Ask HN: Which CEO should get laid off?

CEOs generally have to do work to make sure that everyone else is executing well and toward the right goals. Successful CEOs either need to be hands-on and skillful, or get lucky with subordinates who execute well and toward the right goals themselves. Elon's a mix of those to the degree he's successful, like any.

Obviously: Dave Calhoun of Boeing

I'd say cloud is basically a conservative business. The last things customers want is to get their cheese moved.

XBOX is a Google-esque side project with the exception that Google would have killed it long ago. So far as I can tell they were afraid Sony might have created a competitive "home computer" platform by broadening Playstation and Microsoft. I personally feel I made a mistake getting an XBOX ONE instead of a PS4 a few years back because there are just so many stupid things about XBOX such as you can't play couch multiplayer unless you buy multiple subscriptions. And the fact that the video codecs are deficient so Jellyfin and Plex "just don't work" despite working just fine with trash Android devices.

The most striking thing about the Microsoft-Activision hearing was that Microsoft's management came across as indifferent to games. It would be one thing if Microsoft had a business plan that really makes sense (e.g. dominate an industry so you can make money) but as it is it just seems that they want to dominate games because they are a big dominant company that dominates things.

The most notable thing about the Microsoft-Activision hearings is that management seemed absolutely indifferent to games.

A lot of other changes are less radical than they seem. With cloud they can take your money just fine if you use Linux or Windows. Microsoft has always courted developers and often been generous (it's amazing what you got with an MSDN subscription) whereas once the Mac came along Apple has consistently seen developers as money bags that they could bleed dry. It was painful for Microsoft to realize that POSIX culture is here to stay but getting behind GitHub, NPM and stuff like that is consistent with their history of winning the hearts and minds of developers. Office365 is about as revolutionary as Adobe's Creative Cloud, a product that didn't really change much, now they just bill you by the month. It was just necessary to get parts of the office suite on mobile because that's where the users are.

Calhoun was brought in to fix the 737 Max mess. But he's another Jack Welch mentee. If you believe the GE disease and Six Sigma are part of the problem, then yeah he's got to go.

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