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Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

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Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#11

Post by spectramax »

It’s unfortunate to see Microsoft (along with Adobe, etc) expanding into Ads. If nothing else, they could really differentiate and join forces with Apple from privacy standpoint to oppose Google, Amazon and Facebook.

Instead, “Intellisense with AI now available on VS Code” is Microsoft’s nice way of saying “We harvest the shit out of your data”. Ah, like a true Ad company. Don’t get me started on Windows 10 telemetry.

I really believe that Apple’s bet on privacy will pay off well in the long term. They’re different companies (Apple is selling hardware) but boy they could have gone into Ads with a MASSIVE user base but they chose to limit Ads in the App Store. It would have been huge expansion opportunity but they didn’t pursue it. And it will pay off as privacy awareness spreads and Microsoft could join them as operating system providers.

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#12

Post by ranie93 »

godelmachine wrote: post #10
Amezarak wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's hard to see what Nadella's leadership has actually added to MS from where I've standing. As best as I can tell, there hasn't been any major new products or shifts since Ballmer left. People talk about MS "stagnating" under Ballmer, and that's true of the stock price, but revenue and profit more than doubled under Ballmer and he introduced multiple new billion-dollar products/services. Nadella has made some…

May I ask what’s WP?

Windows Phone

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#13

Post by luckydata »

Amezarak wrote: post #7
bryanlarsen wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stuff propping up Microsoft now (Office 365, Azure, Windows 10) were all started under Ballmer, weren't they?

Yeah, it's hard to see what Nadella's leadership has actually added to MS from where I've standing. As best as I can tell, there hasn't been any major new products or shifts since Ballmer left. People talk about MS "stagnating" under Ballmer, and that's true of the stock price, but revenue and profit more than doubled under Ballmer and he introduced multiple new billion-dollar products/services. Nadella has made some…

Nadella has made a few key changes, for example exempting internal product teams from having to consider Windows as the only OS to develop for, changed the incentive structure for sales to avoid pushing products enterprises didn't care about etc... When you're a CEO your success is usually not dependent by flashy all in decisions, especially if you're managing a giant company like MS. You are successful by setting policies that allow your talent to do more of the right stuff, your sales folks to sell more and better etc ...

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#14

Post by JamesBarney »

> There’s a bit of Silicon Valley cred, too, thanks to its acquisitions of LinkedIn, the professional social network, and GitHub, the software code repository.

I would have thought open sourcing so much of it's framework, vscode, and typescript would have had a greater impact.

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#15

Post by simonebrunozzi »

thrower123 wrote: post #3

What a great difference between him and Ballmer. I'd not be surprised if they eat Amazon's lunch on cloud computing in the next few years.

I would never, ever underestimate Andy Jassy. I consider him on par with Jeff Bezos, in terms of leadership and execution, if not superior.

source: worked at AWS 2008-2014.

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#16

Post by kerng »

I think Nadella was driving more of a cultural change within the company. Business wise the path to Azure and the cloud was pretty straightforward and he stuck to it.

The question to ask might be, would Ballmer have done something else then focus on cloud? Like focus more energy on phones for instance? That could have led to a different financial result.

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#17

Post by thrower123 »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #15
thrower123 wrote: post #3

What a great difference between him and Ballmer. I'd not be surprised if they eat Amazon's lunch on cloud computing in the next few years.

I would never, ever underestimate Andy Jassy. I consider him on par with Jeff Bezos, in terms of leadership and execution, if not superior. source: worked at AWS 2008-2014.

Possible, but from the inside as a Microsoft Partner, it feels like most of the world is just starting to move to the cloud, and when they do, they go Azure, because they are already dependent on Exchange.

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#18

Post by cheeze »

thrower123 wrote: post #17
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never, ever underestimate Andy Jassy. I consider him on par with Jeff Bezos, in terms of leadership and execution, if not superior. source: worked at AWS 2008-2014.

Possible, but from the inside as a Microsoft Partner, it feels like most of the world is just starting to move to the cloud, and when they do, they go Azure, because they are already dependent on Exchange.

If you're already locked into msft, then yeah msft makes sense.

But one thing people often forget is that AWS is cheaper than everyone else. This matters to most companies.

Also, Azure is a pretty miserable dev experience for many of their services. Many of AWS smaller services aren't great, but better from what I've used/general sentiment.

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#19

Post by maxxxxx »

1024core wrote: post #2

Satya has done a tremendous job turning around Microsoft. It was headed in the direction of becoming a slowly sinking behemoth under Ballmer, but he's turned it around. Sundar, on the other hand, is just content collecting $$ and showing more ads.

In what way was MS sinking under Ballmer? Maybe they were not exciting but they were super profitable every year. I think it's more about better PR.

Not everything is golden at MS now either. I am working on creating a platform for our medical software on Windows 10 and it really makes me want to switch to Linux or iOS. Windows is a big mess of old and new code and attempts of sandboxing like iOS but only half-hearted. Keeping up with the semi-annual channel is also insane. I would much prefer annual or biannual releases that are actually stable. It's a very developer unfriendly platform now.

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#20

Post by Amezarak »

luckydata wrote: post #13
Amezarak wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's hard to see what Nadella's leadership has actually added to MS from where I've standing. As best as I can tell, there hasn't been any major new products or shifts since Ballmer left. People talk about MS "stagnating" under Ballmer, and that's true of the stock price, but revenue and profit more than doubled under Ballmer and he introduced multiple new billion-dollar products/services. Nadella has made some…

Nadella has made a few key changes, for example exempting internal product teams from having to consider Windows as the only OS to develop for, changed the incentive structure for sales to avoid pushing products enterprises didn't care about etc... When you're a CEO your success is usually not dependent by flashy all in decisions, especially if you're managing a giant company like MS. You are successful by setting po…

All those things are great and I'm glad they're doing them, but I'm not convinced they make MS a more successful company in the long run.
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