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How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

economist.com

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Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#81

Post by mabbo »

tiffanyh wrote: post #8

I'm as big of a Satya fan as anyone, but someone who doesn't get enough credit is Ballmer. It wasn't a coincidence that on the day Ballmer stepped down and Satya became CEO (2014), Microsoft also announced Office for iOS, Cloud first strategy, and a whole slew of cloud/Azure product announcements. All of which was developed under Ballmer watch and he handed off the launch and continued execution to Satya.

I remember being an intern at Microsoft in 2009 and going to a talk with Ballmer.

What I remember is the most charismatic human being I've ever seen. The man could have been a cult leader. He had and maybe still has power in his ability to speak. Any question we asked (and we were interns, we asked lots of them) he had not just an answer but a good answer. He spoke of his failures well too: "They ask if we should make a video game console or a phone, and I chose the console- I should have said 'both'!".

But nobody cares about how well you can speak. People want results.[0]

The original schedule for the event actually got cancelled at the last minute- there was a huge announcement that had to be made, a big deal that was going to change the face of Microsoft, and it overlapped with our time. He was very apologetic about that, and rescheduled us for the next week, and then spoke at length about this incredible thing that was about to happen.

That big announcement? Bing was teaming up with Yahoo on Search. (We all remember the day of that earth-changing event, right?)

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrhSLf0I-HM

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#82

Post by momokoko »

tiffanyh wrote: post #8

I'm as big of a Satya fan as anyone, but someone who doesn't get enough credit is Ballmer. It wasn't a coincidence that on the day Ballmer stepped down and Satya became CEO (2014), Microsoft also announced Office for iOS, Cloud first strategy, and a whole slew of cloud/Azure product announcements. All of which was developed under Ballmer watch and he handed off the launch and continued execution to Satya.

I think Balmer takes a lot of the blame that should probably be directed more towards the board. Balmer was doing exactly what they asked him to do and had he made the type of decisions Satya is making, they would have replaced him with a more conservative CEO.

Balmer was very successful in doing what he was tasked with. You can’t blame him for that.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#83

Post by pavlov »

Miraste wrote: post #62
apetrovic wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steve Ballmer was a guy who restlessly milked two Microsoft cash cows (Windows and Office) to accommodate investors quarter after quarter. He didn't have a vision or courage to push Microsoft in some other direction, and my impression was that all good things that started under his regime (Azure, more openness) was either reactionary or he simply didn't care (most of early open source push was from his lieutenants).…

Cook hasn't damaged Apple nearly as much as Ballmer hurt MS. During Ballmer's tenure, Microsoft launched the Zune, the various disastrous incarnations of Windows Phone, Windows 8, and the Xbox One (which halved its marketshare vs the 360). Cook may not be innovative, but he has yet to have a real failure, much less a disaster on the scale of those.

> “... the Xbox One (which halved its marketshare vs the 360)”

This is an odd thing to blame on Ballmer — he was CEO already during the original Xbox and Xbox 360 launches! His CEO tenure was 14 years...

Why doesn’t he get credit for making Microsoft a top vendor in gaming?

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#84

Post by kelvin0 »

xiphias2 wrote: post #23

I'm using Windows 10 because I want to run modern programs, but I still don't see the usability of the operating system to be as good that it was with Windows 7. If I go to settings, or open the start menu, I have latencies measured in seconds, even though I have a fast gaming laptop. As a comparision on my iPad most of the settings windows have about 0.2s rendering latency (some shorter, some longer), but in reality…

I noticed a horrendous slowdown of the default image viewer. Double-clicking on a small JPEG file (less then 1MB) can take up to 20s to finally view.

Got so bad, that I now have MS Paint as default image viewer.

I kinda like the image viewer's ability to view other pictures in the same directory, but the performance and waiting time to view anything was just way too terrible.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#85

Post by muststopmyths »

nah, he turned the stock price around which is why Wall Street and MSFT employees love him.

Every single thing he's credited for "turning around" was launched under Ballmer.

My reading of Ballmer from the outside (I'd left long before the recent transition years) is that he probably trusted his division heads too much. He figured they knew what they were doing and he just had to steer the giant ship gently in a general direction.

What other explanation is there for letting Sinofsky run amok with the horseshit that was Windows 8 ? Or Office refusing to ship WinRT apps, ever ?

Ballmer had Microsoft in his blood and I loved him for that. People like to make fun of his "Developers, Developers, Developers" video, but that man put his soul in his work. Nadella is bent on competing on low-price Linux VMs with AWS and he will lose that bet in the long run.

I don't feel like I need to go into the abomination that is Windows 10.

Or maybe I'm just a bitter Windows Phone user shaking my fist at the clouds (no pun intended).

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#86

Post by dannykwells »

apetrovic wrote: post #38
tiffanyh wrote: post #8

I'm as big of a Satya fan as anyone, but someone who doesn't get enough credit is Ballmer. It wasn't a coincidence that on the day Ballmer stepped down and Satya became CEO (2014), Microsoft also announced Office for iOS, Cloud first strategy, and a whole slew of cloud/Azure product announcements. All of which was developed under Ballmer watch and he handed off the launch and continued execution to Satya.

Steve Ballmer was a guy who restlessly milked two Microsoft cash cows (Windows and Office) to accommodate investors quarter after quarter. He didn't have a vision or courage to push Microsoft in some other direction, and my impression was that all good things that started under his regime (Azure, more openness) was either reactionary or he simply didn't care (most of early open source push was from his lieutenants).…

Apple stock has 10x'd under Cook since 2011. Microsoft was flat under Ballmer.

So ummm, maybe a slight difference in performance.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#87

Post by dcolkitt »

Silhouette wrote: post #46

It's tough to argue with success. They obviously wanted someone who was going to go all-in on the cloud angle when they picked Nadella, and to give credit where it's due, the stock price chart for Microsoft says everything you need to say about the results he's delivered. What's worrying in a broader sense is that our societies have come to depend heavily on Microsoft's previous flagship offering, Windows. As the art…

Windows still directly generates annualized revenue of $22 billion. Plus Microsoft's dominance in that platform creates a ton of synergies in its other product lines. For example how many Azure customers pick it over AWS because they need a Windows-first cloud. It easily contributes hundreds of billions to Microsoft's market cap.

I'm sure Windows is no longer considered the sexy department in Micrsoft's internal culture. But corporate management would have to be ridiculously incompetent to let that business line get significantly neglected.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#88

Post by Silhouette »

wastedhours wrote: post #22
baybal2 wrote: post #9

No he didn't. He turned the company even harder to farming plumpy corporate clients whom they already had on software+service deals with "cloud" thing subscriptions. A Microsoft salesman who visited us last year was almost begging us to switch to Cloud AD from regular AD. This is how hard they are moving toward that. It was just a long delayed admission that you can't make a lot of money on offline boxed software sal…

> It was just a long delayed admission that you can't make a lot of money on offline boxed software sales today. Well, yeah. That's the turnaround. And it's worked. It's not easy to get a large company, fat off the proceeds of boxed software to actually reinvent their business model to shift to what lots of companies actually want (easy-in/easy-out licenses on their whole software stack to scale with their workforce,…

It's not easy to get a large company, fat off the proceeds of boxed software to actually reinvent their business model to shift to what lots of companies actually want

I'm not so sure. The biggest problem Windows has long had in this respect is that its application installation and update model is awful. Installation is haphazard and every program does its own thing. Updates even more so. Data security and application access control are barely existent, which wasn't so bad 30 years ago when the worst you were going to suffer was a virus wiping your disk and having to restore from backups, but has become a (perhaps the) critical problem for software management in today's connected world.

Microsoft could have fixed almost all of that relatively quickly at any time, by providing the kind of robust installation/update/permissions models we see on numerous other platforms today, implementing an online store for vetted software from credible sources, and then perhaps extending that idea from selling the single licences that facilities like the mobile app stores offer up to selling and managing organisation-wide licensing for serious professional software. It would have made life easier for developers at all scales, it would have made life easier for users, it would have given them an extremely lucrative store model to use as a revenue generator, and they wouldn't even have had to shut down installing software from other sources and try to lock their systems down, just provide the option to limit installation on centrally managed systems for organisational users. But instead all we've seen is variations on poor imitation app stores, which have mostly offered toy applications using half-baked runtimes instead of the full power of Windows, as Microsoft tried to dumb the big desktop OS down to mobile OS levels instead of realising that it could still dominate professional and power user desktops.

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