Toxic Emploment History

Is there a point where an employee stating on their CV that they worked for one corporation should make them toxic and unemployable by another? Perhaps not at the lower range, but in the higher management positions, and with some corporations it should. The point is, when someone leaves company A to work for company B, can you be assured they've actually left company A?

This week there have been revelations that former NewsCorp employee Neil Wallis had been passing stories back to his supposedly former employers while working as a PR consultant for the Police. This follows on from other ex-NewsCorp employees taking up very dubious roles wrapped in dishonesty and lies, like Andy Coulson as an aide to David Cameron with direct one-to-one influence over the PM. It includes the person at the centre of the phone hacking scandal Mulcare who NewsCorp were happy to pay legal fees for to avoid him spilling the beans until forced in public to withdraw that aid. It turns out that they've been doing the same for Andy Coulson, who is now taking them to court over the decision to stop paying his legal fees.

These are all different people, they are all former NewsCorp people who are loyal to NewsCorp and it's criminal actions. They all seek to either use their current position to advance NewsCorp interests, or prevent those interests from being harmed. Did they ever really leave NewsCorp? On paper they did, at least the paper that NewsCorp haven't "accidentally shredded" Arthur Andersen style. Do they plan on returning as a victorious warrior to the company in later years to a huge performance bonus?

This isn't just NewsCorp either, Microsoft have built themselves on a similar scheme.

Former Microsoft employees move into positions in other corporations, bring their fellow ex-Microsoft mates in, and before long, the board outnumbers then ousts any vocal members who don't agree with the new approach. The next step is to align all of that companies business with Microsoft regardless of the merits. They may have been happily neutral before, but all of the non-Microsoft stuff is dropped, abandoned so it becomes an out office department of Microsoft. If the market and customers reject the new direction in enough numbers, the company flounders, it's stock price plummets and it's ripe for a takeover to make it official. Even without an official takeover the company is pretty much dead as a competing company with a profitable product or service. It's been holed out from within.

Yahoo were struggling against Google, but were the second search engine, ahead of every attempt Microsoft have made to compete. They used to be a big name but had fallen away in many areas. Yahoo shareholder and Microsoft connected Carl Icahn tried to force through a Microsoft takeover and was rebuffed. Not to be outdone, the PR fallout from Yahoo standing their ground meant the Yahoo share price plummeted. The result was him being able to oust those opponents to Microsoft on the Yahoo board and try again.

This time Yahoo are seriously weakened and not of value to Microsoft as a company, but they do get to power Yahoo searches with Bing. Now when you use Yahoo to search, it's done by Bing. Bing becomes the second place search engine by attacking the one above it and consuming it's share, not by being a better or more compelling service, and not without people connected to Microsoft leading the charge from the inside.

For what it's worth, I think the initial rejected Yahoo deal was too good to turn down, even if it meant Microsoft buying market share their own stuff can't earn.

Into this we had the hostile Yahoo board members ousted and replaced with new people. Carol Bartz was the CEO of AutoDesk, a company closely tied to Microsoft and apparently a good friend of current Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. She was recently sacked by phone which speaks volumes for Yahoo's board.

Nokia were the king of mobile phones in the 90's. Everyone and their dog had a Nokia phone, I've had a couple myself over the years. The smartphone changed everything. Although Nokia had a smartphone on the shelves before the iPhone, the smartphone market as a mainstream consumer device didn't begin until Apple arrived on the scene. Since that point, every smartphone has to compete against the iPhone, it will be compared with the iPhone. This is where Nokia managed to totally mismanage their future. Their indecision over QT, Maemo, Meego and Symbian have all added up to a brand developers and customers have little interest in. They had to do something.

The logical move in any business is to try to do something yourself. If you can't compete by doing that, the next move would be to buy a company who specialize in that area, and utilize their skills and products. They tried that with Symbian and Maemo and failed. The next step it to look at who is good at that area and partner with them somehow. Into this vacuum of chronic mismanagement at Nokia enters ex-Microsoft employee Stephen Elop as the new CEO of Nokia.

Stephen Elop spots the obvious need to partner with someone who does know what they're doing, and then announces that they're dropping all Maemo, Meego, Symbian products, or at the very least relegating them to hobbyist toys, to concentrate the entire line to Microsoft's new smartphone OS Windows Phone 7.

So when you look at the smartphone market you have two players accounting for around 90% of the market share between them, Android from Google, and iOS from Apple. A big chunk of that remaining 10% are Nokia's previous Maemo and Symbian. Microsoft have money but a history of pumping money into areas like phones, mp3 players, search engines etc and failing spectacularly. Anyone remember the Kin?

That's not to say Microsoft haven't learned from it's mistakes, it's not to say Windows Phone 7 won't go on to at least break even which would be a success compared to many Microsoft product lines. The point is they have a terrible track record in markets they didn't create. This is hardly a "we looked at the merits and found Microsoft’s offering a winner on merit". From what I understand, Windows Phone 7 isn't too bad. It lacks features, it lacks any presence and customers want Android or iPhones.

The result of this decision from an ex-Microsoft employee as the new CEO, is that Nokia phones don't have anything on the market for ages, which makes shareholders and investors even more annoyed than they were when the choice to move everything to Windows Phone 7. It devalues Nokia, which makes them ripe for a takeover to make it official. At the very least it takes out the possibility that Nokia without an ex-Microsoft employee at the helm would have chosen to use Android, or focussing on Maemo, Meego or Symbian, stacking the market higher against Windows Phone 7.

When you have a proper IT journalist team, you can report accurately on stories involving companies and their failings. Windows PCs are often just called PCs. When the BBC do stories about positive Microsoft specific events they often have several Microsoft people on to give PR quotes, as well as several "independent analysts" who are often either ex-Microsoft themselves, or work for companies with strong ties to Microsoft. By contrast on the negative Microsoft stories such as Windows only malware, you don't find a single mention of this detail. It's all suddenly generic PCs. When Microsoft do get a mention, it's in the context of the shining knight swooping down to save us.

Ashley Highfield is a bit of a hard one to quantify. He's Microsoft, he's BBC, he sometimes speaks for one or the other. On his watch the BBC retooled their online output with the iPlayer, which "coincidentally" focused 100% on Microsoft Windows. Complaints from Apple and Linux using license fee payers were brushed aside as minor. The BBC could and should have ensured that their iPlayer service wasn't using technology patented by Microsoft.

I'm going from memory on all of the above examples, there are plenty more if you explore them. The point is would you trust an ex-employee of ether NewsCorp or Microsoft to be loyal to your company? Or would it be safe to assume they have two positions, and only one is public? History shows those who do hire ex-Microsoft or ex-NewsCorp people from and to high positions always come off losing. Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.