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How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

economist.com

421–430 of 487 posts

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another example of such uninspired CEO that keeps making good quarters but tarnishes his company advantages is Tim Cook. I can't wait for him to be replaced. Comments like this make zero sense to me. Apple might be better if Jobs was still alive. But without a time machine, and potentially better medicine, that's not an option. Under Cook Apple: - Increased profitability and market share massively. - Created the mo…

Those bullet points mostly focus on scaling existing products, and seem more Ballmer-like than Nadella-like IMO.

It's important not to let our biases get in the way here. Clearly, it was Satya who turned Microsoft around. Ballmer had the opportunity for years and did nothing as the stock prices clearly show.

Since Satya took over, MSFT stock has been soaring... You can't deny the evidence. That's 100% clear

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#422
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.

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Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#423
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Azure seems to have made $12B in Q3 2020 and that didn't exist when Jobs was alive.

So Nadella is half as effective as Cook? More seriously, I shouldn't have put the comparison to Nadella in there at all. They are both great CEOs.

Exactly, Satya Nadella is an awesome leader. Who is to say Tim Cook could have taken all these difficult challenges which MSFT was facing at the time? It's 100% speculation.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#424
post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple specifically used to call out the DR Congo as one area where their supply chain responsibility was not yet up to their standards, but in recent years, they claim to have established an audited supply chain: https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-Conf... (I'm going by Apple's own claims here, would be interested to hear whether you have information contradicting these claims).

Did the child labour lawsuit [1] get settled? I think your link is describing audited Smelters and Refiners. The kids work in the Cobalt mines and Apple is one of the biggest consumers of Cobalt in the world. [1] https://industryeurope.com/5-tech-giants-sued-over-use-of-ch...

As far as Wikipedia knows, that lawsuit is still pending (it would be extremely early for an US lawsuit of that complexity with that many defendants to settle).

The complaint [1] is interesting and disturbing. But I'm not convinced it's entirely in good faith. It spends a lot of time expounding on the DRC's sordid history (Whatever you want to blame Apple for, they had nothing to do with King Leopold). It cites extensively from Amnesty's 2016 report on conditions in Cobalt mining [2], but entirely fails to mention Amnesty's 2017 followup report [3] that credits many of the defendants (especially Apple) of having taken significant steps in the right direction since 2016. And the complaint appears to dismiss any positive measures taken by the defendants merely as evidence that their prior bad conduct was knowing.

Of course, a company improving their conduct does not mean they cannot be found liable for their earlier conduct, but I would not take this complaint as an objective assessment of the defendants' current cobalt sourcing practices.

[1] http://iradvocates.org/sites/iradvocates.org/files/stamped%2...

[2] https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/AFR6231832016ENGL...

[3] https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/AFR6273952017ENGL...

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#425
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…

Don’t forget chrome. It is pushing the web forward so fast that the great Firefox has been in the backseat for nearly a decade.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#426

I agree that he did. What I see, is that MS acted like a small-company startup for many years; ferociously competitive, fairly agile (not the Agile Manifesto kind; just flexible and responsive). That paid off for them (and it's arguable whether or not it was a good thing for the industry in general -it sank a number of companies, but also put Seattle firmly into the center of the tech world). Then they became a blue-…

This. I feel like Satya brought in fresh eyes to the "project" (that being the running of the office of the CEO of Microsoft). Microsoft was locked into a certain way of doing things, and with Satya, they were free to pop their head up and look around at how the world was evolving without them. And you can see how that led them directly into bold new areas, such as WSL, Azure as it is today (highly Linux-and-kubernetes-focused), Github, Linkedin, lots of gaming companies (Mojang, Havok, etc.). It also allowed them to question areas where Microsoft probably thought it "should be winning", but just wasn't working, and might have poured billions into, such as Nokia phones, Skype, Bing, etc.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If when people say big tech they exclude msft (and include Facebook), they are simply wrong. .net, sqlserver, power bi, hell office are the blood flowing through Government and industry. Gaming is also tech and azure will get there if they just keep at it. The startup world is only a slice of the pie, and not the largest or most important . If you don’t live on the coasts, and you want to invest in a stack that will…

Yeah I work in the Midwest and have been learning .NET for a project I was recently onboarded on. C#/.NET has a stronghold in most enterprise companies out here.

I would kill for C# to be more popular in SV instead of the mess that is Java/JVM. Then again, Go is a better choice by far.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#428
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Azure seems to have made $12B in Q3 2020 and that didn't exist when Jobs was alive.

So Nadella is half as effective as Cook? More seriously, I shouldn't have put the comparison to Nadella in there at all. They are both great CEOs.

Look again. Quarterly vs yearly numbers.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I work in the Midwest and have been learning .NET for a project I was recently onboarded on. C#/.NET has a stronghold in most enterprise companies out here.

I would kill for C# to be more popular in SV instead of the mess that is Java/JVM. Then again, Go is a better choice by far.

No need, just code a fully compatible alternative implementation. It's very unclear what is the situation with Mono (unlike alternative JVM implementations).

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was invited to interview for a position working on the Skype backend. I have no idea if it is a good idea.. since I personally can't take Skype seriously or believe that it is something good to work on. Is that something people at huge companies have to think about often? Good money vs working on a product you believe in.

I think skype is good and important, it just isn't trending, but who cares. The problems are in the frontend unfortunately. It seems to be a Javascript app, and that s just bad choice for a real-time video app. Split mode doesnt work, scrollback fails on long conversations, can't control the placement of windows, designed for maximized windows, private mode disconnects randomly. And please do not ring all the devices…

> I think skype is good and important

There is no way you seriously think this...

Skype is atrocious, and offensive as a product.

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