I'm saying that: there is a fixed bonus pool for employees. All of this bonus pool will be allocated. Said bonus pool will be allocated in a merit-based way such that those who are deemed "better" get more than those who are deemed "worse".
So yes, employees will indeed be sorted from 'best' to 'worst' by some metric. This is pretty much true of every performance-based evaluation system, no?
Removing the "stack ranking" system refers to removing the 20%/70%/10% buckets from 1-5 that we currently sort into, not the fact that we're doing a merit-based reward.
Thus my point remains: if our review system is a problem (and certainly a great many people seem to think that it is) then this seems like a tweak on the system, not an overhaul. What we're being evaluated on and who is doing the evaluating is much more important than whether we're explicitly "stack ranked" into buckets or not.
But this is still stack ranking. What you are describing is still an ordinal system where employees had to be ranked in order from 'best' to 'worst'.
As I understand it, Microsoft are proposing to remove any sort of relative ranking between team members and instead reward for actual productivity.