"Our industry does not respect tradition - it only respects innovation . . ."
This strikes me as an odd thing to say, especially so given the nature of the communication. Am I alone in this thought?
Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO
151–160 of 584 posts
Re: Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
You must not work in the corporate world. Microsoft has a massive foothold in enterprise: email, instant messaging (lync), excel, word, visio, project, even sharepoint and those are just the pieces you can see not to mention whats going in the backend. Being one of the only Mac users in my office I constantly have to find work arounds for everything. Sadly they will be relevant for a long time we have almost 30,000 p…
The decline of Microsoft will be a generational thing. At some point, those offices are going to be inhabited by kids who grew up with google docs, dropbox, a variety of IM options, and who have never seen a native email client. When these kids grow up and enter the workforce, they will want to use the tools they know, and will not understand the point of in-house Windows sysadmins, or the software licensing fees. My…
>> When these kids grow up and enter the workforce, they will want to use the tools they know, and will not understand the point of in-house Windows sysadmins, or the software licensing fees.
When your company reaches a certain size, auditors and such will put an end to that.
"This gets backed up where?"
"Where's your antivirus?"
"Why aren't you using _STANDARD_PRODUCTS_?"
etc
Re: Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO
#153John W. Thompson was once general manager of the division of IBM that produced OS/2[1], which was soundly defeated by Microsoft. I wonder how he feels about being chairman of Microsoft now given that previous experience. [1] Around this time, he reported to an executive named John M. Thompson, hence the use of middle initials.
Another way you can read it is with a comparison with Stephen Elop and Rick Belluzzo. Could he have intentionally mis-managed OS/2 leaving the space open for Windows 3, being then rewarded by a position at Microsoft's board? I know nothing about his career or his decisions WRT the OS/2 product, but, after having a closer look at the other two, a pattern of executive placement as an offensive weapon starts to form. ed…
A critical historical factor that doomed OS/2 from the outside was that following IBM tradition, after the evolution of PC -> XT -> AT, they told IT managers the PC-AT would be the last microcomputer they'd have to buy for a long time.
Unfortunately, per Bill Gates, its 286 was "brain dead chip" and absolutely hopeless and slow in Protected Mode, which is where it needed to run for a modern, large address space computer. As I understand it, the OS/2 inability to abandon the 286/PC-AT for the 386 is what really drove the split.
(It wasn't even IBM that came out with the first major 386 system, but Compaq.)
Re: Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Man, a fully functional supported bash-like terminal on Windows would be heaven sent.
It's called MinTTY and comes with Cygwin. I'd never even consider using a Windows machine without it. http://lifehacker.com/5185647/mintty-gives-cygwin-a-native-w...
Microsoft supports MinTTY and Cygwin?
/sarcasm
Re: Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
The new CEO actually asked Gates for help, so I guess it would be cooperation more than anything.
If the new CEO wants to change the culture for the better, Gates could be helpful, the Ballmer regime eliminated a lot of the failsafes Gates put into it. Without a cultural change Microsoft should end its here to now futile attempts to expand outside of its core (has the Xbox, at net, ever made the a lot of money?), put Windows and Office in maintenance mode after restoring the utility of the former for normal deskt…
The Xbox as a foothold in the living room is huge.
Re: Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO
#156Video fail: apparently Bill Gates video was filmed with a chroma-keying (blue-screen) and because of original reflections on his glasses you can now see "through his head". Look at his glasses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5BhQVuRcTk
I thought it was a reflection from a teleprompter.
Re: Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the #1 thing Microsoft needs to do in order to right itself is become a platform that developers love, which isn't the case today. Becoming fully posix compliant would be a great start to that.
They've been there and no one used it.
They abandoned it when they dominated developer mindshare, which they do not today.
Also, I'm not talking about a posix layer that is all but hidden, I'm talking about making Windows a posix system. Coreutils (or something like it), a free compiler, a terminal.
Re: Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd take PowerShell over bash any day. If you mean the console window, that's completely independent of the applicating running inside both on Unix-likes and Windows and admittedly there are things to improve. However, there are ConEmu, Console2 and others which by now work really, really well.
Why are all of them column based? You cant arbitrarily resize a console window in 2014?
I use Cmder, which is nice and you can resize arbitrarily (I agree that it's ridiculous not to be able to horizontally resize a console window).
Re: Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO
#159MS is going down. No doubt. Look at Motorola and Adobe.
Racist comments about CEOs of Indian origin have no place on Hacker News.
The sad thing is that I'm of Indian heritage and I have to agree with him. It's not related to race, it's more about the education that most Indians receive. All are taught more about being bean-counters than striving to create new and innovative (gah, hate that word) solutions. I like the Metro approach. It just needs to be split into two configurations for both desktop and a tablet OS, and Microsoft could have a real winner.
I'm afraid that we'll backtrack all the way back to the 7 days and inhibit progress. It's been shown to happen in the past, and it's not an illegitimate concern, however racist it may seem.
Re: Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO
#160I'd never thought I'd say this after the years of aggressive (and at times anti-competitive) dominance but I think the world needs a strong Microsoft again.
Although Microsoft remains very strong in the corporate world, its presence in the Internet and mobile worlds are now pretty limited and leaving the two power-houses of Google and Apple to shape the industry.
Satya has done a good job with Azure, and it will be interesting to see whether he can make Microsoft more relevant to the Internet back into someone that can influence the industry.