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Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

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Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#301

Post by spectramax »

exelius wrote: post #265
scarface74 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple being big into privacy is just a benefit of their business model - they don’t need to make money off a data as a hardware company.

I wouldn’t say it’s “just” a benefit of their business model; it’s the entire point. I don’t see Samsung making any of these moves. Any good product organization (and Apple is one of the best) focuses on their customer. We all know that. But Apple goes further and takes their customers’ side — the iTunes Music Store was an absolute disaster for the recording industry but a huge boon for the consumer (and, of course,…

I agree 100%. Everything from hardware level encryption, localized machine learning, face-id(and Touch ID), T2 Chip, Secure Enclave, afps, secure vault, etc are all not needed for “normal business” but are focusing specifically on privacy as a differentiating factor.

Out of many large corporations the only company I trust is Apple. I’m happy to pay more. I’m happy to sit through their repair bullshit. I trust their motives.

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#302

Post by victor106 »

TomMarius wrote: post #243
victor106 wrote: post #240

The new Microsoft is good and Nadella is awesome. The one product that really sucks from this Microsoft is Azure. I commented in a thread before Azure is the absolute worst cloud provider amongst the big three after we thoroughly evaluated all three. AWS is the best and GCP is next. But due to management pressure we had to go with Azure. Unfortunately the best product does not always win in the enterprise. (That is w…

Could you please go more in depth? What is so good about Amazon and what is wrong about Azure? Thank you! The thing is that it seems to be the opposite when you're looking at it as a non-technical manager.

We had about 70 pages of solid analysis done on this that I unfortunately can’t share but some of the highlights:-

1. Terrible UI 2. Unclear Documentation 3. Frequent service outages. 4. Scalability issues, they were unable to scale a server in prod past 1000 connections where as in AWS/GCP they were able to 10x that with similar server specs. Something to do with how server defaults were set 5. Severe performance degradation and network exhaustion.

To be fair there were some positives but nothing exceptional.

But end of the day it kind of doesn't matter as Azure is going to be used in enterprises just because they have the legacy MSFT sales force that is tight with managements high up in the org. No wonder MSFT hit $1T.

Its such a shame for our industry though. Engineering teams at other cloud providers sweat and toil to get things right for their customers whereas MSFT uses other means to beat them. Hopefully they can at least fix things after they get in. But we know the chance of that happening is slim.

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#303

Post by nojvek »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #262
jillesvangurp wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS was basically making money no matter what given the highly lucrative office + windows franchise that Bill Gates left behind. I wouldn't credit Balmer with that too much he just basically kept on milking that. The problem by the time he left was that there was increasingly less to squeeze. Shareholders tend to look forward rather than backward and it was getting very clear that windows and office were increasingly…

"MS was basically making money no matter what given the highly lucrative office + windows franchise that Bill Gates left behind. I wouldn't credit Balmer with that too much he just basically kept on milking that. The problem by the time he left was that there was increasingly less to squeeze." No, this is not fair. Ballmer reconfigured sales channels, created an array of Enterprise offers including cloud - that's wha…

That’s not true. I was there in MS when the office teams had a great iOS app and they wanted to ship but Ballmer blocked it.

When Nadella became CEO, they shipped it and it was a big deal. Nadellas chant was “Mobile+Cloud”. He came from Cloud & Enterprise. What he praised and asked everyone to focus on was very different from what Ballmer used to say.

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#304

Post by nojvek »

victor106 wrote: post #302
TomMarius wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please go more in depth? What is so good about Amazon and what is wrong about Azure? Thank you! The thing is that it seems to be the opposite when you're looking at it as a non-technical manager.

We had about 70 pages of solid analysis done on this that I unfortunately can’t share but some of the highlights:- 1. Terrible UI 2. Unclear Documentation 3. Frequent service outages. 4. Scalability issues, they were unable to scale a server in prod past 1000 connections where as in AWS/GCP they were able to 10x that with similar server specs. Something to do with how server defaults were set 5. Severe performance de…

It’s just not Azure. Microsoft has a cultural problem of treating designers as second class citizens. Only some teams get the value of good design and UX.

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#305

Post by sooper »

maxxxxx wrote: post #199
bovermyer wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm both wary of and hopeful about Microsoft and Google. "Trust but verify" and all that.

"Vertrauen ist gut, Kontrolle ist besser" for the Germans here :-)

I think this is a better aphorism than "trust, but verify".

I work in the information security assurance field, I swear that 90% of the issues I see at companies with external service providers comes back to the fact that their contract does not have anywhere enough ability to hold the service provider to task...

Get everything you need in the contract / agreement, then hope you never have to use it.

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#306

Post by yellowapple »

TheIronYuppie wrote: post #214
rurp wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big tech company harvesting extensive user data by default and saying it's ok because "Trust us, we don't do anything bad with it" is not a compelling argument these days. Even if it's true (and that's a big if), that says nothing about what Microsoft will do with the data tomorrow, or the next day.

It's on by default, but literally the first thing we ask you, actively, is about giving us feedback and let you turn it off right then. It's not remotely hidden. I totally understand, though about trust. We've been asking users for feedback for 20+ years, I hope we've shown ourselves to be good actors! Disclosure: I work at Azure on machine learning

> We've been asking users for feedback for 20+ years, I hope we've shown ourselves to be good actors!

Not sure about the Azure team (since my experience with Azure is limited to a one-off project that required a SQL Server instance to test compatibility with some client's legacy DB, plus some very recent dabbling in VS Code and Azure Data Studio), but whichever team runs Windows nowadays, for example, hasn't exactly "shown [them]selves to be good actors". Or is preinstalling Candy Crush even on "Professional" versions of Windows 10 considered being a "good actor" by today's standards?

(Sure, even the first versions of Windows had games preinstalled, but those were first-party instead of third-party, they ostensibly existed to help users learn how to use a mouse, and they didn't plaster themselves front-and-center on my Start menu like seedy massage parlors in a Bangkok red light district)

Needless to say, "we've been siphoning your data for multiple decades, so you can trust us to keep doing so even though we're actively betraying that trust at this very moment" is cold comfort at best. I would hope that the New™ and Improved™ Microsoft™ would at least have some self-awareness about that.

I'm sure your intentions are good and pure. I hope they stay that way. I have no way of knowing whether or not they will, and historical precedent says they probably won't. It shouldn't be surprising that I and plenty of other tech-savvy users would take such claims of trustworthiness with a baseball-sized grain of salt.

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#307

Post by shostack »

pier25 wrote: post #94
blhack wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel is actually an amazing product. Google docs is cool, but it’s nothing compared to excel.

Excel is a beast, but for my use case Google Sheets is better since I don't need the advanced features and it's always available in any browser. My biggest problem with Google Docs in general is not about features but that performance is pretty bad.

I use Sheets for work and increasingly a bunch of personal stuff. I wish Google would invest more in customization of visuals and such with charts and allow for better pivot functionality, but otherwise it is pretty solid.

I can't see myself ever paying for Excel for personal use at this point.

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#308

Post by yellowapple »

AdamTReineke wrote: post #165
komali2 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a way we can see what data specifically is being sent to your servers from our local VSCode installations?

(Disclaimer, work at Microsoft. Not on VS Code.) I expect you should be able to run Fiddler or Wireshark or similar traffic sniffers to see the requests.

At least in theory, it shouldn't be necessary to go to such an extreme, considering that VS Code is ostensibly FOSS and thus readily auditable for this sort of thing: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode

This assumes, of course, that y'all aren't doing any weird code-injecting funny business when packaging it up for installation :)

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#309

Post by yellowapple »

chillacy wrote: post #56
kuzehanka wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux seems to be doing just fine keeping software maintained without ads or harvesting data. This mindset is toxic and needs to die.

Fine among our crowd but how many non technical people are using Linux?

Virtually everyone who owns a cell phone that's not an iPhone. Android apps tend to be ad-supported, though, so not sure if that really helps the point.

There's also the TVs, set top boxes, refrigerators, and cars (among many other consumer-facing devices) that run Linux (which completely displaced Windows CE).

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#310

Post by yellowapple »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #112
belltaco wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Ubuntu fiasco comes to mind. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/07/stallman_on_ubuntu_...

Canonical does not maintain most of the software that comes with Ubuntu, at least not exclusively.

That article is about spyware Canonical themselves developed and baked into the desktop environment they developed specifically for Ubuntu.
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