Well this certainly doesn’t sound too promising for the morale of the troops in Redmond. During Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s speech to Microsoft employees at the company’s annual retreat, Microsoft employees reportedly began leaving in droves, mid-speech no less.

Compounding matters is that the impetus behind the speech to begin with was to motivate employees and tout upcoming products and technologies.

Stumbling across mini-microsoft, a blog run by an anonymous Microsoft employee, we happened across the following comments purporting to be from those in attendance. Of course, and in the interest of full-disclosure, we hadn’t heard of mini-Microsoft previously and have no gauge as to how reliable the blog tends to be.

What a sad spectacle. While SteveB was yacking away, people were leaving in droves. Back in the good old days when BillG spoke, EVERYONE listened. Steve, you’ve lost the support of your employees – when will you realize that you’re holding this once great company back? Oh and BTW, you can take LB (HR chief Lisa Brummel) and KT (COO Kevin Turner) with you too. They like the taste of your Kool Aid… Now for the unpleasant weeks ahead. Wonder what flaming bag of you know what LB will lay on our doorsteps? She rolled out cuts to our bennies last year just after the company meeting, what’s next??? Great demos and pretty good overall. Only thing is the last part, windows, cannot lose. Sounds a bit defensive from our CEO. Okay it’s been a couple years since I personally attended the company meeting but, wow, I have to say that was the worst one I’ve ever seen by far. I tried, I swear I tried to keep my admittedly sinking attitude in check and be objective. But it was just too much to endure such painfully flat demos and lifeless speakers in their sleepy attempts to show excitement about our products and our future. The train dance thing (the few times they did it) got old fast but it soon became a welcome reprieve from the on-stage monotony. It seemed like almost every demo was something about Win 8 tablet, with a few quick nods to products that are actually doing well in the marketplace, then back to praying to the Windows 8 gods for rain. Is Win 8 tablet all we have left to be excited about? Has the morale across the company slumped so much that 20,000 of us together can’t even generate a decent applause? Please someone tell me I’m wrong. Tell me I’ve just got a bad attitude and I completely misread the meeting. Yep, pretty sad to see all the seats empty out while SteveB was talking…hopefully he gets the hint and bows out in the Win8 timeframe.

Eeek.

Microsoft is certainly trying to make a go of it given its recent partnership with Nokia, not to mention the hype train building for Windows 8, but there seems to be a genuine lack of respect for Microsoft’s leadership at the top.

via WinRumors