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Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

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Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#91

Post by dtrailin »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #12

A VC friend of mine characterized these kinds of answers nicely: incredible, profound bullshit that no one seems to know how to cut through. On a level specific to Microsoft, their biggest threat is how agreeable and self-deprecating everything they do is now. Corporate cultures thrive on hierarchy, and yet their employees are pretty comfortable admitting to their friends that Windows and Azure are crap. The quiet tr…

People at Amazon and Oracle complain all the time, you should talk to them. I think honesty is far more important than pretending everything is great when isn't. If this is the case then you are part of a cult. I think you'll also seen a wide variety of opinions on Windows and Azure, mostly related to the individual products at Microsoft. Having worked there I know quite a few people that were big fans of the NT Kernel, C#, .net, and Azure services like Storage and App Insights. People will also acknowledge the bad parts, which is critical if one wants to improve.

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#92

Post by AnimalMuppet »

GordonS wrote: post #80
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the one you're asking. But to me, the (most recent) way they ruined Windows was the new interface. I don't want to interact with my desktop via a phone/tablet interface. I don't want to use a touchscreen. I want to use only the keyboard and mouse. More: I don't want to use my computer as a media consumption device. So for me , all the new UI changes are counterproductive. But that's me. Others have different…

So, it seems like you are describing the car crash that was Windows 8? Seriously, if you haven't tried Windows 10 since it first came out, try it - I held out on Windows 7 for years, but I'm really glad I switched.

I'm on 10. I still hate the interface. Yes, it's better than 8 was, but that's not much. They took a step in the wrong direction, and then they took a half-step back. I mean, that's better than nothing, but it's still less than good.

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#93

Post by diegoperini »

matrix wrote: post #61
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…

The heavy-handed updates forcing frequent reboots are the deal-breaker for me. It seriously pisses me off to come back to my machine only discover that all those editor windows I had open gone, the IDE close, and all the open browser tabs lost, etc. Why are frequent full reboots even necessary in this day and age?!

It's ok if they are necessary. It's not ok if they are needed ASAP.

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#94

Post by kokey »

saosebastiao wrote: post #56
devereaux wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding #1, eventually I expect Microsoft to release their own Linux distribution and keep Windows as a GUI. I would not be surprised if their failed project Astoria was reused to run android apps on that.

Why would it need to be Linux? I love linux, but mostly because it works well and is open source. I'd love for a big tech company to put their weight behind SEL4. That would go a long way for Microsoft: formally proven security, tiny footprint, good performance, etc. It's something that has massive potential for super computers all the way down to IOT. It just needs a proper ecosystem behind it. Or maybe buy QNX off…

I think as long as Microsoft holds onto Windows tightly the better bet in the future will always be a Linux or UNIX-like OS. Like many other things, the thing that works more like evolutionary systems tend to prevail. Linux might be the dominant race of the UNIX ancestry tree at the moment, but it may not retain that dominance and the thing that will overtake it will probably come from the same UNIX evolutionary roots, e.g. the BSD side where FreeBSD, Darwin, MacOS and iOS came from or the other Linux side branches like Android and Chrome, or somewhere less unexpected. The only way Windows tree OSes will prevail over this is if they allow more branches to evolve, even open source parts of it. User interfaces tend to do better if owned by an organisation with a concentrated purpose and commercial vision, but the stuff under the bonnet seems to do a lot better from being more open and evolutionary.

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#95

Post by kokey »

VRay wrote: post #34
devereaux wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding #1, eventually I expect Microsoft to release their own Linux distribution and keep Windows as a GUI. I would not be surprised if their failed project Astoria was reused to run android apps on that.

Speaking as an OS engineer who's worked on both kernels a lot, Windows is way better under the hood for low-latency, responsive end user stuff than linux Then again, WinMo 7 was way faster and more responsive than Android at the time, and look how that turned out..

I'm not sure why this is such a problem in Linux, where latency is really not such a big problem in Darwin/MacOS/iOS.

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#96

Post by weberc2 »

zozbot123 wrote: post #83
bitwize wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Deskt…

> Guess what, that integrates the web browser at a far deeper level than Win98 ever did.

That's the entire point; it uses the web browser because the web browser became an operating system (in the "application platform" sense of the word, not in the "kernel" sense) in its own right, and ChromeOS is Google's attempt to follow it to its conclusion. This is categorically different than Windows' deep and arbitrary integration of Explorer.

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#97

Post by exitcode00 »

GordonS wrote: post #76
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.

> The problem is they are no longer best-of-breed for any of their markets Operating systems? I personally love Windows 10 (now its more mature), and Windows Server 2019 is embracing containers. On cloud, AWS is very entrenched, but Microsoft can capture a lot of the enterprise market. I've worked extensively with Azure, and I think it's a fantastic product. TBH, I'm not sure there is a "best of breed" cloud provider…

Are we talking about the same windows 10 that blows-up every November to add nonsuch features?

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#98

Post by twblalock »

danielovichdk wrote: post #51
sonnyblarney wrote: post #5

"When Satya Nadella took Microsoft Corp.’s helm five years ago, the conventional wisdom was that the company’s glory days were behind it." Have a look at this MS revenues [1] and consider why for a moment there is any 'conventional wisdom' like this? MSFT stock price did languish during this time of amazing growth which I guess validates that 'conventional wisdom' was in fact sour, but it's hard to see why it was. Ro…

Ballmer signed off on the Azure investment over 10 years ago. Today I believe that's their biggest revenue stream alongside Office perhaps. Big picture, Ballmer was a huge success.

It's arguable that Ballmer would not have run Azure the way Nadella has, e.g. embracing Linux and open source, and it would not have been as successful.

The problem with Microsoft under Ballmer was execution. For example, they saw the potential of the iPod (eventually), but all they came up with was the Zune. They saw the potential of smartphones (eventually) but did not execute well on the OS, the app store, the hardware, and the marketing.

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#99

Post by loudmax »

gnu8 wrote: post #24
doctorpangloss wrote: post #12

A VC friend of mine characterized these kinds of answers nicely: incredible, profound bullshit that no one seems to know how to cut through. On a level specific to Microsoft, their biggest threat is how agreeable and self-deprecating everything they do is now. Corporate cultures thrive on hierarchy, and yet their employees are pretty comfortable admitting to their friends that Windows and Azure are crap. The quiet tr…

Microsoft deserves to go gentle into that good night because of all the damage they’ve done to the computing industry over the years, for example killing Be and Netscape with monopolist tactics and creating a terminally insecure software monoculture of the lowest common denominator of Windows and IE, that we’re still recovering from today. (Google is repeating the lesson today - Android is the Windows 98 of mobile).…

Seeing Microsoft die would give me great schadenfreude, but all big companies do some good things and some bad things, so it's worth focusing on their specific sins. I see two of them: their desktop monopoly and their Office monopoly.

Their desktop monopoly isn't what it once was, especially considering that most people get online today using mobile devices. But it never really went away. Windows is the only commercially successful desktop operating system. Everything else is a niche product without access to the enormous ecosystem of Windows-only desktop software. Desktop Linux exists, but it isn't any kind of commercial success. The Mac desktop exists to sell Apple hardware, it isn't a product on its own. And part of the reason it exists at all is that Microsoft publishes a version of their office suite for Macs.

MS Office is absolutely entrenched in corporate computing. Many of us here on HN can get by on non MS Office products, but if you're exchanging Office documents with customers you absolutely need to use MS Office to get a decent level of compatibility. For a huge number of businesses, there simply isn't any choice.

Microsoft isn't about to go out of business and a lot of people enjoy using their software and feel productive. People should have a choice. Microsoft could go a long way to repent for their sins if they open up both Windows and Office to the point where there are significant viable alternatives to both. Microsoft should be able to compete on quality, not on possessing the keys to their proprietary kingdom.

I'm not holding my breath.

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#100

Post by adventured »

twblalock wrote: post #84
sonnyblarney wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 tha…

I agree that mobile and search were missteps, specifically putting themselves into a position of competing so poorly in those areas overall. It's also unrealistic to think that one company could own desktop, mobile, search, office, etc.

Microsoft was going to own desktop, mobile, search? $300-$400 billion in revenue? $130+ billion in profit?

No. That's absurd. Holding Ballmer to account for not conquering planet Earth is not a fair premise. Of course there were lots of 'missteps,' what's described is impossible. Their biggest mistake was attempting all of it in the first place.

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