us, are also humans and they have inherent strengths and weakness. So, where is the problem?

What the leaders could do? What attributes they need to change? Rather than blaming without any details Do you have courage to face and have an open conversation with your leaders directly rather than whining here? Folks, Be the change what you want to be There are plenty of opportunities out there for deserving and capable individuals Did any of you know Sanjay Parthasarathy? I was with MS India and quit few months back. I don't have any personal grudge against anyone.

I have never worked with DPE or Tarun directly. But I will share one of my observations from reading the comments here and the context I had in the past. If there is a consistent mention of a person and a group, there must be an issue with that. Why is that no one comment about any other group? Even for an outsider like me, it is obvious that there are problems with specific groups and leaders of those groups.

I don't work in India, but I've been in leadership positions at other firms and this sort of response really bothers me: A number of us here at IDC pride ourselves on our integrity, honesty and work very hard to set the right example for the team.

If you pride yourself on integrity so much, then you owe it to yourself, if not the company, to keep your ranks clean and drum out those who are making the honest ones look bad. Shooting the messenger who really had no responsibility for the behavior of upper management, let alone trying to correct it speaks counter to your claims of integrity.

The people tarnishing "your good name" aren't the people complaining, but your fellow GMs who are behaving poorly. Let's keep things in perspective. And I do not know anyone who works at Microsoft or Microsoft India or any of its consultants or suppliers etc. From an offhand outside perspective, I find the whole post nauseating. I can't believe you would be so vacant as to allow this tribal war to infect your blog.

For you to allow unsubstantiated personal name vendetta venting against individuals who cannot defend themselves or prove one way or the other what is said is true reminds me of some basic treatises that should be readily incorporated in any life interaction: such as thou shalt not bear false witness, which of course is ignored here. What you have done is give fodder to a group of people dissatisfied with their lot in life welcome to the suffering world that all of us will endure eventually who clearly have an agenda.

The basic rule of ANY employee of any company is that criticism must always be constructive and must never be of a personal nature--and even I have failed this rule a few times here, but I think you have been duped by an organized hit squad from a place where there seems to be a power struggle occurring.

Quite honestly you need to inform your Indian bloggers of a level of decency required in their employment agreement before they consider posting on your blog. I am sure that Microsoft like most companies have such agreements that require a level of civility and an attitude of positive support of their fellow workers.

Somehow those rules need to be applied here. The same discussion could be occurring but without the darkness that seems to be pervading that is so full of hate. As an executive, were I to be confronted with what I am reading here, I would genuinely consider shutting down the whole Indian operation, writing off the loss and transfer the technology elsewhere, unless I started seeing love, peace and harmony coupled with winning profitable results.

I would give them 30 days to turn the mess around. I subscribed to it The irony boggles my mind Dude, I can understand the anon folks posting provocative comments. Yes, I want the job so I will post anon. Go for it. This just proves how much time you must have to waste. How about you doing some real work for a change? I'm guessing you work in One India?

Also, you don't know Tarun at all. The man has a serious track record in the harassment department - he has a modus operandi that he developed after getting shit canned from Aditi due to a harassment lawsuit. He is careful about who he picks. He is a smart guy in these matters. Whether he is good or bad, I don't know - that's between Microsoft, his management and him.

Seems to me he must be good as despite all this personal BS, the guy has managed to climb up well. Comments around hiring are a continual theme in Mini posts. Are you sure the bar is lower now than when you hired in? Can you not find or see value in your peers?

Do you look for the strengths a peer has? Do you encourage your peer to build on those strengths and invest in coaching you peers in strengths you have and help build up your peer? As a company we are competitive, we are also a team. Tearing peers down verbally or with an "I am superior" attitude is not making us a stronger company. If it was democracy - Neelam, Ravi, Tarun G, Joji would have lost the right to be execs by popular employee vote.

Even if whatever people say here is incorrect or defamatory its an indicator that the management has lost the right to manage. Be kind and step aside. Hey Mini - had been following your blog for some time cause it seemed productive - but lately it seems that it's been hijacked by some unproductive dialog. Time to bring it back on track buddy. There are a lot of issues within the team and most of them are created by Tarun.

I am sick of the 'we are the best darn DPE team We were best sometime back. Now it is all about packaging and presenting it the way the world wants us to see. Get an interview done for each and every person in the team by an external DPE team.

Why should they be ignored? Leaving the personal attacks aside, there is a lot of truth in whatever has been said about DPE and it's leadership. I am from DPE too and I am equally passionate. But I know that the things are not as rosy as you paint. The 2nd layer leadership is strong? This shows that you are one among those "strong" leaders. The second layer has done everything possible to get a level hike during Tarun's tenure.

This layer consists of folks who are the most self serving guys I have seen. I will be posting more details soon. We will see BMO team dancing this year during company meeting He takes care of the team very well!!!

I am surprised at this statement. He only takes care of people who will talk good about him. He won't think twice before killing anyone who doesn't play into his whims. He is the most immature leader I have ever seen at Microsoft. His has supreme ego and you have to keep massaging it to get anything from him. Finally, I guess you are one of those blue eyed boys of Tarun whose association has helped you immensely.

Stop defending the corrupt second layer. I am eagerly waiting for the MS Poll and you would see the results for yourself. My request to the fellow DPE colleagues - Guys!

Please open up and do share your views. This is an opportunity to get things sorted out before the new leader steps in. This comment is becoming personal, slanderous and unproductive. Let us focus on the real issues in MS India instead of stooping to making personal attacks on people in a forum where they may not always be able to defend themselves.

The problems in MS India are true and are damaging a lot of good people. It is time to focus back on the issues on hand - how does Management plan to reboot the culture of MS India?

Some response from the senior management reading this blog will be useful. Anybody cares about MGSI? The entire leadership team of MGSI is made up of non-ms new hires less then a year. It does not feel like MS at all. It is becoming another exercise in empire building. Grow the number is the mantra. Cut cost everywhere, hire low quality at cheaper rates and grow big fast. HR is non-existent. I thought the entire idea behind MGSI was to do showcase projects for key companies.

We are supposed to be product specialist. How is CMMI going to help us. This is like diluting the MS brand name. Not to mention piss off the partners. The numbers don't look the same each time a business report is published. Interview process is non-existent now. Most of the times your "no-hire" is hired. There was some sanity a year back but with most of the guys who started MGSI quitting, the entire process has gone to the dogs.

The list is endless. Yeah we even have a team working for the product team. Talk about structure in MS. You have a product team in MGSI. We started hiring the B-team during the bubble -- we'd throw any reasonably good person -- and sometimes people who were a bit less than reasonably good but who had a specific skill we needed -- in a seat because if you don't hire, the headcount goes away.

The whole "we're a team" thing is great until your product failed to be what it should have been because there just aren't enough great people working on it. In such situations you don't stick around to help the B-team do their best, you leave for a team populated with better people.

Here comes the mega post on DPE India. Sit back and read this to get the complete picture. I am going by each team and tell you how screwed up the DPE mission in India is: Enterprise — This team has the least technical skill set. The PSAs have neither domain expertise nor technical expertise. They keep misleading the customers most of the time. The guy who works with the public sector in this team is hated by his counter parts in the PS team.

He is known for grabbing the credit for the work others do in the accounts. He is also responsible for screwing up opportunities at some of the biggest accounts. Now, you would never see IT pros working for the enterprise team anywhere in the world. It happens only in India! Because the lead for Enterprise was lacking the required headcounts to become a director!

Tarun very conveniently moved the IT Pros to bloat the team size and bump up the level of Sanjay to the director. Who has lost in this game? The IT Pro evangelists. Because their career is in jeopardy as they are supposed to be working with the breadth community where as they are currently used as wild cards for the enterprise pre sales.

The BFSI PSA is quite honest but needs a crash course on basic MS terminologies and technologies otherwise we have a risk of him recommending competitive technologies to his customers. Partner — Oh boy! The lead would be definitely benefitted because he has directors reporting to him which means he should become a GM or a Group Director soon! You can mention thousand reasons but the reality is that the ISV lead has decided to move on and the team was orphaned overnight.

So, drag and drop them into the SI team and call it Partner team. The director of this team never forgets his old organization and tries to run his team like his old consulting team. To succeed in this team, you should let him write all the nice mails allowing him take the credit otherwise he will be really upset. Moreover, never mark anyone in the mails that you send to him. Give direct feedback to him and you lost your review for the year.

The so called Architect Advisors in this team lack the required technical depth to talk anything related to architecture. It is sad to see the current set of people in this team calling themselves as Advisors. They seriously lack technology depth. The ISV evangelists are on their own trip. Academia - As someone pointed it out, you know the health of a team whose director is chilling out at a remote town and hardly makes a visit to meet the team. I wonder if she even has access to the mails from her location.

I know the constraints she has but why compromise on productivity and efficiency when we can get a replacement for her? This team has been reduced to a pre sales team for public sector.

They have completely forgotten the mission of academic evangelism and the core objective of academic evangelism has gone to dogs. Why sign umpteen no. They are wasting some of the senior resources in the team.

The youngsters in this team are wasting their time. They are neither technical nor marketing resources. This team needs a shot in the arm! They have completely gone haywire in the execution. This team has been raped countless times by Tarun.

All the great things that Tarun boasts off are squeezed from this team. Their existence is defined by a couple of events like IndiMix and TechEd. They very conveniently bloat the number of attendees by giving illogical justification like TV broadcast and streaming on mobile phones. The subset of this team, the web team is a mystery. No one knows what they do with the web and no one even knows why they are a part of BCC.

The current lead is relaxing in this team still trying to figure out what to do. This team is supposed to be running the community initiative. As someone posted earlier, they lost the community battle and there is very little respect for Microsoft and its evangelists out there.

No one has a clue about the Enthusiast Evangelism and Embedded Evangelism that this team currently owns. Unfortunately, the technical talent in this team is misused as they are not leveraged to their best potential. Tools Sales — The previous lead has completely squeezed every bit from this team leaving them high and dry! The current lead has no clue of tools marketing but heavily relies on the folks who executed in the past. No one understands why Tarun had to forcefully fit her into this role when she was not ready for it.

There is a major churn in this team as most of them left or in the process of leaving. This team has been successful only because they rode the wave in the past. There are tough times ahead as there is no solid plan or funnel that exists.

The MTC director has been very successful in insulating his team from all the external bullshit. They do some good work and are appreciated by EPG and other teams. I have a lot of respect for their real technical skills. Marketing is newly formed and again the concept of cross audience marketing is really scary!

It is another gamble by Tarun. What a big joke! Let us first define it at the corp level before we do anything locally. Finally, why do we need a director for innovation coming all the way from UK? We need someone from the local ecosystem who is passionate about making a difference to the startups formed in India.

But everyone below that is hurt. We may not realize it right now. Now, you tell me whether DPE India has issues or not? It does and they have to be fixed. I totally agree with you on this.

This lady is a misfit to be in the DPE Tools team. I am not surprised a bit! This has always been an issue with MCS. They are confused about competing or collaborating with partners. MGSI is not an exception. I have a strange feeling that someone from the 2nd layer has posted this. I sent a mail describing the above scenarios to the Business Conduct and Compliance alias.

I already got a response saying that the investigation is on! I have no doubts about their ability. Why is cronyism considred a uniquely Indian or IDC problem?

Isn't this normal of what happens at MSFT USA , a new group opens, vultures jump in with their flock and prematurely kill the product that was bought with a big bag of cash? I got the identities of both these GMs. If you did not send such mail in an anonymous form your days are numbered at the company. SO ou better start looking for a job outside or you will be "let go" soon. The problem with IDC is that they are located in India. You can teach an American cook to make a good curry- but it would be far-fetched to expect that cook to suddenly become an innovative chef that can come up with new curry ideas for the India market.

My suggestion to the IDC would be to not shy away from being the 'delivery center' for Redmond. As for innovation - it happens. News of Neelam's departure will be out in the next few days.

Please be productive on this blog. We all know there are problems in all groups and there is now an external agency hired to try and fix the problems in EPG.

That is a good first step. But with rotten leadership, the change must start at the top. Have town hall meetings, talk to employees with respect, provide opportunities for growth, be transparent in how you deal with people, and make people believe it is not all about YOU! Give people a chance to speak their mind without fear of being targetted. Hire using the defined hiring process.

Finally, don't hire somebody who is so weak they are a puppet of the Chairman. If you do all this we would be sucessful. Explain to DPE why Moorthy is the right leader. Explain to EPG why Rajiv is the right person to lead the group. More importantly, convince yourself that they are the right people.

And stop forwarding inspiring speeches other people have made. Try doing something inspirational yourself and lead by example. It's been more than 4 years for me working with MS India, and I must say, the beatiful culture of MS India was ruined completely in last 3 years.

As many of the comments echo, DPE is one of the best rotten carrot that can be thrown out immediately for all good reasons. In just 2 years it's all vanished quickly.

The reason..? Every TechEd show in India now resembles like a partner carnival where you get some goodie and shut you ass before you walkout. Then comes the most idiotic wing of the Microsoft india. MS IT is well known for it's ridiculous Re-orgs every 3, 4 months. Well there is no pattern as such.

Whenever someone wanna move, the re-org happens and everyone gets new workplaces and new orgs. Well we dont find any advantage of these Re- Orgs except of the fact that change of business unit and workplace, new faces and new rules. The leadership doesn't even know how to run an IT Hub of a software giant. They dont even bother doing cheap tricks by employing incompitent leaders everywhere.

Murty Uppaluri leads them all the way wherver he flies I think. Most of them are dumbass buracrats and have no respect for Microsoft at all. MS IT desperately need leaders who can inspire them rather than leading them like shepards. They dont know whome to recruit and for what position. They just know that they have to recruit some human beings to type something called "code". This is building up extremely incompitent and parrot- talk people piled in every business unit.

You will be either be converted as a dumbass manager to lead some stupid vendor resources I used stupid, because no vendor company in India would send thier smart people to a client like MS. They understood MS better than it's employees or left in the dust as an Individual contributor. You can see the worst possible cohesiveness in the teams. Teams collaborate based on thier "commitments" on Cross team collaboration.

Even shaking hands with other might be a gesture coming from thier commitments and nothing else. MS IT has got a very typical setup of leadership line which commands the chain below them very efficiently.

This is possible because, the next two levels of leadership is a dedicated herd of Sheeps who knows nothing but "yes boss". This leadership gang follows jack welch's books very religiously.

They will be hunting for future leaders all the time by flying to various reputed collges across india to find dumbest but cute gals and chatty good looking guys.

There will be a manager who manages these fresh potatoes based on her commitments watch this word. HR teams are absolutely blind in recruiting and they have dead lines to recruit people rather than right candidates. Most of these HRs are vendors and they dont have any idea what kind of blunder they are doing.

If one department rejects a candidate for his worst skills, they push the same candidate for another department. Did I mentioned that they do interviews over yahoo messenger video chats sometimes? Everyone at Microsoft wish someone should come and inspire them and lead them by example, so that they can work in a really great working environment.

The difference is that they are smaller and responsible for a very small slice of the money. There's corruption there, HR is unuseless and to get a job there you must know someone.

The situation is even worse in Brasil that is the largest subsidiary. I tend to use my own filter to ignore strong bias when I read blog critiques. Though in this case, even after filtering, there is enough matter that top execs need to take notice of and relate it to the organization's health.

We did some 'cultural sensitivity' training when our company was taken over so that we would be aware of the differences. One of the key ones was the importance of hierarchy in the Indian culture. In general, if a senior staff member says something then people will go along with it even if they know it to be wrong. This would seem to tie in with a lot of what people have been saying here -even to the point that groups controlled from Redmond are much more productive.

In terms of innovation; I had one of our Indian collegues explain that in terms of the Indian education system. His point was that, with so much poverty in India, a large majority of the people are working to get out of their current social position. With few exceptions the most likely way to do this is through education but only the top graduates actually manage to do well. This leads to a great deal of competition in the system: to get into the right college you need to get good marks at the right secondary school and to do that you need good marks at the right primary school etc etc.

You do not deviate from the lessons you have been taught or you may fail. Such an environment does not encourage thinking outside the box! I have seen many of the Indian staff grow enormously in their roles while seconded to this country. I cannot say the same for those that I need to deal with that remain off-shore. I am starting to see a trend. SMSG Sales is a problem. I think we have a f-up priority issue here!! Our special thanks to Mini!

Finally, Neelam is leaving MS India. But no one is sure if Rajiv, Sanjeev and other HP folks are going to follow her. Also it is time for us Softies from India to have a dedicated blog. Hope to see that soon! This time from Dell! Can't we get someone who appreciate the magic of software? Please don't hire box pushers who cannot differentiate Windows from Excel.

Why cannot we get an internal MS hire for this position? I am not a MS employee. I work with both MS and Google as a partner company in India and i have spent considerable time in the consumer business here in India. At the outset there are a few common traits that i see in all MNC's opearting out of India: 1.

Either they assume that India is a land of cows or is a 10 billion dollar opportunity in the next year. Fact - India is neither and both are dangerous assumptions to make.

I have see a few big names bust up because of unrealistic expectations out of India. Bottom lines with a business model predicated on Rs revenues and dolalr costs overheads from global operations on India revenues is doomed model. The SI model of dollar revenues and Rs costs is brilliant.

Most MNC's in India have a commitment issue exception being say Uniliver - rs revenues with a cost structure designed for Rs costs. Successful Indian companies, case in point say Bharati have done wonders with a revenue model tuned for India built on top of a cost structure again designed for India.

For an organization like MS there are far deeper issues in markets like India: a. Do consumer see value in a computer itself? Is it relevant to their lives?

India is a good destination for commodity workers - Don't expect innovation out of them for the next few years. Reason is the maturity of most managers in India Inc is still fairly low and what is their world view right now. Do they have the ability - yes - do the have the ecosystem - no. Leadership in India - limited to a large extent which is why leadership level salaries to frontline salaries are at multiples that are unheard of in the world.

Take my own example - i certainly feel that i don't have the maturity for the role that i play but what the heck can the company do.

Are there enough mid managers and leadership with the expertise especially in new economy companies. All said and done India Inc is only 10 years old at the most. I don't think this is a problem with MSFT hires only.

Take the bust ups at Yahoo, Oracle etc in the last 6 months in their India ops and they all follow the same trail. I see no hunger to do business in India for a lot of the managers that i have met. Surprisingly very little passion especially in the last year or so. My view on what is causing this could be as follows: a. To matrixed an organization to make people accountable — lot of the people that I have met have very little to do — too narrow a view of the world.

Most of them are just happy to be at MS and no passion c. Serious morale issues d. This is more a strategic issue for MSFT to deal with i guess e.

Extremely partner unfriendly organization culture- all them seem to be interested is in selling me a few licenses and then scooting the hell out of it. In most cases what has made me extremely unhappy is that fact that they don't reveal the license costs upfront but keep adding it on as time goes by. Screws the hell out of my budgets and i don't want to meet my account manager.

Like i said i work with Google also - those guys have a very small team - very focused and very responsive. Its a real pleasure to do business with them. Net net i would say you guys have the legacy and the depth and range of expertise to do this right. Show some more commitment and passion and you will succed. And do cut the number of people you have in MSFT — there are just too many people doing nothing.

Not a MS employee. I thought hiring standards were high at Microsoft. Used to work at Aditi and watch Tarun. Just a street smart guy. Always wanted to ask Pradeep Singh why he hired Tarun! One contributing factor to the dismissal of charges was that the year-old woman made accusations against another man in that were deemed false by investigators, according to Maybrown. Another fact that contributed to the dismissal of the charges was that Srivastava left the office to go to his car during the time of the alleged rape, according to Maybrown.

He has not been rehired by Microsoft and is presently living in the U. Share story. Srivastava and Ramarajan, founders of Navya Network , a cancer informatics startup, initially focused on securing oxygen concentrators — portable machines that increase the oxygen level in the air and feed it to patients through tubes attached to their nostrils.

Ramarajan, who is also an emergency room doctor, had seen firsthand how the concentrators, which can also be used at home, let hospitals free up beds for the sickest patients.

The two raised money from executives, doctors, and philanthropists, such as prominent Boston-area tech entrepreneur Desh Deshpande — part of a wave of donations for India from the Indian-American community including that of Vertex chief executive Dr.

Reshma Kewalramani. Srivastava and Ramarajan then enlisted the help of nonprofit group Direct Relief to charter a FedEx cargo plane to Mumbai and deliver concentrators to hospitals, many of them in rural parts of India.

Over the course of seven flights with FedEx as well as Air India, Srivastava and Ramarajan were able to deliver some 5, concentrators. By June, Srivastava and Ramarajan realized the demand for concentrators would soon decrease, and wondered what more they could do to better prepare the country for the next COVID wave.

Working their networks again, they honed in on an idea to build oxygen plants at hospitals. About the size of a garage, each plant separates oxygen from air and pipes it into hospital rooms. The difference in scale is enormous: While one concentrator can support 60 patients a month, a single plant supplies oxygen equal to the output of concentrators a day.