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Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

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Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#231

Post by guterz »

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…

How is G Suite a joke? It can definitely do some heavy lifting and a lot of enterprises are using it. Granted I've worked at a lot of places and most use office, but the ones that have used G Suite have way more collaboration. Its easier to share, collaborate, and not have files get lost in the shuffle. I much prefer it, plus I love using Sites vs Sharepoint.

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#232

Post by grumpydba »

pjmlp wrote: post #226
grumpydba wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, and they are plenty fast. The API could be more elegant, but it works fine. Mysql for example uses io_submit. So do oracle, sybase. It's just a matter of developer comfort. They work around it for us. Deployment-wise, linux runs circles around windows.

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#233

Post by smileypete »

tphan wrote: post #217
kccqzy wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like my Microsoft mice too.

I'm super loyal to the Microsoft Basic mouse. It lasts forever whereas all the Logitech M100's that I've purchased (and I've purchased a lot of them) don't last more than 6 months. Sad!

+1, had a Microsoft Mouse 5000 for the last ~5 years. Good for larger hands, love the smooth scrolling having got used to it. Needs the odd teardown to remove fluff from the optical wheel sensor, I can live with that fine :)

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#234

Post by pjmlp »

grumpydba wrote: post #232
pjmlp wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you are deploying Solaris into production, how are those kernels handling asynchronous loads. Still plain old select(), poll() and AIO?

Yes, and they are plenty fast. The API could be more elegant, but it works fine. Mysql for example uses io_submit. So do oracle, sybase. It's just a matter of developer comfort. They work around it for us. Deployment-wise, linux runs circles around windows.

Having worked in several Java/.NET shops not everyone on our IT would agree with that, specially how easy it is to manage cluster deployments with AD.

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#235

Post by aries1980 »

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'.

Or, if corporations like Microsoft did before, bribe the govn't to enforce the use of their products in schools and gvon't institutions, like they did in the '90s and early '00s.

An example: https://www.zoliblog.com/2008/05/19/steve-ballmer-receives-t...

> A Hungarian Government bid, worth $25B Hungarian Forints, roughly $157M was allegedly skewed towards MS

I clearly remember in the late 90s, when all the computer literacy exams were phrased explicitly to use Exel, Word, Explorer. The official European computer competency test (ECDL) until 2013 was explicit about Microsoft products as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Computer_Driving_Lice...

It is hard to convince people like me, who grew up in such level of corruption, that the people who were working for Microsoft as a high-level executive that time, they are not relying on public money any more.

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#236

Post by aries1980 »

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 don't believe you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCHED_DEADLINE

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#237

Post by danielovichdk »

twblalock wrote: post #98
danielovichdk wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 har…

Embracing OSS also started under Ballmer.

But also especially with Scott Guthrie, and his role as a leader for the future Micrsoosoft developer platform .

I don't know if Guthrie hired the likes of Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack, Mads Kristensen etc. But they have IMO made a huge impact, but internally and externally for the OSS push.

It's a big corporation and internally the fights had been big, becasue a lot of people don't understand how to sell free software.

Just to give an example.

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#238

Post by jeffFrom18F »

techfoolery wrote: post #119
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…

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…

I used Excel for several years, mostly doing development work for financial services companies. I now work at a small/medium-size tech company that uses Google Sheets. Sheets is fine for most of the things we need to do, but our needs are modest. Sheets' overall functionality pales in comparison to Excel, and it often feels laggy even on a good network.

The finance companies I mention above also had data warehouses, but that's a completely different use case and not what Excel is used for. It would not work as a replacement even if everyone knew SQL.

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#239

Post by koalaman »

ndiscussion wrote: post #162
koalaman wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am writing this from my personal Windows 10 machine and I am not a big fan. Random things that have aggravated me just in the last few days: * For some reason I suddenly had to create a pin a few days ago to login instead of my password. why? * skype is now magically in my list of background programs. * There is news in the start menu when I want to launch an app!? * whenever I want to do something a little hard, l…

Have you tried Linux recently? I installed arch a few months ago, and almost all of my steam games run on it out of the box (no extra setup required). I have an AMD Vega 64 graphics card, drivers are all handled automatically. My Xbox 360 controllers with wireless dongle are handled automatically. If you want to use xbox one controllers, any bluetooth adapter will work out of the box, but you do have to install a pac…

I use it daily for work. Haven't used it at home for years.

My main blocker games wise is Battlefield series which I don't believe works on linux.

Re: Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella

#240

Post by luckydata »

pacaro wrote: post #66
luckydata wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft doesn't do consulting but has an enormous partner ecosystem.

Well, there is Microsoft Consulting Services, so it isn’t quite such a simple picture. But it is true that they haven’t gone down the IBM path.

It's a drop in the ocean though, I'm aware there's is a little of that but if you look at revenues you can say that without being too wrong. The in-house stuff is mostly a function designed to enable customers better more than a way to squeeze money out of it. It doesn't even crack the billion dollars (it's around 300M last time I checked).

But yeah, I should have known that given the crowd on hacker news I should have protected my statement from the "actually..." crowd.

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