About three years ago, a BusinessWeek story talked about Microsoft employees as being mired in endless meetings. About the same time, in a visit to Fargo, N.D., the founding town of Microsoft Business Solutions as Great Plains, I heard an MBS employee make the same complaint about spending days in meetings that go nowhere. When I asked at Convergence last month why Microsoft employees would need to call a reseller or ISV, the answer was the company, despite its image, is highly hierarchical and if a lower-level employee in one reporting chain needs to talk to someone higher in another reporting chain, it would take forever. This sounds like the Ma Bell days when AT&T ruled the telephony world and had a  reporting system that had less flexibility than the Indian caste system in the 1800s.