Microsoft

• Talented people
• Get to have high impact in the field
• Work with cutting-edge technologies
• Company is invested in growing its people

Senior management seems out of touch with employers and the market.

Slow to adapt to changes in the market.

Windows is a "golden handcuff" – too valuable to abandon, but limits how the company can react to external opportunities.

Employee compensation is based on a curve, thus you are never truly invested in "making others great" as the company claims, and you never can get a truly objective reading on where you stand until performance review time comes around.

Empower business groups within the company to react quickly to external opportunities. We are suffering due to how late we were to market with products like Bing, Zune, and Windows Phone 7. The list goes on.

Get rid of the curve for performance reviews. Management should set reasonable, measurable objectives for employees and reward them based on how they meet those objectives by measurable standards. This should replace the annual cut-throat competition of employees against each other or the attempt to anticipate "future contribution" as in the old system.

As a manager, I can tell you I hate sitting in calibrations and having to assign low ratings to good-performing employees just because I have a high-performing team and am forced to "curve" some down by the system. I can also tell you that employees make motions around helping others, but in reality, they are always holding back some of their talent and knowledge so that they will get curved higher.