I would argue that even though the surface line has been a regarded as a financial failure, it is one of their most important developments to this date. Microsoft has been developing hardware for user interface design behind closed doors for years, and never released anything to the public before surface. Sure, the surface line was originally pushed by Ballmer, but I am so very glad that Nadella did not just look at financial statistics and just kill it. Hats off to you Nadella.
Satya Nadella Added $850B to Microsoft
111–120 of 138 posts
Re: Satya Nadella Added $850B to Microsoft
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you’re only looking at stock price then Ballmer did exceptionally well.
Go look at the stock history, the moment Ballmer became CEO in 2000 the price stopped growing, lulled back down into the ~20-30's and stayed there until he stepped down in 2014. He did "exceptionally well" at keeping it where it was...
> Go look at the stock history, the moment Ballmer became CEO in 2000 the price stopped growing
Nah, not really. 2000 was the dot-com bust (which was the start of the death spiral for a lot of formerly high-flyers, including Sun Microsystems) and 2001 was the DoJ consent decree, which brought a lot of MS's attempts to expand to a screeching halt. Ballmer, while being thoroughly mediocre in a lot of ways, deserves at least some credit for not tanking MS in that era.
Re: Satya Nadella Added $850B to Microsoft
#113First: A stock can rise for reasons having zero to do with the reality of the business behind the stock, for example mispricing, availability or the lack thereof of alternative investments, inflation, currency devaluation etc. Second: To me it always leaves a very foul aftertaste when the achievements of a team are ascribed to whoever the visible front-person is. I find it hard to believe that among the other 149999…
Take him away then. Imagine he just vanished. Took a sabbatical, didn't say where he was going, and just disappeared for a year. What would happen? Things would function. They'd probably be fine for the first couple months, and they might even pass their first quarterly earnings without anyone noticing he's gone. If the department heads all were quiet and didn't notify the shareholders, things would seem completely f…
At least from what I hear, Microsoft was huge enough that tribalism was already a thing even with a CEO there, going as far back as the Gates era. The slowdown in growth in the '00s that shrank the reward pool and the dog-eat-dog mentality fostered by their vicious stack ranking system just made the tribalism and cronyism there worse.
Re: Satya Nadella Added $850B to Microsoft
#114> The company is the world's strongest supporter of the Linux open source coding system Citation needed. Also, a gentle reminder that Satya Nadella, as amazing as he might be, is not the sole reason why Microsoft's stock price has gone up.
> Also, a gentle reminder that Satya Nadella, as amazing as he might be, is not the sole reason why Microsoft's stock price has gone up.
Yeah, Nadella laying off all of Microsoft's QA staff in 2014 helped considerably. /s
Re: Satya Nadella Added $850B to Microsoft
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, Ballmer did quite well at MS. He consistently increased earnings via Windows and Office during his tenure as CEO. He was a very good businessman. He was not, however, a product guy. Witness their failures with the Zune, mobile, early cloud computing. His problem was that he always tried to do what would be best for Microsoft and not the customer. You can get away with this if you already have an install bas…
Short term thinking can make for excellent quarterly financials, but detrimental to long-term growth in ways that aren't obvious. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that Ballmer's Microsoft missed the boat on several important major technologies. Imagine a world where the "iPhone" was a Microsoft product and Apple was a company left buying out other phone companies in a futile effort to catch up. That would wo…
What a utopia. Windows phone was fantastic apart from the lack of developers with high quality apps. I'd go back there in a heart beat
Re: Satya Nadella Added $850B to Microsoft
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, Ballmer did quite well at MS. He consistently increased earnings via Windows and Office during his tenure as CEO. He was a very good businessman. He was not, however, a product guy. Witness their failures with the Zune, mobile, early cloud computing. His problem was that he always tried to do what would be best for Microsoft and not the customer. You can get away with this if you already have an install bas…
Windows. Vista. Ballmer was responsible for this blight upon humanity. How many human hour / lifetimes were wasted trying and failing to get things to work on Vista?
I never had any issue with Vista, but I was running it on premium hardware, not your cheap $100 motherboard
Re: Satya Nadella Added $850B to Microsoft
#117> The company is the world's strongest supporter of the Linux open source coding system Citation needed. Also, a gentle reminder that Satya Nadella, as amazing as he might be, is not the sole reason why Microsoft's stock price has gone up.
Two ways to read it: the way you read it and "out of all the people who support Linux, MSFT is the strongest".
Except "strongest supporter" has a particular meaning in English, and it's not the one you proposed.
Re: Satya Nadella Added $850B to Microsoft
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would if they cited their sources so I could verify their claims for myself. In my eyes it's OK for the journalist of an article like this to not to be an expert in the field, but they should be able to provide a somewhat coherent summary of a topic and allow readers to perform their own analysis on the parts they care about.
We're not talking about whether or not someone is an expert, we're talking about whether they have even a passing familiarity. What an operating system is isn't esoteric knowledge.
Linux isn't an operating system.
Re: Satya Nadella Added $850B to Microsoft
#119The CEO does not deserve all of the credit. American compensation mechanisms for executives are completely broken. The concept of WAR (Wins Above Replacement) needs to be brought into the business world. An sub par player on the Yankees will still win a lot of pennants. I'm not saying Satya is that guy, but generally speaking these sensationalist headlines are a problem!
> The CEO does not deserve all of the credit.
Who gets the blame when companies like Nokia and RIM implode?
Re: Satya Nadella Added $850B to Microsoft
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, Ballmer did quite well at MS. He consistently increased earnings via Windows and Office during his tenure as CEO. He was a very good businessman. He was not, however, a product guy. Witness their failures with the Zune, mobile, early cloud computing. His problem was that he always tried to do what would be best for Microsoft and not the customer. You can get away with this if you already have an install bas…
I feel that reflects quite well Steve Jobs vs Tim Cook as well. Jobs just wanted to make 'insanely great' products [for their users], with the side effect of profit, while Tim Cook is probably fixated on efficiency and Shareholder value. Apple has had record profits and performance, but most will tell it's not the same and its future is not so certain. It seems paradoxical that trying to maximize shareholder value at…
> Jobs just wanted to make 'insanely great' products [for their users], with the side effect of profit
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Diagnostic_Port....