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Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

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Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#81

Post by chapium »

nostromo wrote: post #65
Bamafan wrote: post #11

Long story, short: 1. Realize the world is moving beyond Windows 2. Cede mobile OS to Android/iOS, that battle is lost. 3. Realize, next great revenue stream is the Cloud (Azure).

The problem is they are no longer best-of-breed for any of their markets, except maybe Office. Microsoft doesn't break out Azure revenue, but by all accounts it's quite small compared to AWS. And Office is very much under threat. If you work with young people you'll notice they tend to prefer G Suite apps over Office - most likely because Google has done a great job getting their software into schools.

Office and windows go hand in hand though. Windows is a clear winner over ChromeOS. For comparing it to MacOS its debatable what is qualitatively better, both systems are full of tradeoffs.

Personally I lean towards MacOS because homebrew and terminal.app are pretty good. Updates are pretty unobtrusive and wifi is easy to manage. I'm not sure that these are hard hitting features for most users.

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#82

Post by sifoobar »

kazinator wrote: post #55
ggambetta wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They’ve either forgotten the past or they don’t care. Or they're too young to know or remember! Working with recent grads, I've discovered that for most of them Bill Gates has always been this grey-haired, well-natured philanthropist. They can't believe it when I tell them of how universally reviled Microsoft was, and I feel like Grandpa Simpson talking about onions in his belt :(

I speak here perhaps not only for myself but others: although Microsoft had been reviled, and still is, somehow Gates escaped that personally. I've never felt that I dislike Bill Gates. There had been a smaller Microsoft before the rise of MS-DOS and Windows. Microsoft was a vendor of BASIC interpreters that were integrated into some 8 bit microcomputers, which I used. The Apple II's "Applesoft" basic was derived fro…

Here, let me fix that for you:

https://www.bimmerfest.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmenti...

Bu xie, my pleasure.

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#83

Post by zozbot123 »

bitwize wrote: post #38
partiallypro wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are they ruining Windows? People have been saying this since XP (before SP1 or SP2, when everyone hated it.) Yet there's not much evidence to support it...they are actually doing some really cool things with Windows now like adding bash and having different flavor Linux subsystems. The main issue I've had is some lack of quality control since they let go tons of testers and used Insiders instead. That has not eff…

Windows is subject to this sort of bizarre conservation of awesome. Any improvements in one area must be counterbalanced with an absolute shitshow in some other area. Windows 95 brought full 32-bit-ness to the average desktop, but it was a crashy buggy mess based on DOS that should have never existed because Windows NT was a thing. Windows 98 improved on Windows 95 in some ways, but introduced completely unnecessary…

> Windows 95 ... should have never existed because... NT was a thing.

Windows NT needed way high-end hardware to be usable at the time. (Even Linux did, if you wanted to use a Win95-like GUI and not be limited to the text-only CLI.) Windows 95 was a hack, but it was still miles better than pure MS-DOG and 16-bit versions of Windows.

> Windows 98 ...introduced completely unnecessary IE integration and the Active Desktop nobody used.

Completely unnecessary? Used ChromeOS lately? Guess what, that integrates the web browser at a far deeper level than Win98 ever did. And Active Desktop-equivalent technologies are only coming back into use very recently, with things like Web Notifications, ActivityPub, Progressive Web Apps and the like.

> Windows XP ... looked like Fisher-Price ...

Except that you could disable the Fisher Price bits, either in XP or as late as Vista and Windows 7.

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#84

Post by twblalock »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #48
Bamafan wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For whatever reason, the industry press never liked Ballmer, and I guess they like Satya Ballmer made several missteps: 1. Fruitless foray into mobile with acquisition of Nokia and Windows Mobile and Windows Phone strategies. 2. Billion+ dollar acquisition of Skype that basically went no where. 3. Remember a company called aQuantive? Don't worry, neither does anyone else. Ballmer's MS purchased them for $6 billion.…

"Ballmer made several missteps:" Growing an already massive company company by 3x in revenue is the important thing, which is the 'bottom line' in which missteps have to be contextualized. Any company in tech is going to make mistakes, this should be happening, so listing them off doesn't so much help - what matters is how all of this works out in the mix. I worked in mobile during that time, it was vicious. Surely M…

Trying to compete in mobile and failing is a misstep. Microsoft missed out on smartphones, one of the fastest growing and most lucrative market segments in tech industry history.

Trying to compete in search and failing is also a misstep. Bing is just not as good as Google.

It's arguable that Azure would not have been successful under Ballmer either, because it's unlikely he would have embraced Linux to the extent that Nadella has.

The bottom line is that Ballmer was good at growing existing business but Microsoft was late to the game on a lot of industry trends under his watch, and when they did try to catch up they did not do a very good job -- Windows Phone is a perfect example.

It's impressive to grow existing business, but companies that do not successfully innovate eventually stagnate and that's not what investors want to see.

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#85

Post by stareatgoats »

Bamafan wrote: post #11

Long story, short: 1. Realize the world is moving beyond Windows 2. Cede mobile OS to Android/iOS, that battle is lost. 3. Realize, next great revenue stream is the Cloud (Azure).

To me it was more interesting to get a glimpse of Satya Nadellas thought process:

> "as a CEO you need to create that continuous balance between the multiple constituents [that] is the real job"

and

> "Ultimately, if we don’t want to have a race to the bottom, we need to have some laws and regulations that govern how participants in the marketplace can make sure we don’t do things that have unintended consequences."

and more.

One might argue that thinking like this can be obtained in a two-day management course, or an afternoon with the corporate head of PR - still, many leaders don't even seem to understand the benefit of putting such into words, let alone use it as guiding principles.

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#86

Post by pram »

alkonaut wrote: post #52
bayulxc5 wrote: post #3

The only product from Microsoft I use is Windows and they're ruining it. So, sorry Satya, but...

I switched on my win10 box today, opened a shell and typed ”ssh otherbox” to ssh into my linux box. Unless we are having the “but telemetry” discussion (again) there are very few ways that 10 is worse than a previous version.

I don’t think Windows 10 is worse than its predecessors, but the start menu being full of advertisements and crapware on a fresh install is pretty shameless (especially after I’ve spent $200 on it)

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#87

Post by nostromo »

king_magic wrote: post #74
nostromo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is they are no longer best-of-breed for any of their markets, except maybe Office. Microsoft doesn't break out Azure revenue, but by all accounts it's quite small compared to AWS. And Office is very much under threat. If you work with young people you'll notice they tend to prefer G Suite apps over Office - most likely because Google has done a great job getting their software into schools.

Uh, Azure revenue, by many accounts, is greater than AWS: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/10/29/1-microsof... https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/04/27/microsoft-... And sorry, G Suite is a joke compared to desktop Office for serious work. It doesn't matter what the youngin's prefer, what matters is what gets (or facilitates getting) real work done in the enterprise, which generally revolves aroun…

Microsoft includes a bunch of non-Azure products under their cloud revenue. And they do it to confuse people and falsely claim they're outpacing AWS, which as you just proved, works.

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#88

Post by ahartmetz »

king_magic wrote: post #74
nostromo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is they are no longer best-of-breed for any of their markets, except maybe Office. Microsoft doesn't break out Azure revenue, but by all accounts it's quite small compared to AWS. And Office is very much under threat. If you work with young people you'll notice they tend to prefer G Suite apps over Office - most likely because Google has done a great job getting their software into schools.

Uh, Azure revenue, by many accounts, is greater than AWS: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/10/29/1-microsof... https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/04/27/microsoft-... And sorry, G Suite is a joke compared to desktop Office for serious work. It doesn't matter what the youngin's prefer, what matters is what gets (or facilitates getting) real work done in the enterprise, which generally revolves aroun…

PowerPoint for real work? Please.

I'll give you Excel.

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#89

Post by blinkingled »

eknkc wrote: post #72
nailer wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows is a pretty good kernel, GNU/Windows (aka WSL) effectively feels like Linux, with some drawbacks mainly NTFS being very slow (which Microsoft are aware of and working on - see https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/873#issuecomment-425... ).

Yeah I remember reading this particular comment when it was new. It mostly feels like “ok guys this is the best we get out of this” to me though. If they do not go with a different approach, the filesystem will always be an issue with WSL. I planned ditching my mac in favor of WSL. Due to MBP hardware issues and the fact that a git status would take 10x time drove me away. I wish it was good enough though.

git status maybe 10x slower on WSL than native Linux - I wonder how much slower it is than macOS - in my brief use macOS filesystem never felt anywhere near Linux fast to me.

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#90

Post by 8ytecoder »

king_magic wrote: post #74
nostromo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is they are no longer best-of-breed for any of their markets, except maybe Office. Microsoft doesn't break out Azure revenue, but by all accounts it's quite small compared to AWS. And Office is very much under threat. If you work with young people you'll notice they tend to prefer G Suite apps over Office - most likely because Google has done a great job getting their software into schools.

Uh, Azure revenue, by many accounts, is greater than AWS: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/10/29/1-microsof... https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/04/27/microsoft-... And sorry, G Suite is a joke compared to desktop Office for serious work. It doesn't matter what the youngin's prefer, what matters is what gets (or facilitates getting) real work done in the enterprise, which generally revolves aroun…

"Cloud" revenue likely includes O365. (Sorry I couldn't find a source for it. But I have definitely read this.)
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