JD on EP

Context: This is just me talking, from what I myself have seen. No one else reviews it or edits it... doesn't speak for others, just speaks for me. The standard caveat from Mr. Clemens applies.

Stephen joined Macromedia in 1998. My memory is that he came in to the internal IT group first, taking responsibility for email, servers, communications. I think it was at an annual all-hands at Hearst Theatre on Van Ness where he was first introduced by Rob Burgess. Stephen was a Canadian with a crewcut, among an audience of brilliant pierced bodybuilders and other oddballs, and we were told at length during the presentation about his experience in the Boston Chicken restaurant chain. But despite all that things actually did work out okay.

Over the next few years he took on more responsibilities within Macromedia, and I eventually reported to him through Sherry Page, who led Tech Support and Customer Service at the time. Stephen always had a keen interest in what customers were saying, and took an active role in bringing customer advice into the organization's decisionmaking.

He's approachable, friendly. Efficient communication is best, and from afar he might seem reserved, but he listens hard, with a fast sense of humor, and don't be surprised if he recognizes you by name after only one meeting. He'll listen to what you say -- you may not always know the results of your input, but your input will be heard.

Administrations tend to bring in teams, rather than just individuals. Top execs in a new domain will rely on existing staffers already familiar with that domain, and also bring in people with whom they've worked before. They need a team -- it's not just one person. I wouldn't be surprised to see other familiar Macromedia faces join Microsoft over the coming months.

I don't know Jeff Raikes at all, but I know Microsoft got someone special when they hired Stephen Elop to oversee Microsoft Office.

But that brings up a different topic, one that I've been thinking about for awhile, but haven't talked about much.

"Corporate culture" isn't just about corporations -- it's about any group, with history, which strives towards a common goal. Mozilla or the W3C has a "corporate culture"... so do news-reporting organizations... your local City Hall has a different shared history than the City Hall two towns over... you can even tell the difference in emotional tone among neighborhood grocery stores. Each is defined as much by its customers as by its employees -- the "corporate culture" of how a body of people will act is influenced by the entire history of how that group has interacted with its environment in the past.

Adobe's social culture is very strongly influenced by the values of its early years -- Warnock, Geschke, Xerox Park, PostScript, the wildly democratizing effect of desktop publishing, the years of work towards portable documents. These events set Adobe's corporate culture, and shape it to this day. I had heard of this cultural environment when I worked at Macromedia, but really saw it, very strongly, after the acquisition. There's an idealism, an academic approach towards technological democratization, that you can still see inside Adobe today.

Each corporate body of people does slowly develop its own unique culture. Goals are made, decisions become commitments, and new members are shaped by the group's history. This culture influences what each group will do in the future.

But groups also change over time. There's interbreeding between groups, cross-pollination. As Macromedia and Adobe grew larger they both started hiring more general business professionals, which moderated the corporate cultures established by the early enthusiasts. At these scales, such business professionals are vital -- the work can no longer be done by enthusiasts alone.

Lots of people in the technology field are more a part of this common Silicon Valley culture than of any particular corporate culture. Job-hopping is more the rule than the exception, and so many values end up being shared across businesses. This common culture blends with the individual cultures which each company's history has established.

I trust Adobe's corporate culture. Today it is made up of many Silicon Valley professionals, and there's a higher mortgages-per-capita ratio than at Macromedia, but I still see Adobe's original values clearly here. These values have been maintained by day-in, day-out decisions among many different working groups within the company. If things go wrong, Adobe will try to do right -- there are strong internal cultural pressures to do right -- that's what I see.

Microsoft's corporate culture is another known factor. For me, it gives a different impression -- the "knife the baby" story opened my eyes, the browser wars corroborated it, and other incidents have confirmed my observation of the culture there. Microsoft is a vital and influential member of our overall computing ecology, but I don't believe things just because they tell me so -- considering the group's history, I judge them by their actions, not by their speech.

But the corporate culture which scares me most is Google's. I don't personally associate with people who work there, and haven't even visited their campus, and so don't have any first-hand experience. But I've seen the rapid hiring they did over the past few years, and know that they pulled many, many people out of the general Silicon Valley culture, and I know that they've had dramatically increasing success the past few years with no downturns. Those are not good ingredients to make a sound company culture of their own.

As soon as there's a slowdown in ad growth, the conditions are ripe for implosion, siliconValleyistically. It's really scary that Google has web beacons on the majority of the Web's pages, controls the navigational reality of the majority of web searchers, and owns secret ad-personalization databases which are bigger than any FBI spying program ever could be. The only time that Google had to grow its corporate culture was in the heady days following their initial public stock offering, and they've added a whole lot of headcount since then. There may be a common glue and inner strength to the organization, but the way that they've grown suggests otherwise. I hope Google turns out okay, for all our sakes.

Individuals change the culture. The culture changes individuals. When considering what a group can do in the future, it is useful to look at its past.

I'm not sure what Stephen Elop will be able to achieve at Microsoft, but I believe it will be interesting to watch.

And here's hoping he improves the situation for rotisserie chicken up in Washington, too. ;-)