It would be a lot more convincing if they could say Microsoft Stack Ranks And No One Else Does. Google, for example is a strictly stack ranked company and hasn't folded (at least in my opinion) into a caustic environment as described in this article.
At Google, each team is not required to have some percentage of their people on the shit list. I don't know if I can elaborate further, but I've been here for a few years, all on healthy teams, and being the lowest performer on a team doesn't mean that you're doing poorly. From personal experience it seems totally safe to be moderately awesome on a team full of super awesome people.
Google uses stack-ranking in a very different way. At Google the stack ranks of all your peers are merged and then used as a sanity-check on the promotion process, to catch cases where a manager may be artificially inflating the reviews of his favorite reports or where he may be overlooking a star employee who everyone else in the organization agrees is worthy of promotion.
So Google has a different algorithm for computing the stank rank, but still stack ranks? Microsoft also incorporates peer feedback into the review process, but treats it as just another input into the manager's decision process.
