Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 255 posts

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#221

Post by jhanschoo »

johngalt wrote: post #174
king_magic wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> G Suite is a joke compared to desktop Office If there is one area where I've been consistently wrong, it is betting on "powerful/serious tools" rather than simple, ubiquitous things that handle most of what people need. 'Simpler' tends to win vs 'better'.

G Suite is all fine for internal communications, but grossly incompetent for making a presentation for anything where aesthetics is for concern. Same for text documents.

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#222

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#223

Post by pjmlp »

johngalt wrote: post #174
king_magic wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> G Suite is a joke compared to desktop Office If there is one area where I've been consistently wrong, it is betting on "powerful/serious tools" rather than simple, ubiquitous things that handle most of what people need. 'Simpler' tends to win vs 'better'.

My only uses of G Suite are for tracking expenses and one page letters, stuff that even Lotus 123 and Word 2.0 would be too advanced, and I have used them when they were modern.

For anything more serious I drop down into Office.

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#224

Post by pjmlp »

manigandham wrote: post #173
techfoolery wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems more like an entrenched opinion that you've continually looked to reaffirm instead of opening your perspective. First, serious work & powerpoint? Really? Yeah in an enterprise organization that's largely stuck doing what they've been doing because it's worked - sure, but that's not a technology issue, it's a culture issue. For example, Google Sheets covers 80-90% of the use cases for Excel. But that's not…

Business users are not going to learn SQL. They're not going to move all their data into the cloud, setup access, manage resources and spend money to run queries that take a few seconds on their laptop. They're not going to use 20 different services to break out scratch work, analysis, charting, and BI from what runs in a single portable file that they can manage and backup and extend in unlimited ways from meeting t…

And Excel is getting cool big data features and Tableau like capabilities.

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#225

Post by zozbot123 »

grumpydba wrote: post #219
VRay wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

> 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 Still it's probably a lot cheaper to fix some latency issues on linux that to maintain your whole kernel. The main issue with linux is the GPL for drivers, a long with kernel API instability.

> The main issue with linux is the GPL for drivers

That's the main benefit with Linux. OEM drivers on MS Windows are a shit show, even on Windows 10.

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#226

Post by pjmlp »

grumpydba wrote: post #218
GordonS wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Windows operating systems are just a gigantic bloated and underperforming mess. Server 2019 is no exception. At the company I work for IT ops deliver VMs as a service. The windows ones have huge disk footprint and take at least 3 times as long to deliver. Moreover dsc is not featureful enough compared with ansible. So it's also a pain to script/automate for. The failure rate is higher. And let's not forget the need t…

Unless you are deploying Solaris into production, how are those kernels handling asynchronous loads.

Still plain old select(), poll() and AIO?

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#227

Post by pjmlp »

jpatokal wrote: post #186
chapium wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Windows is a clear winner over ChromeOS Could you expand on this statement?

ChromeOS is a North America market phenomenon, hardly used anywhere else.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#228

Post by pjmlp »

ticmasta wrote: post #158
chadcmulligan wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love my microsoft natural ergonomic keyboard 4000

The Phone OS is still my favourite UI and was incredibly unique when first introduced. Live tiles in an era of pages of icons was way ahead of it's time. The phone hardware was/is great too; the lack of apps destroyed them though

My secondary phone is still a Lumia.

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#229

Post by pjmlp »

kokey wrote: post #94
saosebastiao wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 root…

Looking at the embedded market OSes, everyone is pretty keen in moving away from Linux into RTOS, mbed, NuttX, Tizen IoT, RIOT, eventually Fuchsia, ....

Who knows which ones will survive, however they all have two things in common, they aren't GPL based and just enough POSIX to keep C and C++ happy. Additionally some of them do have stable ABI for drivers.

Linux's long term victory might be constrained to the server room, and even there it is debatable, given the increase in managed runtimes for micro-services, which could even be running bare metal for what I care.

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#230

Post by LifeLiverTransp »

norswap wrote: post #185
johngalt wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> G Suite is a joke compared to desktop Office If there is one area where I've been consistently wrong, it is betting on "powerful/serious tools" rather than simple, ubiquitous things that handle most of what people need. 'Simpler' tends to win vs 'better'.

Simply put, different markets. Students are now using Google Docs, and Sheets works well enough to plan out your holidays. For someone that spits reports or jangle number all days, G-suite is a poorly thought-out joke. A simple exemple: it's impossible to make custom styles in Docs. You can just redefine existing styles. And you can only apply one of these styles per paragraph (you can however, manually bold or chang…

Yes, so you make spreadsheets for the old gen and your boss and you use G-sheets among your peers.

Now if google provides a decent convert to excell converter- they win over time.

Post reply on HN