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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

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. But we should keep in mind that there is no guarantee that their stance stays the same, and they pretty much only answer to money and nothing/nobody else.

The thing with privacy stance is that it is primarily based on trust . If Microsoft now goes into privacy centric company, nothing makes me trust them as much as I trust them going back into selling ads after 5 years. It is a sensitive branding issue.

That’s why I think whatever trust solution we come up with will have a heavy audit component to it. I know everyone here hates SOX compliance, but the entire goal of SOX was to increase investors’ trust in financial reporting in the wake of the Enron accounting scandal. And it worked.

SaaS companies already make ridiculous margins. Applying a sensible regulatory framework around privacy and data usage auditing would add overhead to be sure, but I’m also sure software margins will cover it.

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

#62

Nadellaissance doesn't work at all and its breaking my soul, fuck off pithy headlines. That said, the board has done well picking leadership, Satya's driven a lot of amazing cultural change, and business too.

> Nadellaissance doesn't work at all and its breaking my soul, fuck off pithy headlines. Care to explain? Do you work there? "doesn't work at all" meaning he's lazy?

I think parent means the contrived term "Nadallaissance" as a headline gimmick.

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

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux seems to be doing just fine keeping software maintained without ads or harvesting data. This mindset is toxic and needs to die.

Oh yes! They're taking the desktop by storm!

I think it's a lot more plausible that Microsoft could still do fine with Windows if they took out ads than that Linux would be doing much better in the desktop market if they started bundling in ads.

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

#64
post #42
post #32

Microsoft's core revenue is still due to market lock-in of their proprietary technologies: MS Office and Windows itself. There are other office suites out there, but nothing can gain much market share without complete compatibility for MS Office file formats: docx, pptx, etc. Microsoft produced a version of Office for Macs and that allowed Apple to grow greater than niche, but their market share was always tiny compa…

G Suite, WPS Office, WordPerfect

Their compatibility with existing MS documents is not good enough yet. This is largely because you'd have to mirror many glitches and idiosyncrasies in MS's code to have full compatibility. Or as the say in the industry "bug-for-bug compatibility".

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

#65
post #19
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-hearte…

> In what way was MS sinking under Ballmer?

In a relative way.

If you are going to talk about operating systems, iOS and Android/Linux blew by Windows on his watch despite Microsoft's big head start in the smartphone space. I think that's directly the result of Microsoft not being exciting.

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

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux seems to be doing just fine keeping software maintained without ads or harvesting data. This mindset is toxic and needs to die.

Fine among our crowd but how many non technical people are using Linux?

Uhh. The entire world? The internet doesn't run on IIS.

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

#67
post #19
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-hearte…

Blowing billions regularly on terrible acquisitions? aQuantive, Nokia, more...

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

#68
post #41

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…

If people don't pay for software maintenance, e.g. Windows 10 updates, what do you do? Ads, harvest data... Windows (likely) always could offer better privacy for a fee. You can buy a Windows computer incl. services at a price point you can only dream of Apple hardware. Facebook/Inst/Wapp and Google show that the majority of people go with 'Geiz ist geil' (cheap is cool), privacy be damned. Awareness doesn't necessar…

> Windows (likely) always could offer better privacy for a fee. You can buy a Windows computer incl.

IMO what I paid for my Windows Pro license is already that fee and then some.

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

#69
post #32

Microsoft's core revenue is still due to market lock-in of their proprietary technologies: MS Office and Windows itself. There are other office suites out there, but nothing can gain much market share without complete compatibility for MS Office file formats: docx, pptx, etc. Microsoft produced a version of Office for Macs and that allowed Apple to grow greater than niche, but their market share was always tiny compa…

Excel is actually an amazing product. Google docs is cool, but it’s nothing compared to excel.

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

#70
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people don't pay for software maintenance, e.g. Windows 10 updates, what do you do? Ads, harvest data... Windows (likely) always could offer better privacy for a fee. You can buy a Windows computer incl. services at a price point you can only dream of Apple hardware. Facebook/Inst/Wapp and Google show that the majority of people go with 'Geiz ist geil' (cheap is cool), privacy be damned. Awareness doesn't necessar…

Linux seems to be doing just fine keeping software maintained without ads or harvesting data. This mindset is toxic and needs to die.

The Ubuntu fiasco comes to mind.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/07/stallman_on_ubuntu_...

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