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Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO

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Re: Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO

#211

Post by CmonDev »

romanovcode wrote: post #201
taylodl wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? What good would a strong Microsoft provide us? What void would that fill? We've been there, done that and frankly, I don't care to go back. They abused their power when they had it and I have no intent of giving it back to them to give them another crack at it. No, I much prefer today's world of Google, Apple, Samsung and FOSS in all its myriad forms battling it out. There's more developer frameworks than ever a…

.NET, C# and Visual Studio

Yes, the only reasonable alternative is Scala but there is no IDE for it to match VS and there won't be.

Re: Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO

#212

Post by hershel »

Encosia wrote: post #155
hga wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cloud gaming , chromecast and virtual reality(which better fits pc's due their power) will pose big challenges to the xbox .

Re: Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO

#213

Post by UVB-76 »

taylodl wrote: post #197
adamt wrote: post #160

I'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 i…

Why? What good would a strong Microsoft provide us? What void would that fill? We've been there, done that and frankly, I don't care to go back. They abused their power when they had it and I have no intent of giving it back to them to give them another crack at it. No, I much prefer today's world of Google, Apple, Samsung and FOSS in all its myriad forms battling it out. There's more developer frameworks than ever a…

> They abused their power when they had it and I have no intent of giving it back to them to give them another crack at it.

You're tarring more than 100,000 people with that brush, many of whom were not at Microsoft back then.

Re: Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO

#214

Post by hga »

rbanffy wrote: post #185
hga wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compu…

The 286 really had a lot of technical issues and IBM's apparent reluctance to embrace the 386 did hurt them in the long run (as well as MCA). Yet, for software built for OS/2, the 286 was just fine. Its main problem was dealing with DOS programs that wanted direct access to hardware. The fact that developing for OS/2 was painful and expensive was not helping. IBM made a lot of stupid decisions and Microsoft benefited…

Really?

What I was told by various people who tried this is that Intel had no idea how people actually coded for the x86/weren't willing to make segment sizes larger than the original 64 KiB, and the penalty for loading a new segment register was "tens of cycles" per Wikipedia, I've heard on the order of 40 earlier.

So a lot of existing code bases, including a couple I worked on for PCs (Gosling Emacs and a write once filesystem) ran, or would run, fantastically slower in Protected Mode.

Yeah, sure, you could with no small amount of pain write more efficient code for OS/2 1.x, but why bother after Windows 3.x became a big hit?

Oh, yeah, now you're reminding me that the cost to develop for it was $6K for the SDK in 2013 dollars, plus of course a PC-AT with a lot of memory (at least 1.5 MiB, which wasn't cheap back then, nor was the AT).

Re: Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO

#215

Post by staunch »

Microsoft should spend the next 10 years running conduit and fiber to most homes in North America and building out the highest capacity network. No one else quite wants it badly enough, not even Google, and the incumbents are no threat at all. They have the money. They'll never win at software again in a big way. Micronet is the answer.

Re: Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO

#216

Post by whileonebegin »

nilkn wrote: post #190
geophile wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree with a lot of what you're saying, except I wanted to point out that I still greatly prefer native email clients (I'm 24, for what it's worth). Outlook is actually a very competent piece of software on OS X and I use it at work; it's easily on par with Mail.app for me. I prefer either of these to any web email interface I've used, as they are considerably more responsive (even Gmail seems laggy in comparison).

You should try Thunderbird. I switched from Outlook a few years ago and have never looked back.

Re: Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO

#217

Post by michaelhoffman »

rbanffy wrote: post #101
michaelhoffman wrote: post #11

John 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…

He's only been on the Microsoft board since 2012, which is nearly 20 years after the release of OS/2 Warp. That is pretty a far-fetched scenario in this case.

Re: Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO

#218

Post by ZoFreX »

taylodl wrote: post #197
adamt wrote: post #160

I'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 i…

Why? What good would a strong Microsoft provide us? What void would that fill? We've been there, done that and frankly, I don't care to go back. They abused their power when they had it and I have no intent of giving it back to them to give them another crack at it. No, I much prefer today's world of Google, Apple, Samsung and FOSS in all its myriad forms battling it out. There's more developer frameworks than ever a…

It's not Microsoft that was/is bad, it's having any single entity have too much power. In my opinion, right now, that is Google, and that's why we need a stronger someone - anyone. And Microsoft fit the bill.

Re: Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO

#219

Post by mathattack »

cygwin98 wrote: post #202
taylodl wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? What good would a strong Microsoft provide us? What void would that fill? We've been there, done that and frankly, I don't care to go back. They abused their power when they had it and I have no intent of giving it back to them to give them another crack at it. No, I much prefer today's world of Google, Apple, Samsung and FOSS in all its myriad forms battling it out. There's more developer frameworks than ever a…

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 else."

My inclination is the more competitors, the better. But we don't necessarily need more standards. Creating another service provider for cloud based computing is great. Creating another browser that everyone needs to optimize their websites for separately - not so great.

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