Why Nadella's Second Year as Microsoft CEO Will Be a Lot Harder

The obvious thing left out is that Nadella's second year involves the release of Windows 10.

"He has changed the way engineering teams are structured, largely eliminating testers to speed software releases,... "

What could possibly go wrong?

Ok.. the sentence continues :

"and adding data scientists and designers to the engineering teams to ensure all features are informed by rigorous testing and good design principles. "

I don't quite understand, how can data scientists help to catch bugs? Automated testing?

The lowest fruit can be 8 feet off the ground ;)

Agree totally, poor writing. It seems that Microsoft, under Mr Nadella's stewardship, are moving towards a more iterative design approach, which seems to be working well.

This is probably why so many of the Windows Updates this year broke critical things, especially for enterprise. I feel Nadella is taking a "cheaper, faster" approach which is fine and dandy in the otherwise non-critical mobile space (mobile users are used to being treated like crap and having buggy releases) but in enterprise there's simply a higher standard of quality.

I'm not sure what this means for MS. At our shop we now have to overly-test all patches and then wait a minimum of 30 days to see what happens. This has saved our bacon several times under Nadella's MS when before we only had to do pretty casual testing of patches. This also means a lot of shops are no longer rushing to get security patches in because of his negligence and corner cutting. That means a less secure internet for all.

I really wish someone would step in and show Nadella that MS shouldnt just be an Apple-lite and that catering to enterprise should be MS's main goal, especially considering that's where almost all its revenue comes from. I'm sure playing Steve Jobs-lite is fun for Nadella, but its about time he grew up and started running with the big dogs. Frankly, I'm sick of the focus on mobile and other popular technology taking away from the core competencies that made some of these companies great. The recent actions and changes on OSX are disheartening as well. Or how the steam behind the Chromebook is more or less dead as Android eats the world.

Buying and updating an MS product shouldn't be a gamble. They're supposed to be the conservative and stable big brother to the industry. Ironically, its only now under new leadership that we have so much more incentive to move to FOSS products. Its the same amount of headaches, except with FOSS I have no licensing worries. Under Gates and Balmer, the commercial MS products were less headaches and delivered a fair amount of value. Now just installing an Exchange rollup is asking for a complete reimaging. We don't even bother with service packs anymore. Might as well roll out a new image with that cooked in. The fail rate on those is unacceptably high.

edit: why the downvotes? this echoes the sentiment at places like stackexchange and /r/sysadmin. testing at MS has gone to hell and everyone knows it. burying my comment does nothing to stop that reality. Its well known Nadella personally redid the QA and testing parts of MS and those outcomes have only gotten worse.