Microsoft Corp.'s plan to stop issuing stock options was a surprising shift to outsiders, but inside the company it's more of an official recognition of a cultural shift that had been well under way.

In short, Microsoft has become a mature company to many of its employees, who expect it to act like one. Even before the economic downturn throttled growth at the software colossus, Microsoft had begun to show signs of shedding its culture of pizza-fueled workaholics and morphing into a company of workers interested in stable jobs and significant others -- and enough time to spend with family and friends.

The tech slump and the drop in Microsoft's stock hurried that shift along, spelling the end of the company's famous work-hard-and-get-rich-quick culture, which has minted thousands of millionaires. One former Microsoft executive likes to call Microsoft "the new Boeing" -- a solid place to work in Seattle for a good salary.

So, few Microsoft employees were alarmed this week when Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said the 28-year-old company would drop stock options, long considered the best motivator of aggressive young technical talent, in favor of stock awards that provide workers with a more stable and predictable, though probably less valuable, reward.

"Even 2½ years ago, there still kind of was that perception of the company that it's still growing, it's still young and it's still all these hard-core [software] developers driving around in Ferraris because of their stock options," says Arturo Robles, a 25-year-old engineer in the MSN group, who drives a $19,000 Mini Cooper. "But me personally, now I see that that's not the case any more. The company has been maturing for a while."

Certainly, Microsoft's dropping options may change how some employees view their jobs and plan their finances. In effect, the change gives workers less of a chance of reaping huge rewards if the stock rises, a point Mr. Ballmer concedes.

But the plan could make Microsoft employees more loyal by alleviating an immediate problem: Most of the options that Microsoft has granted during the past few years are worthless at the company's current share price.

"Most people were disgruntled about their options," says François Ajenstat, a 26-year-old product manager in Microsoft's Office group, who says he hasn't decided whether to move his options to the stock-award program. Overall, the new plan is "a good thing," he says.

Headhunters and compensation consultants say Microsoft's move will prompt additional shifts throughout Silicon Valley. "Cash is king right now," says Valerie Frederickson, who runs a human-resources and career-management consulting firm in Menlo Park, Calif. "People who work for big companies aren't working for the fun of the options any more."

That has been the crux of the problem for Mr. Ballmer in recent years: Microsoft options haven't been much fun for any employee, particularly recent arrivals. "The Microsoft millionaires happened a long time ago," one Microsoft employee says.

Without the potential of becoming that rich, employees say they have become much keener on balancing work with life. For Microsoft's Mr. Ajenstat, the culture has been changing since he joined the company three years ago. The general attitude of his co-workers is "let's work smarter when we are in the office so we can spend more time with family at home," he says. That doesn't mean that people aren't working hard. There are still co-workers who "work crazy amounts" but "I don't think it's as brutal as it once was," he says.

In fact, tales of leaving work "early" for family events have become a symbol inside Microsoft of how the company has matured. Many employees point to the top. For most of his long career as Microsoft's No. 2, Mr. Ballmer embodied the hard-charging culture that drove employees to 80-hour weeks with little life outside the company.

As CEO, Mr. Ballmer is still a taskmaster, but employees say he has taken on a family-man role that has set a new tone. He coaches his son's basketball team, and he has been known to leave business meetings earlier to be with his kids on Halloween and at sporting events.

The question for Mr. Ballmer -- and for many employees -- has been how to mature gracefully while keeping the level of energy and aggressiveness needed to grow. The markets for the company's main money-makers -- the Windows operating system and the Office group of personal-computer applications -- are maturing along with the company and don't promise the growth they once had. While Microsoft is pushing into a host of new areas, including videogames and software for cellphones, it could be many years, if ever, before those businesses become profitable.

Such challenges are the reason why many choose to work at Microsoft, says Mr. Ballmer.

With the new system, employees have an additional incentive to stay, he maintains, adding: "Now we've got a compensation system in place that we think is going to let our employees thrive and do great work for the next 28 years."

Some Microsoft employees still want to hear more about the plan before they give unqualified approval. Gordon Bell, a senior researcher at a Microsoft research lab in San Francisco, says most employees are taking a wait-and-see attitude as they learn more details about how the plan will affect them financially. One key issue, he says, will be taxes; restricted stock grants, on which the new system is based, may be treated immediately as income, unlike options, which have no effect on income until they are exercised and can be handled in one-day transactions in which taxes are paid automatically.

"If you aren't prepared for that, its going to take a little bit more planning on the part of people," Mr. Bell says. "I'm going to be looking at that for my own situation."

Mr. Bell says the plan is designed to make employees long-term shareholders in the company, whereas options holders have a tendency to time sales with fluctuations in the stock price. "I'm anxious to see what the net result financially is going to be, but it's a good thing for high-tech overall," he says.

Mr. Ajenstat, the Office group product manager, says his live-in girlfriend, also a Microsoft employee, is telling him to sell his options under a plan Microsoft is setting up that would let employees get some profit from their "underwater" options. "She's been saying, 'Get the cash. At least it's a concrete thing that you have control over,' " he says.

One Microsoft software developer says most employees view the change as a kind of guaranteed bonus and essential as an incentive for recently hired employees, whose options currently have no value. This longtime employee admits, however, that the restricted stock is likely to be less lucrative than options might have been in the past. "It's hard to give up that dream," he says, "but that dream was gone anyway."