Looking forward to see how he leads M$.
Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO
251–260 of 584 posts
Re: Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO
#252I noticed the following sentence in Balmer's email to employees ( http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2014/feb14/02-04ma... ): I love the breadth and the diversity of all of the customers we empower, from students in the classroom to consumers to small businesses to governments to the largest enterprises. It's interesting to see the governments standing between small businesses and large enterprises in the mind…
Even for governments that are bigger than large private industries in scale, they often make IT purchasing decisions at a lower level of the organization which makes the effective scale as a purchasing entity smaller; so, there may well be a sensible business reason for this ordering.
Re: Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO
#253I'm hoping Satya can break through Microsoft's notorious cycle of be strongly competitive, but then neglecting a product when it has achieved dominance. Also, continue and expand the embracing of open technologies. Do all that and avoid monpoly tactics and you should be good to go.
Microsoft has always been its best as the underdog and that's where they're at now.
Re: Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would prefer a strong Microsoft that keeps improving Bing and its web/mobile advertisement branch, which can counter-balance GOOG on web/mobile sphere. A GOOG with almost infinite cash flow from Ads would be as bad as MSFT in 90s. It's already the case that nowadays GOOG has become increasingly more arrogant.
I think Bing is a lost battle. The real question is what can they do on Azure, and can they move people to a cloud-based Office suite. On arrogance - this comes with size. The larger a company gets, the more internal stakeholders they have. What was once a simple, "Of course we'll change that" turns into "Who else is impacted to this change?" to "Let's only change what we need to, and not get distracted by everything…
I think Bing is a lost battle. The real question is what can they do on Azure, and can they move people to a cloud-based Office suite.
Bing is actually doing surprisingly well, considering the team competes with probably the most successful department and the foundation of GOOG. IMHO it's likely one of very few successful strategic moves of MSFT in competitive markets. Without Bing, GOOG would pretty much print money and pour money on whatever futuristic projects they feel like. Oh, well, they're already doing these stunts, it would only get worse without Bing. Azure and Office-in-the-cloud alone cannot compete with freebies backed by big pockets.
Creating another browser that everyone needs to optimize their websites for separately - not so great.
I agree on the pains caused by browser fragmentation, but I do think it's still a good thing to have IE especially the new versions around. The recent move of GOOG pushing for Dart is a dangerous sign that GOOG is starting to flex its muscle and do whatever they want. Mozilla alone stands no chance in such a challenge, in a same sense they couldn't in a battle against MSFT about 2 decades ago.
Re: Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't Microsoft have 90% of the desktop? About the same dominance in "Office apps", along with their proprietary formats keeping people uncomfortable using "compatible" software. That dominance is almost 2 decades old and it's quite hard to fix. When most people get a job, they're going to be using Microsoft because that's what they will be given. I've never been somewhere where I'm told which search engine to use.…
You're mistakening Microsoft's residual momentum for current acceleration. The technology sphere is a lot bigger than the desktop now. This year there will be almost twice as many Android devices shipped than Windows + iOS/OSX devices combined. The future of technology is going to decrease the importance of the desktop even further, and Google has 90s-Microsoft level market share of every other type of consumer netwo…
I don't entirely buy that argument.
The "decreased importance" you cite is only relative; I for one don't see the desktop becoming unimportant any time soon.
For one thing, my aging parents need 24 inch or bigger screens to adequately see what they're doing. As a programmer and watcher of digital video I need a minimum of 24 inches of 1080p screen.
Then there's the enterprise, where biggish screens are needed for basic IT.
Re: Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't Microsoft have 90% of the desktop? About the same dominance in "Office apps", along with their proprietary formats keeping people uncomfortable using "compatible" software. That dominance is almost 2 decades old and it's quite hard to fix. When most people get a job, they're going to be using Microsoft because that's what they will be given. I've never been somewhere where I'm told which search engine to use.…
Their influence on desktop is slowly eroding, though, and the new battlefield is the internet.
Furthermore, either desktop is no longer relevant as the New Guard (Apple, Google) want us to believe, in which case Microsoft's past and current dominance on desktop is a fairly moot point as far as today's technology is concerned OR desktop remains relevant and we should be pressuring the New Guard to prioritize innovation in that space.
I personally strongly prefer modern "desktop" computing (that is, working with a computer with large displays while at a desk; I don't care what form factor the actual box takes) to computing on small devices.
Separately, I tend to like Microsoft's products more than Apple's and Google's even though I'm not a .NET developer. I'm weird, I suppose.
But all that said, Apple and Google are right that desktop is not hot—even a fan of desktop computing like myself must admit it's fallen out of favor. I've had my share of rants about why that is and what could be done to address it if firms are interested. But putting that tangent aside, I find those who bemoan Microsoft's dominance on desktop are using the wrong angle. If you like desktop computing like I do, but you don't like Microsoft, don't attack Microsoft. Instead, ask your favored firm (Apple, Google, whatever) why they don't offer you something you'd like in the desktop space.
I for one never agreed with past depictions of Microsoft as a monopolist on the desktop even through my experiments with oddball alternatives like OS/2. Their tricky business being what it is, they were not a monopoly. There were other options, but I eventually realized that I didn't like the alternatives.
Finally, I'm not sure I precisely agree with the implied shift from "desktop" and "the Internet." I figure I understand what you mean, but I can't help but envision the popular Homer Simpson quote: "Wait, they have the Internet on computers now?" Being a desktop aficionado, my desktop computing environment is all about network-enabled consumption and creation.
I see the chief battlefronts as:
* Small-screen versus large-screen (where I favor large screen and want small screen devices to be subservient views on applications running on my application server).
* Federated or self-control with sharing via documented protocols versus the plain cloud (where I favor federated or self-control because I feel the plain cloud we have today has brought us tremendous lock-in and multi-device/multi-cloud chaos).
All of these involve "the Internet," being the common communication medium.
Re: Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cloud gaming , chromecast and virtual reality(which better fits pc's due their power) will pose big challenges to the xbox .
I have a Chromecast (plugged into the HDMI input on my Xbox One, actually). I don't see that being a credible threat to Xbox among consumers who can afford an Xbox. Possibly something used in tandem when there's not a native app (the Xbox apps for YouTube and Netflix are a much better experience than Chromecasting from a laptop or phone for me). What do you mean by cloud gaming? Something like the Ouya or Steam's new…
Cloud gaming is when a server renders your content for you, then streams the video to you. So you could play a very resource intensive game on e.g. a cheap tablet.
Re: Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure you can! Right click on the console window bar (top) and look in Settings. You will need to increase the horizontal buffer size or something like that.
Right, but that's a considerable inconvenience compared to the usual ways of resizing a window. Also, IIRC, there's no Win32 SIGWINCH equivalent, so full-screen interactive console utilities won't respond correctly to resizing. While there are reasonable third-party workarounds for the most pressing problems, the Windows console subsystem could use lots of love.
There is equivalent! And many applications know about it. Example? Far Manager, Vim, ...
WINDOW_BUFFER_SIZE_EVENT
Re: Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO
#259Good luck, commander! Scrap Ballmer's toys and go after the big enterprise boys. That's where the money is :)
I think MS had disregard the enterprise/line of business apps a long time ago. There is no talk about WPF. It's all about apps and mobile. HTML5/JS and not a lot of xaml. I can't find a article or blog about WPF that is written after 2011.
What's the future of WPF? What's the road map?
Re: Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? Don't think of Microsoft as it is now, think of it as it was 22 years ago.
Twenty-two years ago, Windows 95 was three years in the future. As I recall, Microsoft's only truly great product was Word (Excel was getting there, I think), although I guess Flight Simulator wasn't too bad. Microsoft was trying to pretend that Windows 3.1 was a competitor to the Mac. Lisp machines were still trying to make a go of it.
In 1991, Microsoft was already ascendant. You may be too young to remember, but MS-DOS was everywhere. Given the failures of Commodore and Atari, the rise and fall of the 80's unix wars, and with Jobs no longer at Apple, Microsoft essentially took visionary leadership of the computing scene by default.
Instead of using proper unix machines, my early computing years were spent on DOS and Win 3.1.