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How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

economist.com

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Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#391

Post by crandycodes »

pierrefermat1 wrote: post #376
scudd wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think WSL should also be listed among awesome new developer amenities from Microsoft. I know a lot of people view it as a capitulation considering its Microsoft, but WSL is such a great tool. I purchased a Macbook about 2 years ago out of curiosity, as it seems a lot of developers prefer them. I'll admit the screen is beautiful, but so much of the developer niceties are simply the Mac taking advantage of POSIX inte…

I think WSL will get there eventually but in its current state it's just more tedious to use for permissions/networking/compatability issues. Mostly things you can work around but just a bit more tinkering

(disclosure I work for Microsoft but not on this stuff)

Biggest benefit for me has been how simple it has made ssh on Windows. I got a nicer spec'd Surface Laptop 3 during my last hardware refresh and haven't missed Macbook at all.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#392

Post by swyx »

pydry wrote: post #35

Dave Cutler doesn't get nearly enough credit for turning Microsoft around. I don't think it's a coincidence that he was at the helm for two of the most technologically advanced and successful product lines (NT 4.0 and azure).

more info on Dave Cutler for those who are new to him:

- https://news.microsoft.com/features/the-engineers-engineer-c...

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29RkHH-psrY

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#393

Post by fakedang »

RestlessMind wrote: post #320
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).…

No strong opinions on Cook but a Ballmer of the current era is Sundar Pichai. Google of the last few years is utterly rudderless, losing all the mojo and goodwill they once had. That shows in the Stock price, in (a lack of) successful new products, in Google’s loss of reputation as the “coolest company to be at”, in the bloated middle management occupied in turf wars, in essentially most of the things that matter.

That's what you get for hiring the B-school type who I doubt has coded even one line after undergrad (or even in undergrad). Google has just been McKinseying a ton of products in the name of poor sales instead of actively changing them for better. Not to mention the loss of workplace culture, the end of TGIF dinners, and zero diversification from the ads business.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#394

Post by amluto »

fakedang wrote: post #382
whynotminot wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing that's not the only feather in Tim's cap. He's vastly expanded Apple's valuation while simultaneously introducing new, successful products, and growing Apple's place in the tech world. Steve was visionary, but Tim has taken that vision farther than anyone ever gives him credit for.

Most of the stuff was in development during Jobs' time, including Airpods, the latest one. With Jony Ive gone, I doubt Apple has the prowess to continue that finesse. It would be akin to von Holzhausen leaving Tesla, imo.

I think it may be the other way around. In the Jony Ive post-Steve-Jobs era, we got the iPhones 6-11, and, in my opinion, all of them are considerably worse physical designs than the 5. Now Apple has (imminently) the 12 and 12 Mini, which are, IMO, the best designs from Apple in years.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#395

Post by dingaling »

WorldMaker wrote: post #351
lotsofpulp wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MSFT could have opened up retail stores with their boatloads of cash like Apple. But they didn’t want to take the risk with a low margin high cost center activity like providing in person support and expanding headcount. Hence no reward. And with their recent closing of Microsoft stores, it’s clear that they are doubling down on rent seeking from Office and Windows licenses.

I still think Retail Stores were a red herring. Even if people bought unlocked Windows phones directly from Microsoft Stores they couldn't get SIMs from half the major carriers at any given time as Microsoft was forced not to support given Verizon SIMs as one point due to a dumb war with them and Verizon flat out refusing to allow the devices on to the network. (At a different point AT&T almost did the same thing, bu…

> they couldn't get SIMs from half the major carriers at any given time

... in the USA.

Meanwhile the other 90% of the global market awaited.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#396

Post by SEJeff »

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.

Satya ran the entire cloud strategy before being promoted. The things you're giving Ballmer credit for were literally things Satya worked on :)

In February 2011 Nadella was promoted to president of the Server and Tools Division, which oversaw products for companies’ data centers like Windows Server and the SQL Server database. This department also oversaw the Azure cloud platform. When he took over this area it was doing $16.6 billion in revenue. In two years, by 2013, Nadella raised that number to $20.3 billion.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#397

Post by ogre_codes »

fakedang wrote: post #382
whynotminot wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing that's not the only feather in Tim's cap. He's vastly expanded Apple's valuation while simultaneously introducing new, successful products, and growing Apple's place in the tech world. Steve was visionary, but Tim has taken that vision farther than anyone ever gives him credit for.

Most of the stuff was in development during Jobs' time, including Airpods, the latest one. With Jony Ive gone, I doubt Apple has the prowess to continue that finesse. It would be akin to von Holzhausen leaving Tesla, imo.

> Most of the stuff was in development during Jobs' time,

We're 10 years past Jobs and Cook was running quite a bit of Apple even before Jobs passed away. Not even Jobs is prescient enough to have predicted where the market would have gone this far out. He was good at being where the puck was going, but he didn't have a crystal ball.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#398

Post by mindfulplay »

pydry wrote: post #35

Dave Cutler doesn't get nearly enough credit for turning Microsoft around. I don't think it's a coincidence that he was at the helm for two of the most technologically advanced and successful product lines (NT 4.0 and azure).

At some point, I hope such hidden heroes get their success outspoken more publicly: Dave cutler, Dianne hackborn are prime examples. I do like the fact John Carmack and Linus who are well-deserved to have a public following. But there are many more. And it doesn't have to be a showoff as much understanding the context in which Dave Cutler or Dianne Hackborn et al actually succeeded as engineers and the deep technical work they are lauded for.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#399

Post by microtherion »

papaf wrote: post #388
microtherion wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See e.g. the annual reports in https://www.apple.com/environment/ regarding environmental responsibility and the graphs in https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/ regarding improvements in supplier responsibility. Even Greenpeace acknowledges quite a bit of progress in many respects: https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/GG... — keep in mind that they used to picket Apple annual meetings. A…

Personally, I think "designed to fail" is a downright false charge, and "repairability" is a trickier trade-off than repair advocates make it out to be ... Somebody should tell the UK Parliament, they need some feedback and Apple cannot spare anybody to clear up this "downright false charge" : https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/62/environmental-...

I don't see "designed to fail" or any corresponding language on that page.

There is concern about repairability there. I seem to recall that the UK was a member of a trans-national organization that recently passed tougher repairability legislation, and quit that organization to be rid of all that burdensome regulation.

For the life of me, I can't understand why Apple wouldn't take the UK seriously…

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#400

Post by racl101 »

vikramkr wrote: post #79
racl101 wrote: post #70

Wish he would turn Excel around. Such an important product, but so buggy. Very bug ridden. Why doesn't it get better?

What bugs? I know of some that are left in for backwards compatibility, but otherwise its clearly working well enough to be the dominant tool for so many industries. And the parts that work are good enough that its easier to just change the industry to fit excel then change excel at this point since so many people have different requirements- see what happened with genetics recently

Like for example, just off the top of my head:

- Why does search not work when the spreadsheet has a few thousand rows? Sometimes, I'll do Ctrl + A, select the entire data set, move my cursor to cell A1, then type Ctrl+F to find text, finds nothing. But if I filter the column where I think it might be for what I was looking for then it finds it.

- Sometimes the opposite of the first occurs. I'll filter for something in a column, finds nothing, but Ctrl+A and then Ctrl+F finds it. Super weird. Again, I'm talking like 5000 rows and maybe 25 columns worth of data, a spreadsheet a few Megabytes big. Not the biggest dataset.

I also make sure I have no extraneous columns like some people tend to make by mistake which makes the searching take longer.

- Ever try to undo (ctrl + z), if you have many sheets open, sometimes your ctrl+ z will start going through the undo history of other files (i.e. not the ones that you're actually working on or the foreground. The ones in the background or minimized. Guess what? Now you can't tell if you altered data on the other sheets because for some reason Excel registers everything as a change to sheet. You want to expand your columns to fit your text. Good, that counts as a change. Filtering your columns? That's a change.) etc. etc. Every action is worthy of a: 'Do you want to save your changes' even if never really added or updated data. So good luck trying to sort through undos that you didn't mean to make.

That's but a few things and don't get me started on number and date formatting. And btw, these are bugs I noticed around 2003 btw. Why are they still there?

Working on Excel and making sure that it doesn't make mistakes is work on top of the actual work that needs to be done.

I've become so distrusting of Excel that I've learned Python so I can use Pandas so that I can get the truth about a spreadsheet because I can't trust Excel.

That's incredibly depressing that I have to do that.

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