The internet is in an uproar again: Marissa Mayer told Yahoo! remote workers to come back to the mothership or leave.

Initially, I was like everyone else - appalled that Mayer would have such disregard for the many hard-working remote folks at Yahoo! and surprised that she would shoot herself in the foot so badly.

On the HackerNews post, I wrote:

Why does pulling people into the office finally give Yahoo the ability to fire under-performers? You don’t need to see butts in seats in order to identify people who are not pulling their weight.

If people are coasting at home OR at the office you can tell that by their work output. Where they do their work doesn’t enter into it.

Adopting a Results Only Work Environment (http://gorowe.com) would allow them to have folks who work from anywhere and give management the tools to fire under-performers.

If this were only a temporary measure, a “reset” so to speak, then I still don’t agree with it (I think you can do that without the disruption), but it would be understandable. As they have not said that this is temporary, I have no reason to think it’ll come back in the future, which is the tragedy.

It doesn’t have to be like this.

The more I think about it though, I was wrong. Yes, the internet is right that remote workers are not inherently unproductive and that pulling everyone back punishes the many for the misdeeds of the few. More gallingly, revoking remote work shows you don’t trust your coworkers.

You know what? She probably doesn’t.

Since 2009, Yahoo! has had 5 CEOs (interim or otherwise) and gone through at least one complete reorg. Lots of people are coming out of the woodwork stating that remote work at Yahoo! was like a vacation. And, Yahoo! has long been the butt of a joke:

Q. How do you take a profitable, popular startup and kill it?

A. Get acquired by Yahoo!

So, can you really trust anyone at the company? Sure, some responsible remote workers are caught in the crosshairs but with reports of “We’ve checked and some people who work from home haven’t even logged into the VPN” how can you trust their immediate management to do the right thing? And their managers?

Whom can you trust? Who is taking advantage of Yahoo and who is merely caught up in the downward-spiral that has been Yahoo! for the last decade?

Marissa wants to look into every employee’s eyes and make that call. And I can’t really blame her. There’s probably more dead wood at Yahoo! than South Dakota in the 1870’s, and it’s going to be a long, slow journey to get things back on track.

I travel quite a bit. As such, I have a membership to my preferred airline’s lounge. It provides a nice quiet space away from the blaring security announcements and inane airport CNN. The airline has recently spent a lot of money renovating the lounge network to give it a “fresh” look-and-feel. I think it looks sort of tacky, but the one thing they got right happened in the bathrooms.

• They’re noisy. That is to say, there’s an exhaust fan that is just the right amount of white noise.
• The urinals have an appropriately sized divider between them
• The stalls are actually little rooms. Floor to ceiling walls, a door that closes.
• The sinks are fashionable, have towels, and hand lotion.

It’s really quite nice. So, why do most employee bathrooms look like a prison?

I actually interviewed at a well-known, highly funded (tens of millions) tech company here in NYC and visited the restroom. It was dead quiet. The stalls faced the sink and had large gaps between the door and frame, so when you washed your hands and looked in the mirror, you could see right into the embarrassed eyes of the person sitting there.

I casually mentioned how quiet the bathroom was to one of the interviewing engineers and he said “Oh yeah, it’s terrible. No one uses it unless they have to. I go home to use the bathroom, other people use the coffee shop downstairs.”

Companies: it’s not hard to make humane bathrooms that don’t stress people out. Take care of your coworkers by providing reasonable accommodations. I didn’t take the job at that company for a number of reasons; the terrible bathrooms was one of them.

Windows, as a consumer product, is a burning platform. Innovation has stopped. Or isn’t in the right direction.

This chart says it all:

Yes, it’s relative share (a smaller part of a bigger pie) but PC growth has stagnated. Microsoft makes a significant bulk of its Windows revenue from new PC sales and business upgrades - very few consumers actually upgrade their Windows absent a new computer. Back in the 90’s technology moved so quickly that a computer released in 1998 had technology not even heard of in 1996. You’d be a fool not to upgrade! Nowadays? Not so much.

Why? Because Microsoft has no taste. And more importantly, neither do most Windows software developers. Open up virtually any popular Windows application and you’re presented with a really ugly interface:

Boring grids, lackluster UX and visual design, indecipherable “help wizards”.

iOS and OSX app developers have a strong design aesthetic. OSX apps look nice:

Web developers share the same design-as-a-core-competency philosophy influenced by Apple:

• Square
• MailChimp
• Wufoo (and)

And developers are on the same OSX bandwagon. At virtually every innovative conference and meetup I attend, ranging from JavaScript to Ruby to the Business of Software conference, I’m met with a sea of glowing Apple logos on MacBook Airs and Pros (or the subdued Apple logo on iPads).

Yes, if you go to a .NET conference or perhaps a big-enterprise conference, you’ll likely see a lot more Windows machines in the audience. But the “get ‘em young” strategy is likely to work well for Apple, as future developers starting with OSX and Apple are significantly more likely to continue with the platform as they enter the workforce, demanding OSX development environments or not working at predominantly Windows shops.

Microsoft realized this years ago but only recently has there been a flip-flop on the younger generation as new college students prefer Mac to PC.

This is a trend that is likely to continue as long as Windows clone manufacturers continue to underperform against Apple. And, without the halo effect of a strong phone and tablet, Microsoft has no hope of luring consumers back to the Windows ecosystem.

Because Microsoft has no taste neither do their developers, and so there’s nothing in the Windows ecosystem that is desirable:

Today’s children are tomorrow’s consumers (and business owners!) and they are overwhelmingly rejecting Microsoft’s (non-Xbox) offerings in favor of Apple (and to a lesser extent, Android).

But what about businesses? Microsoft has long held a lock on large enterprises that require strong controls and IT departments. Apple has a history of ignoring this market, and there’s no evidence of this changing. However, with the “BYOD” movement, Apple is proving to be a competent player and Microsoft is increasing costs. Enterprise Apple sales are outperforming Windows.

Microsoft also held a lock on the small and medium sized businesses that could setup Windows computers, servers, and services (Exchange, MS Office, etc.). However, SMBs are increasingly replacing expensive locally hosted solutions with cloud based that are cheaper, require significantly less management, and provide better availability and performance.

The loss of developer, youth, and app mindshare is a huge blow to the Windows platform. iOS and Android ecosystems are defined by the apps that run on their devices. And the web is increasingly becoming the way we run applications on our bigger desktop and laptop computers.

Microsoft has billions of dollars in revenue and is not likely to disappear any time soon, but the era of Microsoft as a dominant consumer platform is over. Developers are moving to the web in droves and switching to OSX (or Linux). American youth are preferring Apple and iOS products, and small and medium sized businesses are replacing Microsoft software with web-based apps to manage and run their business.

Software companies that don’t have design as a core, integral component to their software design are at an ever-increasing disadvantage against companies that do.

(Edit: Updated with a more recent image of QuickBooks.)