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Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem

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Re: Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem

#121

Post by cocotino »

illumin8 wrote: post #88
tdkl wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also stores your email on their servers to get push messages, which no UI can fix.

Worse than that, it stores your email credentials on their servers, so it can retrieve email on your behalf. Terrible, terrible security. I wouldn't be surprised if the passwords are stored in cleartext in the database.

If you're talking about Gmail accounts for example only the oauth tokens are stored (which you can revoke from your google account config panel). If you're talking about an IMAP account of yours, how are they supposed to log into it without storing your password in clear text?

Re: Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem

#122

Post by faragon »

kidmenot wrote: post #19
drinchev wrote: post #6

I was a Windows user for a long time. 5 years ago I switched to OS X, because I think it's closer to the deployment environment I use as a dev. However what OS X did ( when they killed the old one - MacOS 9 and rewrote the whole thing on UNIX based kernel ) was the single greatest move, which I think pays off even these days. This is what I hope should happen with Windows. They should decide on POSIX kernel and compl…

> This is what I hope should happen with Windows. They should decide on POSIX kernel and completely rewrite most of it. They simply can't afford it, not because they lack the resources but from a strategic point of view. See the other comments talking about compatibility. Windows works for many, many, many people and businesses. It would be a suicide move. People, and even more importantly businesses, don't jump on a…

This one's pretty obvious if you've ever written a malloc. Compare VirtualAlloc² with the mess of mmap/madvise/mprotect. I'm not even sure you can get the nice explicit reserve/commit of Windows with pure POSIX APIs.

Then, can you explain why the C library provided by Microsoft in their compilers has such slow 'realloc()' implementation? (e.g. expanding a 10MB allocation to 20MB using realloc())

Re: Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem

#123

Post by scholia »

marcosdumay wrote: post #99
samfisher83 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under Ballmer's watch the revenue tripled. It could have been pure dumb luck. Even with all that Satya is doing it hasn't really showed any results on revenues and profits. Sun did a lot of great things for open source and they pretty much floundered.

It's more the case that Gates left plenty of low hanging fruit to pick. Almost the entire revenue growth was in repricing stuff that was widely adopted because it was cheap, and a few short lived "innovations" that people are already abandoning everywhere.

You really think that repricing stuff gets you from roughly $20 billion to $70 billion in the PC market?

Re: Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem

#124

Post by mrpippy »

justinclift wrote: post #112

> He drove smart acquisitions ... And the author has "LinkedIn" listed?!?!?!?! Does anyone - aside from some MS staff and the article author - think LinkedIn was a smart buy for MS? Everyone I know is welcoming the likely fade out of LinkedIn in not-many-years.

Not to mention, the acquisition was announced a month ago. It's not even close to being approved yet by LNKD shareholders or closing. No case could be made that it was smart, since...it hasn't happened yet.

Re: Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem

#125

Post by gentleteblor »

hacknat wrote: post #32

>At Microsoft, those resources are so disconnected from engineering that they seem to rely on whitepapers and customers to learn about their own products. This is so true. My company was being courted by Azure folks so we got some premium access and it was always laughable and frustrating how much more I knew about their cloud architecture than they did. I remember finally being able to talk to the head of network en…

This isn't all true, is it?

I replied to one of those "Welcome to Azure" emails and mentioned I had some questions about integrating the Key Vault with a bunch of their other offerings. Someone from MS reached out to me and setup a meeting with a developer from one of the (many) Azure team. And this guy knew his shite, and was very helpful (still have notes from that meeting on my desk, many months later).

I was a solo developer, with a startup idea, no revenue, no company. And I got help ASAP. I thought it was awesome.

I'm sure my experience doesn't reflect the whole picture, but i think that's true all around.

Re: Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem

#126

Post by gentleteblor »

cptskippy wrote: post #57
puranjay wrote: post #34

Try this: Google "Office 365" The first result just says "Email". The second result says "Office 365 login" I'm not an internet dunce, but this is just bad user-experience. Why not have a modern landing page that tells me a bit about the product, it's price and what I can expect from it? Why is the first result a login page? I've been using Google Docs almost exclusively for work now. I've ditched Word completely. I…

One of the problems Microsoft has that others don't is brand confusion. They like to ride on their own coat tails so distinct and unique products that are completely unrelated are often called the same thing. What do you call Microsoft's personal email client? Outlook. What do you call Microsoft's web based personal email service? Outlook. What do you call Microsoft's enterprise email client? Outlook. What do you cal…

Is this what's happening with Skype and the upcoming Redstone 2 builds for windows? If i remember right, mobile to pc messaging was pulled from Redstone 1 and will be included in Skype later on.

Re: Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem

#127

Post by niroze »

youdontknowtho wrote: post #93
UK-AL wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of flaws with the POSIX models. NT's creater (cutler) fixed a lot of them. Your dismive attitude is probably due to ignorance instead deep knowledge of what the NT kernel is capable of. Just a few days ago there was post about how NT's IO by default is more performant.

Cutler is a nerd-hero of mine. Yeah, the NT kernel design is pretty frickin awesome. There is a great book about the run up to NT's release. He took on the job because he thought that writing operating systems would happen fewer and fewer times in the future. I think he actually said that he thought this might be one of the last times a commercial OS would be written from scratch. The thing about operating systems is…

Awesome! Glad someone is actually talking sense here :)

The idea that windows=bad across the board is terrible.

Most don't even know what VMS is/was.

Re: Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem

#128

Post by niroze »

Bashing on NT kernel without knowing what VMS is, and what improvements were made that we all can learn from is terribly ignorant at best.

Sure, Microsoft has had terrible problems, but the true innovations and improvement on kernel design and implementation are truly amazing.

Kernel programmers are underappreciated.

Re: Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem

#129

Post by bmm6o »

douche wrote: post #64
cptskippy wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the problems Microsoft has that others don't is brand confusion. They like to ride on their own coat tails so distinct and unique products that are completely unrelated are often called the same thing. What do you call Microsoft's personal email client? Outlook. What do you call Microsoft's web based personal email service? Outlook. What do you call Microsoft's enterprise email client? Outlook. What do you cal…

Good lord, the brand confusion. I work with Microsoft's enterprise instant messaging/unified communications platform. It used to be called Lync, which, whatever, meh, it's a name. When Microsoft acquired Skype, they decided to rename the next iteration of Lync, Skype for Business. Skype and Skype for Business are two completely different products, running on top of different protocols that just barely inter-operate.…

And there's Office Communicator - was that another name for Lync?

Re: Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem

#130

Post by yuhong »

kabdib wrote: post #35
scholia wrote: post #21

Bit too much Ballmer bashing. He made plenty of mistakes so he's an easy target for the ignoranti, but the adoption of open source, the move to the cloud, the writing of Android and iOS apps etc all started under Ballmer. Ballmer also cleaned up the anti-trust mess and -- while his hands were somewhat tied by a dozen years of constant DoJ supervision -- tripled Microsoft's sales and doubled its profits. This was desp…

Ballmer's biggest mistake was the review system at Microsoft. - Managers spent easily a quarter of their year on reviews - Employees often competed against one another (have a great idea? Okay, but That Guy down the hall found out about it and did a half-assed implementation and got a great annual review, and you got slammed for not accomplishing enough. Or maybe your idea simply got sabotaged in some closed-door mee…

I remember this article: https://hal2020.com/2013/07/09/on-org-structures-goals-and-m...
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