Bill Gates Explorer 7 and Unrelated Labor Unrest

The Bill Gates Show in Vegas is wrapping up but if you want to catch up on all the hot Gates action there's the Gates keynote, the Gates/O'Reilly interview and the Gates blogger lunch. At what point does Gates become a bigger brand than Microsoft itself?

Bill and others have taken the stage during Mix 06 and issued a big fat mea culpa for the fact that you're still using Internet Explorer 6. They're very sorry, they say, they should never have tied IE7 to the Vista release those many many years ago. As a token of their friendship and continued appreciation of the Users Microsoft has finally released a beta version of the new browser to the unwashed masses.

Get IE7 here.

Don't let the light of a new IE blind you, though. WashTech, an alliance of technology workers in the state, got its hands on some Microsoft internal documents two weeks ago and is kinda pissed about the compensation plans in Redmond and the whole performance review style they employ over there.

What is causing considerably more ire than pay levels, however, is a performance review ranking system that uses a bell-curve model to decide who gets high scores and who takes the low ones.

Microsoft Corp. has over 60,000 employees, and like almost all large corporations, it uses a performance review process to rate them. The idea behind any corporate performance review system is to provide an accurate and fair assessment of employee contributions, but some employees say Microsoft’s system promotes politics over fair reviews.

According to employees, who said they would be fired if they spoke on the record, the annual review amounts to little more than a closed-door popularity contest in which managers “fight” for higher scores for their team, or defer to higher-level decision makers who mandate how many workers drop to the bottom of the review scale.

Here's the Mini Microsoft thread on the subject and here's the Slashmob chiming in.