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How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

economist.com

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Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#151
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

agree to this. They had a good going with windows 7. The freaking windows 10 photos app intermittently hangs forever when opening a simple image file. I was just using Videos and it crashed when opening settings. Skype is still a disaster years after swinching from skype classic. The abomination that replaced control panel is designed intentionally like a maze from which you cant get out. I dare you to find the bluet…

wait.... i am not the only one whose image viewer takes like 10s of seconds to show up! It's so horribly slow that i instead open browser and then drag the image onto browser. I beat default 100% of time!

https://www.irfanview.com/

UI is old, but is the fastest.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#152
From a business standpoint, I would have to agree he did turn them around from a business standpoint.

As a user of Windows since 3.1 (w/out networking). I do the same as MekaiGS "I honestly have no idea where all the Windows settings are anymore so I just search instead."

It was like multiple teams designed different parts of the settings but they never had any meetings or talked with each other.

There are days when I would rather use Microsoft Bob than Windows 10

Or better yet, Microsoft Joe Bob http://www.bytebrothers.org/joebob.htm "Go Microsoft -- Go Intel -- Go America," and "QuickTime is for Pinko Hippie Wimps."

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#153
post #89

With VSCode and Typescript, Microsoft owned the web developer space - a feat that I would not have predicted them doing 10 years ago. How did Google/Facebook get beaten here?

Well I'd point out that Facebook gave us react, basically altering the default programming paradigm for webdev, and Google, well Google plays God and judges all Webdevs via SEO. Plus regardless of what folks think of Flutter, Google has done some incredible work there. There's some very interesting things happening with it related to WebDev that are slowly but surely coming. Real cross platform native desktop support (as in compiled, not interpreted, imagine no more electron apps taking up huge amounts of RAM and being slow while they do it), ahead of time compilation to native platform code for arbitrary dart executables, and transpilation to js from Dart, which will soon have sound null safety enabled by default, all in a single code base is pretty wild. So, I'd say Google is making moves in a very interesting direction.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#155

I don’t like Microsoft Windows or any of its newer products Windows 7 was the best version and Office before 365 was good too - now they just really milking everyone with subscription payments

You get large amount of storage and an always updated product. I am gladly paying for subscription.

1. That might have been a good thing back when updates weren't dreaded, because they would rarely if ever add distracting UI elements or take away useful features.

2. If you're a small-scale Office user who's happy not to have the latest and the greatest, and you're happy to update your copy of Office every 5-7 years, then a yearly subscription will not be a good trade-off.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#156
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

agree to this. They had a good going with windows 7. The freaking windows 10 photos app intermittently hangs forever when opening a simple image file. I was just using Videos and it crashed when opening settings. Skype is still a disaster years after swinching from skype classic. The abomination that replaced control panel is designed intentionally like a maze from which you cant get out. I dare you to find the bluet…

wait.... i am not the only one whose image viewer takes like 10s of seconds to show up! It's so horribly slow that i instead open browser and then drag the image onto browser. I beat default 100% of time!

I initially wrote it off as my core i3 laptop with Windows being slow but then same thing was happening with my shiny new Windows 10 Core i7 workstation. It's really not cool. It all the UWP apps. The new Calculator opens much slower than the older application also.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#157

Yes, he did. One of the best tech CEOs. Got his MS in CS from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Later got an MBA from Chicago but that's a BS degree for the resume. Shows you can succeed no matter where you start, you just need to work harder usually and not letting others to put you down.

And an undergrad degree from Manipal, a private university whose reputation pales in comparison to the publicly funded Indian Institutes of Technology that a lot of Indian CEOs seem to be an alumnus of.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#158
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.

> 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.

It was a few weeks later. Office for iOS was ready to go but I suspect Ballmer was holding it back (not wanting to give up precious Windows exclusives) rather than driving it.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#159

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 gener…

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

That's nonsense. Ballmer kept Microsoft in the 90's style of doing business, but this didn't work so well in the 2000's. After Satya took over he embraced opensource. He allowed Linux into Azure, which is bold. He killed the Windows division, which is very bold. He made Windows free. He made Office free for devices with small screens. He opensourced .NET and other products such as VSCode and TypeScript. He incorporated Linux kernel into Windows. None of these things would have happened under Balmer. These are bold moves and these moves are responsible for why customers, developers and investors love the new Microsoft.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#160
post #89

With VSCode and Typescript, Microsoft owned the web developer space - a feat that I would not have predicted them doing 10 years ago. How did Google/Facebook get beaten here?

Microsoft has always had a huge developer tools footprint, so it's a natural fit.

That they did, but VS had always been aimed at MS tech stack: VC++, VB, C#, F#. And then VS Code appeared seemingly out of the blue, rapidly becoming the editor of choice for languages all across the tech landscape.
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