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Ask HN: Is Satya Nadella the best tech CEO of last decade?

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111–120 of 152 posts

Re: Ask HN: Is Satya Nadella the best tech CEO of last decade?

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many? To the shareholders it is. But as a consumer I prefer innovation and not money hoarding. Shareholders think otherwise.

The Apple Silicon chips are a massive innovation which have just massively changed the laptop landscape. People are buying new MacBooks left and right because they can do all their work on a tiny laptop now which doesn't run hot and has a battery like an iPad.

As much as I am impressed by Apple Silicon, I haven't seen the buying habits of people I know change.

Windows laptop owners still continue to buy windows laptops.

Re: Ask HN: Is Satya Nadella the best tech CEO of last decade?

#112
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He has lead Apple after Jobs died which is no small task. He oversaw the iPhone market which has been growing continuously under his leadership. He started and grew Apple’s services division, launched Apple Watch, AirPods and the Apple Silicon transition which have all been massively successful by any metric. I don’t understand how Tim Cook’s tenure can be considered not impactful.

I agree with "Apple Silicon transition". Everything else is obvious / organic growth.

Apple Silicon is certainly impressive.

But it remains to be seen if Apple can scale that hardware to servers, AI, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Is Satya Nadella the best tech CEO of last decade?

#113
post #2

I don't know how much of the MS turnaround can be attributed to him, but if we take it at face value that the CEO is responsible for everything, then MS definitely has had a dramatic positive run following Nadella taking the reigns from Ballmer. MS still lacks a industry leading 21st century consumer device and Nadella has not been able to change that but his bets on cloud computing, embracing of Linux and open sourc…

> As an "older-school" dev

I assume this means "older-school Windows dev", as none of that is new in the UNIX world.

Re: Ask HN: Is Satya Nadella the best tech CEO of last decade?

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and FreeBSD Jails were a thing 15 years before Docker came and made things affordable for the masses. and Olympic champion can jump for 5 meters, but bridges over creeks is nothing uncommon for masses. and Emacs has been able to edit files transparently on remote hosts ... Probably Emacs can learn [if they care to be dominating on the market] on technical possibility vs being simple and handy. ===== And if we take VS…

Remote editing on Emacs isn't a mere "technical possiblity." It's available out of the box, is no harder than working with local files, and crucially, doesn't require you to install anything on the remote host unlike VSCode. Furthermore, Emacs still has the best tooling for remote development. They're worth using even if you use other software for text editing, like I do. Dired, the file viewer, makes working with bo…

I have not found an answer on does it support dealing with containers on remote side, let's assume it does and pass this part.

One day I was not familiar with VSCode and I became familiar and many others as well. Just not Emacs. Assuming you are right and technically Emacs has all bells and whistles, it must be something else that not promoting it for being wide used.

And you skipped the part about VScode tunnels all along.

Re: Ask HN: Is Satya Nadella the best tech CEO of last decade?

#115
post #3
post #2

I don't know how much of the MS turnaround can be attributed to him, but if we take it at face value that the CEO is responsible for everything, then MS definitely has had a dramatic positive run following Nadella taking the reigns from Ballmer. MS still lacks a industry leading 21st century consumer device and Nadella has not been able to change that but his bets on cloud computing, embracing of Linux and open sourc…

Balmer said it best, 'Developers, developers, developers!' And then Microsoft bought Github.

Ballmer may have screamed “Developers, developers, developers”, but what he actually meant was “Windows, Office, developers”.

Windows and Office came before everything. The big change Nadella brought to the table was completely eliminating Windows as a primary goal for the company, and reducing Office’s importance as well.

Re: Ask HN: Is Satya Nadella the best tech CEO of last decade?

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Apple Silicon chips are a massive innovation which have just massively changed the laptop landscape. People are buying new MacBooks left and right because they can do all their work on a tiny laptop now which doesn't run hot and has a battery like an iPad.

As much as I am impressed by Apple Silicon, I haven't seen the buying habits of people I know change. Windows laptop owners still continue to buy windows laptops.

Maybe I am in a bubble, but in my family I was the only Apple user 5 years ago. Today we have got not a single Windows device left anymore. My wife has a MBA now, my mum has a MBA now, my sister has a MBA now.

Same goes for the .NET community. So many developers who some time ago would have only developed on a Windows machine all switched to Apple over the last few years and most people don't ever look back.

I appreciate that those personal anecdotes don't mean anything, but let's put it this way, I was not surprised to see a 30% drop in Windows sells in Microsoft's last financial statement.

Re: Ask HN: Is Satya Nadella the best tech CEO of last decade?

#117

> the majority dev environment in its chokehold Is that so?

The 2022 Stack Overflow survey has it at 75% market share. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#most-popular-technolog...

Relying on stack overflow data is biased towards badly documented technologies, which Microsoft Products usually are.

Re: Ask HN: Is Satya Nadella the best tech CEO of last decade?

#118
post #93
post #50

You say that Windows is a Kraken, but it's been on a downward slide in my mind. I don't think Nadella gets enough flak for what is happening to Windows and Microsoft's attitude towards respecting users / privacy in general. Some examples that I've seen posted to HN over the past few months * Microsoft Edge leaks browser history to Bing - https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/25/23697532/microsoft-edge-b... * More ads in Wi…

Pretty sure Windows is on the path to no longer being interesting and necessary for Microsoft. Either they come up with a brand new iteration, or everything will go to the web.

What are people going to run on their computers?

Re: Ask HN: Is Satya Nadella the best tech CEO of last decade?

#119
post #6

Tim Cook quintupled the value of Apple and passed on a lot of the fads that other tech companies fell victim to.

Value for who? No innovation, just hoarding massive profits. Quintupled stock price for shareholders.

> Value for who? No innovation

Apple silicon?

Re: Ask HN: Is Satya Nadella the best tech CEO of last decade?

#120
post #2

I don't know how much of the MS turnaround can be attributed to him, but if we take it at face value that the CEO is responsible for everything, then MS definitely has had a dramatic positive run following Nadella taking the reigns from Ballmer. MS still lacks a industry leading 21st century consumer device and Nadella has not been able to change that but his bets on cloud computing, embracing of Linux and open sourc…

> As an "older-school" dev I assume this means "older-school Windows dev", as none of that is new in the UNIX world.

No I cut my teeth on Sun workstations.
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