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How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

economist.com

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Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#431

Post by pas »

RandallBrown wrote: post #307
raunakdag wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No matter what technologies MSFT have, the number one thought in people’s minds these days when you say big tech is simply FB G Amazon and Apple. It’s no longer MSFT up there with them. Definitely a stigma thing.

It could be because I live in Seattle, but this seems completely untrue.

it's absurd, but people rarely appreciate the runner ups. bing? not the best. office 365? nah, google docs is better.

and so it's not seen ad big tech, even if it's used by more people.

maybe it's also because MS tech talks don't really make no1 on HN.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#432

Post by btilly »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #375
btilly wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DOJ consent decree was toothless and a non-issue. The one that hurt Microsoft was the EU decrees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._Commission may remind you of that. That said, the one thing Ballmer did right is that he took on the difficult problem of locking down Microsoft products on a security front. This was a hard and thankless task, but absolutely necessary in the long run.

That was Gates.

Hard to tell.

Ballmer became CEO in 2000. But Bill Gates continued being involved in day to day operations until 2009.

Considering that Microsoft got religious about security in the 2000s, and this was a shift in corporate policy, I give credit to Ballmer.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#433

Post by madeofpalk »

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).…

> when someone says "big tech" it's Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, not MS

For what it's worth (and this is mostly seperate from your point I guess), most of the time when people say "big tech", they're talking about the negative cultural, political, and economic impacts of those companies. Maybe its not so bad to not be lumped in with Facebook?

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#434

Post by sys_64738 »

ogre_codes wrote: post #197
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).…

> 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…

Apple lost its way when they shoved Scott Forstall out the door for refusing to take the blame for the Apple Maps debacle. Apple has been gliding on the backs of Steve's vision since then and they're terrified to make any wrong decision. That's why they overlap generations of products as they don't have a clue what will succeed.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#435

Post by oblio »

pas wrote: post #431
RandallBrown wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be because I live in Seattle, but this seems completely untrue.

it's absurd, but people rarely appreciate the runner ups. bing? not the best. office 365? nah, google docs is better. and so it's not seen ad big tech, even if it's used by more people. maybe it's also because MS tech talks don't really make no1 on HN.

Office 365 is crushing Google Docs in sales. It would have been hard not to :-)

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#436

Post by stonogo »

whynotminot wrote: post #352
admax88q wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really have a horse in this race, but I'm not sure that the best defense against > Another example of such uninspired CEO that keeps making good quarters but tarnishes his company advantages is Tim Cook. is > but Tim Cook added $1.7 Trillion to apple's market cap since taking over as chief executive.

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.

What new products? The iPhone and iPads I use today are materially the same things as the ones I had half a decade ago. The only new products that come to mind are airpods and the Watch, and I credit Tim Cook with those, but I can't think of anything else.

Apple's valuation doesn't do me any good (or ill!) as a customer. I feel like there are a lot more bugs in Mac OS than there were in the past, and I'd happily trade Apple's market cap for a return to confident OS upgrades.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#437

Post by cblconfederate »

ffpip wrote: post #151
goku99 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's fast, because it's old

-- State of software, 2020

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#438

Post by xiphias2 »

hutzlibu wrote: post #389
ndespres wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or search for a term like "System" and get results like this, all with the same icon: 1. Bing web search results for "system" 2. System Information, a program that shows a report about hardware and software in your computer 3. Settings, the modern control panel app, which has a panel called System 4. The old "System" control panel 5. "Change Your System Sleep Settings", or some other randomly-chosen specific setting…

With stuff like this, you would think the year of the linux desktop could be a real thing. (if some distro could manage to provide a consistent UI ...)

Let’s just wait for Windows 11

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#439

Post by Osiris »

scudd wrote: post #257
orthoxerox wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the VSCode extension marketplace greatly helps with the huge breadth of tooling. Not sure if this is applicable to regular Visual Studio as well, I've honestly never used it.

Visual Studio (full edition) doesn't have extensions. It's a full blown IDE and everything is built-in. Despite having a similar name, the two products sharing almost nothing in common.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#440

Post by indemnity »

fakedang wrote: post #386
ogre_codes wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I doubt that apple can keep its brand relevant without opinion leaders like design professionals. I know a fair number of developers and most of them still use Macs. Not because they are fan boys, but because MacOS still sucks less than Windows. For me and likely many, OS choice is a pragmatic thing and for the moment MacOS is the least bad option. It's going to be interesting seeing what happens with the new CPUs…

And I know a fair amount of devs who are forced to use Mac hardware because of Apple restricting dev and testing environments to the MacOS. Says a lot when a developer recommended me to use a Linux+Hackintosh (I'm not from a dev background). About your last point, it would be every designer's dream to work in a company with as powerful a brand as Apple, with as big a war chest and as global a reach for massive adopti…

I’m a developer, I use a Mac, it’s still the best Unix laptop out there.

But I have a Ryzen 3950X desktop with a real GPU (RTX 2080) running Windows and Linux, for when I am not portable.

Same dotfiles for all, any operating system these days has the terminal + browser story covered, if you then use VS Code and languages like Go or Rust, you don’t really need to care what the OS is.

Getting religious over any one platform is a waste of time IMO.

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