271–280 of 487 posts
Dave Cutler doesn't get nearly enough credit for turning Microsoft around. I don't think it's a coincidence that he was at the helm for two of the most technologically advanced and successful product lines (NT 4.0 and azure).
nah, he turned the stock price around which is why Wall Street and MSFT employees love him. Every single thing he's credited for "turning around" was launched under Ballmer. My reading of Ballmer from the outside (I'd left long before the recent transition years) is that he probably trusted his division heads too much. He figured they knew what they were doing and he just had to steer the giant ship gently in a gener…
> Every single thing he's credited for "turning around" was launched under Ballmer. That's nonsense. Ballmer kept Microsoft in the 90's style of doing business, but this didn't work so well in the 2000's. After Satya took over he embraced opensource. He allowed Linux into Azure, which is bold. He killed the Windows division, which is very bold. He made Windows free. He made Office free for devices with small screens.…
Yeah, no. article from 2012 https://www.wired.com/2012/01/meet-bill-gates/ . Adoption may have accelerated under Nadella, but this was the direction the company was headed.
>He allowed Linux into Azure, which is bold.
Azure was supporting Linux VMs in 2012.
>He killed the Windows division, which is very bold.
You say bold, I say stupid. Windows is still a big chunk of earnings and all that Nadella/Panos have managed to do is piss off long-standing customers by producing a half-assed Windows 10 version every six months.
>He made Office free for devices with small screens
Again, 2012 is when Office mobile was launched.
>He opensourced .NET and other products such as VSCode and TypeScript.
I hate to keep harping on 2012, but yeah, Typescript was announced in 2012 as well.
I'm not going to Fisk every line of your points. There seems to be some sort of blind hatred for Ballmer on HN such that it makes people think there was a magic wand waved by Nadella to suddenly spread enlightenment throughout Microsoft.
The fact of the matter is that Microsoft was already changing.
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I disagree. Tim Cook has been pretty solid. He's no Steve Jobs, but he's done a fine job. Although he hasn't produced any new cash cows so far, he's been a decent steward of the ones they already had and he's taken the company into new markets with the Apple Watch. It's not the most inspiring product, but it is the premium wearable and clear leader. Then there are the AirPods, which fit in nicely in wearable category…
> Although he hasn't produced any new cash cows so far ... > Sure, there are no home runs here, ... Huh? AirPods + Apple Watch are bigger than either the Mac or the iPad and are growing much faster. Companies don't crank out iPhone class "home runs" every 10 years. Microsoft had the Windows and Office, Google had Search and GMail (and made solid acquisitions in the form of YouTube and Docs). Facebook had Facebook...…
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Apple stock has 10x'd under Cook since 2011. Microsoft was flat under Ballmer. So ummm, maybe a slight difference in performance.
Microsoft stock was flat under Ballmer because of hangover from the massive dotcom bust in 2000 and the DOJ consent decree which didn't expire until 2011. It would've been hard for anyone else to do better.
The one that hurt Microsoft was the EU decrees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._Commission may remind you of that.
That said, the one thing Ballmer did right is that he took on the difficult problem of locking down Microsoft products on a security front. This was a hard and thankless task, but absolutely necessary in the long run.
I'm as big of a Satya fan as anyone, but someone who doesn't get enough credit is Ballmer. It wasn't a coincidence that on the day Ballmer stepped down and Satya became CEO (2014), Microsoft also announced Office for iOS, Cloud first strategy, and a whole slew of cloud/Azure product announcements. All of which was developed under Ballmer watch and he handed off the launch and continued execution to Satya.
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>> potentially better medicine Jobs refused conventional treatment to treat his cancer until it was too late. He placed heavy emphasis on oriental mysticism.
While that's true, pancreatic cancer is nasty enough that even with prompt treatment, there was a good chance he'd succumb to it anyway, although he'd definitely have way better chances.
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Apple has been aggressively ditching “legacy” ports since the first iMacs in 1998. How is Apple going USB-C only now different than the original iMac going USB only?
USB-C is fine, its the number of ports that is the issue and not consumer friendly.. And I think USB-A isn't quite legacy just yet (it's OK they ditched the VGA and/or DVI ports), there are still a lot of need for one of those ports. Same with a card reader slot. I also think there is a need for a headphone jack even though bluetooth is qutie viable.
Yes, he did. One of the best tech CEOs. Got his MS in CS from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Later got an MBA from Chicago but that's a BS degree for the resume. Shows you can succeed no matter where you start, you just need to work harder usually and not letting others to put you down.
Later got an MBA from Chicago but that's a BS degree for the resume. What makes you think that? The tech industry on aggregate has plenty of disdain for MBA's, both the degree programs and people with those degrees. Some of it is deserved, but MBA's aren't automatically BS degrees.
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Interesting to contrast Satya with Sundar Pichai, whose company seems rudderless by comparison.
The things is I never read about any major decisions Sundar Pichai has made. There's tons online about Tim Cook, Satya, Netflix's various SLs, Daniel Ek, Elon Musk (admittedly more about his tweets than business strat these days) etc. But I never read about Sunder Pichai's strategies or decisions. What is he actually doing?
What's the incentive to do anything at that level? He's going to walk away after 5-10 years with OOM a billion dollars regardless of how anything he does or doesn't do pans out for Google. Why not just play the quiet card and pin anything that happens to the fiefdom lords who now have free reign and no oversight?
If good things happen, he gets credit for delegating well. If bad things happen, it's their fault. But if he loudly tries something different and it fails, the failure is more likely to get pinned on him. And again, he's already going to walk away with a billion regardless, so "financial upside" as a motivator for success is largely an illusion.
He's a "just gotta keep my nose clean and get out with a middling reputation and a shitload of money" CEO.