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

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

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 353 posts

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

#211

Post by username223 »

calvinbhai wrote: post #93

Having read Nadella's book Hit Refresh as soon as it went on sale, Microsoft performance since then doesn't look surprising at all. Having listed what's wrong (with their product focus, company culture etc), and where they plan to head, its' almost like the book informs the reader where puck is going to be (from Satya's POV). It's funny that 15 years back I was so anti MS and pro Google and now I think it's the other…

> It's funny that 15 years back I was so anti MS and pro Google and now I think it's the other way!

Or 15 years before that, pro-MS and anti-IBM. IBM is still huge, but they've found a steady revenue stream doing enterprise stuff, so they're not creating (much) fresh evil. MS could have made steady profits writing decent desktop software (I'm not so sure now). They're both powerful but comfortable. Google is huge, and still thinks it can rule the world.

Companies are a bit like religions. When they're small, they can't have much impact. When they're big and young, they can wreak havoc. If they make it to comfortable old age, they're peaceful and stable. The Catholic Church is huge, benign, and stable now, but 1000 years ago they were a bit more conquest-focused and violent, and 2000 years ago they were just a few harmless militants.

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

#212

Post by CodeCube »

komali2 wrote: post #142
TheIronYuppie wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't do any training on your data. Telemetry is largely for feature use tracking (eg we should really do better around this component, everyone is using it). There is absolutely no ads overlap at all. Literally none. Disclosure: I work at Azure but not on VS Code

Is there a way we can see what data specifically is being sent to your servers from our local VSCode installations?

Check the docs here :) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/gd...

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

#213

Post by criddell »

scarface74 wrote: post #164
criddell wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And how much has Android “winning” help Google? From the Oracle trial, it came out that Android has only made Google $21 billion in profit during its entire existence and the largest market for “Android”, China, doesn’t make Google one dime.

Google has generated tens of billions of dollars in profit (and a lot of money for Microsoft via licensing). iOS turned Apple into a trillion dollar company. Meanwhile it's not clear if Microsoft made anything from their Windows Phone investment.

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

#214

Post by TheIronYuppie »

rurp wrote: post #194
TheIronYuppie wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't do any training on your data. Telemetry is largely for feature use tracking (eg we should really do better around this component, everyone is using it). There is absolutely no ads overlap at all. Literally none. Disclosure: I work at Azure but not on VS Code

A big tech company harvesting extensive user data by default and saying it's ok because "Trust us, we don't do anything bad with it" is not a compelling argument these days. Even if it's true (and that's a big if), that says nothing about what Microsoft will do with the data tomorrow, or the next day.

It's on by default, but literally the first thing we ask you, actively, is about giving us feedback and let you turn it off right then. It's not remotely hidden.

I totally understand, though about trust. We've been asking users for feedback for 20+ years, I hope we've shown ourselves to be good actors!

Disclosure: I work at Azure on machine learning

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

#215

Post by jddj »

scarface74 wrote: post #164
criddell wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And how much has Android “winning” help Google? From the Oracle trial, it came out that Android has only made Google $21 billion in profit during its entire existence and the largest market for “Android”, China, doesn’t make Google one dime.

I'm suspicious of that figure as you've presented it, but I'm not all that familiar with the trial either.

If it weren't for Android, how many fewer people would be using Chrome as their daily mobile browser? How can we quantify the data slurped up and clicks generated on google.com by those added chrome instances? What about YouTube impressions? How many fewer people would be using Google maps daily? How much less location data would Google possess without living in people's pockets?

How did they measure the value of the Google play services ubiquity?

Have these things plus the app store really only generated 21 billion?

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

#216

Post by TheIronYuppie »

spectramax wrote: post #120
TheIronYuppie wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't do any training on your data. Telemetry is largely for feature use tracking (eg we should really do better around this component, everyone is using it). There is absolutely no ads overlap at all. Literally none. Disclosure: I work at Azure but not on VS Code

Thank you for the insight. Would you know if this is written somewhere on the VS Code homepage or privacy policy? I think it should be highlighted!

Yep - here! https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/gd...

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

#217

Post by Stratoscope »

GuiA wrote: post #202
Stratoscope wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A company building products that end up aiding the carrying out of genocides, for instance, is clearly on a more extreme end of the spectrum... Couldn't that describe just about any company or open source project? A database and office software end up helping you manage and track your genocide. A camera company's products and photo/video editing software end up helping people create beheading videos and child porn.…

That's fair. But perhaps you'd agree with me that there's a line between a company making products like cameras - which can certainly be used to cruel ends, but typically easily replaced by any of your competitor's products, and not pivotal to such efforts - and a company building a product that has no real replacement, is central to anti-human practices, and routinely ignores the criticisms and suggestions of human…

I agree 100%! In fact your comment reminded me of something from nearly 20 years ago. A friend was putting together a startup for some kind of "interactive advertising email" and asked a couple of us if we would find it objectionable if we did a joint promotion with a porn company.

I said that if I worked for a camera company, of course I would know that our products would be used for all sorts of different purposes beyond our control, but if the camera company was doing special partnerships with porn companies I would probably quit.

(For anyone who is thinking "what's wrong with adult porn?" I'm just sharing my feeling from that time. Substitute "child porn traffickers" or "genocidal maniacs" to get an idea of where I was coming from.)

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

#218

Post by scarejunba »

stupidcar wrote: post #207
scarejunba wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It affects our interaction. Because I assume you'll act in good faith, I only add verification in the range of errors not in the range of malice.

It seems to me that the range of human error is rarely smaller than that of malice, so again I'm not sure there will be much apparent difference between an exhaustive verification of either sort.

Is that true in your interactions with other people? I have not seen that be the case. The distribution is very different.

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

#219

Post by TheIronYuppie »

thereare5lights wrote: post #175
TheIronYuppie wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't do any training on your data. Telemetry is largely for feature use tracking (eg we should really do better around this component, everyone is using it). There is absolutely no ads overlap at all. Literally none. Disclosure: I work at Azure but not on VS Code

Is there any way we can verify this?

For better or worse, here - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/gd...

However, if you don't trust us (and I get it!) Your best bet is just to opt out which you can do at any time, including during install.

Disclosure: I work at AZure on machine learning but not VS Code

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

#220

Post by scarface74 »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #206
scarface74 wrote: post #148

Microsoft’s “performance” wasn’t bad by any objective metric during the Ballmer era. If the stock market were rational, MS stock would have been doing a lot better under Balmer than it did. But then again, if the stock market were rational, Lyft would have never been able to go public and Tesla would basically be worthless.

MS was basically making money no matter what given the highly lucrative office + windows franchise that Bill Gates left behind. I wouldn't credit Balmer with that too much he just basically kept on milking that. The problem by the time he left was that there was increasingly less to squeeze. Shareholders tend to look forward rather than backward and it was getting very clear that windows and office were increasingly…

If you just look at the time between 2000-2007, the first half of Ballmer’s tenure. The stock wasn’t doing well, but revenues were steadily increasing. During this time:

- Apple was still on PowerPC processors until 2006 and weren’t really any threat to Microsoft.

- GSuite didn’t even launch until 2006 and even today, it’s really not that much competition to MS Office. It has less than a tenth of the revenue and only a few Fortune 500 companies (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-gsuite-idUSKBN1F...)

- The iPhone didn’t come out until 2007 and really didn’t start gaining market share until 2010. Even today, Google’s “winning” with Android has only netted it less than $30 billion in profit since inception (https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-generate...)

- Microsoft adding WSL only matters to a few techies.

- Even the Nokia acquisition happened later during his tenure.

Post reply on HN