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Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem

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Re: Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem

#91
post #14

I've always said sales (and marketing) was Microsoft's biggest problem. The are finally starting to be cool again as the engineers take over. The silo between Windows and development (Azure, .net etc) needs to come down fully to fix Sinofsky's mess too. We're still left with a desktop OS UI with huge animated icons designed for a phone even though they've now given up on the phone market anyway. They gave up too easi…

Very well said on the Windows phone.I have used three windows phones before switching to Android and I think the UI for simpler things like dialer ,messages or emails was better on windows phone.Especially email was so good ,it used to work a charm even on 2G.I have used built in clients and other options on Android and nothing beats the basic email client on windows phone.May be it was not feature rich for gmail but…

I got a Lumia to get into the whole WinRT model when it got introduced and also because C++ is a first class language on WP.

The whole WinRT/.NET model of WP, and the respective tooling is miles ahead of what Google has managed to pull out of Android.

Even the upcoming Android N with Android Studio takes lots of more resources than VS, doesn't provide a proper experience for NDK users and there isn't a Support Library release that isn't followed up by a quick fix release.

I really don't understand where the skilled developers that master the Google interview process end up working, surely not on Android.

However the WP in small form factors is dead, with the latest promise drop of the 512 MB WP 8.1 devices not getting the WP 10 upgrade they lost the last faithful ones that still believed.

Where it might thrive is as tablet OS, but lets see.

Re: Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem

#92
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very well said on the Windows phone.I have used three windows phones before switching to Android and I think the UI for simpler things like dialer ,messages or emails was better on windows phone.Especially email was so good ,it used to work a charm even on 2G.I have used built in clients and other options on Android and nothing beats the basic email client on windows phone.May be it was not feature rich for gmail but…

But those are just apps, not the OS and there are any number of replacement dialler, messaging and email apps for Android - are you suggesting that NONE of them are as good as the Windows Phone default apps?

>replacement dialler, messaging and email apps for Android

It's a smartphone; communication is its entire raison d'être. Those things ought to be awesome right out of the box and, on Android, they're definitely not.

Re: Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem

#93
post #68
post #6

I was a Windows user for a long time. 5 years ago I switched to OS X, because I think it's closer to the deployment environment I use as a dev. However what OS X did ( when they killed the old one - MacOS 9 and rewrote the whole thing on UNIX based kernel ) was the single greatest move, which I think pays off even these days. This is what I hope should happen with Windows. They should decide on POSIX kernel and compl…

There are lots of flaws with the POSIX models. NT's creater (cutler) fixed a lot of them. Your dismive attitude is probably due to ignorance instead deep knowledge of what the NT kernel is capable of. Just a few days ago there was post about how NT's IO by default is more performant.

Cutler is a nerd-hero of mine.

Yeah, the NT kernel design is pretty frickin awesome. There is a great book about the run up to NT's release. He took on the job because he thought that writing operating systems would happen fewer and fewer times in the future. I think he actually said that he thought this might be one of the last times a commercial OS would be written from scratch.

The thing about operating systems is that everyone thinks they know everything there is to know, but wow are they off the mark.

Re: Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem

#94

Try this: Google "Office 365" The first result just says "Email". The second result says "Office 365 login" I'm not an internet dunce, but this is just bad user-experience. Why not have a modern landing page that tells me a bit about the product, it's price and what I can expect from it? Why is the first result a login page? I've been using Google Docs almost exclusively for work now. I've ditched Word completely. I…

In our office, one of the best decisions we made is to move to google docs. I had to push it through because most employees were used to working with MS office and emailing docs and excel files to keep everyone in the loop. I know One Drive is a thing and you can do the same thing with MS Office product as you can with google docs. But it wasn't always the case and Google Docs had better usability and easier to understand in our team.

Re: Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem

#96
post #21

Bit too much Ballmer bashing. He made plenty of mistakes so he's an easy target for the ignoranti, but the adoption of open source, the move to the cloud, the writing of Android and iOS apps etc all started under Ballmer. Ballmer also cleaned up the anti-trust mess and -- while his hands were somewhat tied by a dozen years of constant DoJ supervision -- tripled Microsoft's sales and doubled its profits. This was desp…

Right- Office and Windows began talking to each other in 2011, when the consent decree ended. The silo structure at Microsoft was almost required by the government.

Re: Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem

#97
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suggesting a rewrite of something as important as the NT kernel is ignorant at best. I think Bash on Windows is a great compromise.

Why is the NT kernel so important? It hasn't touched my life much in about eight years, private or professional. Nokia thought Symbian was very important too.

That's the thing. There are many things that are really important that don't actually touch every single person on the planet.

One of the most widely used OS's ever is called Tron. Does that effect me? Not really. Is it important? I think so. I thought so at least enough to do some reading on the subject. Was it important from a CoSci standpoint? Maybe. NT is important from multiple angles, as well. Also, it's importance doesn't take away importance from the things that may actually touch your life. Such is the nature of things.

Re: Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem

#98
post #6

I was a Windows user for a long time. 5 years ago I switched to OS X, because I think it's closer to the deployment environment I use as a dev. However what OS X did ( when they killed the old one - MacOS 9 and rewrote the whole thing on UNIX based kernel ) was the single greatest move, which I think pays off even these days. This is what I hope should happen with Windows. They should decide on POSIX kernel and compl…

But that was an easy call for Mac since no one really cared about OS9, windows on the other hand still cares about supporting old tech since the people who give them a bunch of money a year are still running it.

Re: Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem

#99
post #21

Bit too much Ballmer bashing. He made plenty of mistakes so he's an easy target for the ignoranti, but the adoption of open source, the move to the cloud, the writing of Android and iOS apps etc all started under Ballmer. Ballmer also cleaned up the anti-trust mess and -- while his hands were somewhat tied by a dozen years of constant DoJ supervision -- tripled Microsoft's sales and doubled its profits. This was desp…

Under Ballmer's watch the revenue tripled. It could have been pure dumb luck. Even with all that Satya is doing it hasn't really showed any results on revenues and profits. Sun did a lot of great things for open source and they pretty much floundered.

It's more the case that Gates left plenty of low hanging fruit to pick.

Almost the entire revenue growth was in repricing stuff that was widely adopted because it was cheap, and a few short lived "innovations" that people are already abandoning everywhere.

Re: Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "They should decide on POSIX kernel and completely rewrite most of it." What features do you want from POSIX that Windows doesn't already provide?

The point of POSIX is conformity, not extra features. Though I don't see how that fixes Windows either. It can already do many things more than POSIX. In fact most OSs support POSIX for application capture, but certainly don't depend upon it entirely.

So in other words the main benefit of POSIX conformity (with regards to Windows) is application portability, right?

Is the Linux subsystem in Windows 10 not good enough to handle this? What *nix applications do people want to be able to run in Windows that they can't already?

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