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Ask HN: Is Satya Nadella the best tech CEO of last decade?

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131–140 of 152 posts

Re: Ask HN: Is Satya Nadella the best tech CEO of last decade?

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As an "older-school" dev I assume this means "older-school Windows dev", as none of that is new in the UNIX world.

No I cut my teeth on Sun workstations.

The Network is the Computer!

Re: Ask HN: Is Satya Nadella the best tech CEO of last decade?

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and FreeBSD Jails were a thing 15 years before Docker came and made things affordable for the masses. and Olympic champion can jump for 5 meters, but bridges over creeks is nothing uncommon for masses. and Emacs has been able to edit files transparently on remote hosts ... Probably Emacs can learn [if they care to be dominating on the market] on technical possibility vs being simple and handy. ===== And if we take VS…

Remote editing on Emacs isn't a mere "technical possiblity." It's available out of the box, is no harder than working with local files, and crucially, doesn't require you to install anything on the remote host unlike VSCode. Furthermore, Emacs still has the best tooling for remote development. They're worth using even if you use other software for text editing, like I do. Dired, the file viewer, makes working with bo…

are you talking about tramp?

Re: Ask HN: Is Satya Nadella the best tech CEO of last decade?

#134

Didn’t he oversee turning windows into spyware? In my mind, he’s the worst ceo of the last decade

Turning Windows into spyware is working out very financially for MS, so doing so makes him an excellent CEO. Your personal feelings about the company's products are irrelevant; only their financial performance is important. If you don't like the product, you're free to not buy it, and use something else. There are many alternatives.

No there isn’t. That’s what a monopoly is. I can’t not use windows. I need it for work

Re: Ask HN: Is Satya Nadella the best tech CEO of last decade?

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 2022 Stack Overflow survey has it at 75% market share. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#most-popular-technolog...

Relying on stack overflow data is biased towards badly documented technologies, which Microsoft Products usually are.

> is biased towards badly documented technologies

What a nonsensical, unverifiable statement. Stack Overflow is for better or worse a statistically valid sample of programmers from around the world.

Re: Ask HN: Is Satya Nadella the best tech CEO of last decade?

#136
Oh dear. You asked an honest open-ended question, but failed to define any criteria for being "best".

So let me summarise - clearly not, because they don't make a consumer/device (aka phone). Only phone companies can have a best CEO. Then again Apple doesn't have a successful cloud platform, Google doesn't make cars, Amazon's rockets aren't very useful, SpaceX doesn't make a phone, Tesla -is- a phone (the best "mobile" phone ever?). What about social media, ad-platform, AI?

Clearly deciding it based on product is absurd.

Equally we could debate the merits of owning an OS, or an Office platform, or a streaming service.

We could base it on innovation, stock price and growth, market cap, employee numbers, cash in the bank, acquisitions, willingness to kill projects, ability to smoke weed. We could define it as having laid off no-one ever.

All of which is to say, there's no "best" to begin with. There are thousands of companies,of every scale, which have done well by some metric, which have survived rocky roads, which have provided value to society, to customers, to employees.

My hat is off to all if them. Their success keeps food on the table, and roofs over heads.

Asking which is best, without define criteria is hopeless because clearly all companies have strengths and weaknesses. We might as well puck which sport is "best". (Where the right answer is golf because, um, that's what I like. And because more 80+ year-olds do golf than everything else combined. They're experienced enough to know.)

Re: Ask HN: Is Satya Nadella the best tech CEO of last decade?

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Is there any CEO better than Satya Nadella?” The “law” is no such thing.

Of course it’s a thing. It even has a Wikipedia article. You might not agree with it, but that’s not the same as it not being a thing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headline...

As it says in the article you yourself linked, it is an adage, not a law. My point is, this is not a generalizable thing, so comments using this to defend their response is not useful.

Re: Ask HN: Is Satya Nadella the best tech CEO of last decade?

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many? To the shareholders it is. But as a consumer I prefer innovation and not money hoarding. Shareholders think otherwise.

The Apple Silicon chips are a massive innovation which have just massively changed the laptop landscape. People are buying new MacBooks left and right because they can do all their work on a tiny laptop now which doesn't run hot and has a battery like an iPad.

>The Apple Silicon chips are a massive innovation

I have seen this repeated again and again. As if Apple Silicon was made for the Mac.

Apple Silicon came from iPhone and iOS. Using the same Ax SoC on MacBook just happened because they became fast enough.

Re: Ask HN: Is Satya Nadella the best tech CEO of last decade?

#139
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure Windows is on the path to no longer being interesting and necessary for Microsoft. Either they come up with a brand new iteration, or everything will go to the web.

What are people going to run on their computers?

MacOS and ChromeOS.

Re: Ask HN: Is Satya Nadella the best tech CEO of last decade?

#140
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Balmer said it best, 'Developers, developers, developers!' And then Microsoft bought Github.

I feel like Google would have been a better fit for Github. But then it would be about due for cancellation about now...

Google would have killed GitHub as it doesn’t earn money. Google isn’t about developers, it’s about getting data and selling ads.

Microsoft needs people to build things on windows, on azure, on their APIs, etc.

Google literally had the GitHub competitor, Google Code, and GitHub was only formed because google neglected Code. Remember how Google would only support mercurial over git?

And of course, Google shut down Code a few years ago.

I have to remind myself while Google hires lots of programmers and does lots of programming, they don’t really need anyone else to program.

Microsoft needs developers.

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