311–320 of 353 posts
Nadellaissance doesn't work at all and its breaking my soul, fuck off pithy headlines. That said, the board has done well picking leadership, Satya's driven a lot of amazing cultural change, and business too.
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In what way was MS sinking under Ballmer? Maybe they were not exciting but they were super profitable every year. I think it's more about better PR. Not everything is golden at MS now either. I am working on creating a platform for our medical software on Windows 10 and it really makes me want to switch to Linux or iOS. Windows is a big mess of old and new code and attempts of sandboxing like iOS but only half-hearte…
Remember this comic: https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/50a25c45eab8ea8c41000... Ballmer brewed the culture to be like that. It's not like that at MSFT anymore.
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I believe this is because MS wants to move away from being an OS provider to being a service provider. If a service runs on Linux they won't care as long as its generating revenue for them. Whether this is Nadella's push or obvious from MS's accountants is hard to say.
They may turn into an IBM variation long term. Profitable, stable business. Not glamorous, but good money.
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On backwards compatibility. I recently learned that apple has deprecated OpenGL and soon will not support it at all. What a slap to developers... so yeah there is some value to Microsofts approach.
Apple isn't afraid of ditching tech when it becomes clear it's a dead end. In almost all cases they've been correct and the rest of the industry soon follows their leads. Think how reliable Windows would be today if they hadn't left in all the cruft as far back as Windows 2000.
Counterpoint: 3.5mm jacks are perfectly fine and were never a "dead end".
OpenGL's indeed pretty crusty, but Vulkan is not. Apple would be better off participating in that ecosystem instead of letting NIH syndrome take hold.
> Think how reliable Windows would be today if they hadn't left in all the cruft as far back as Windows 2000.
Counterpoint: an x86 Linux executable statically compiled/linked any time after the a.out → ELF migration (so... predating Windows 2000) can be expected to run without issue on a bleeding-edge x86 kernel today (and if it's not able to do so, then that's a bug, and Linus will personally descend upon and eviscerate the one unfortunate enough to have introduced that bug).
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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
@ThIronYuppie Let me say first of all that I really appreciate your sincerity and belief in the Goodness of the company that you work for. The issue is not insincerity, but: * a lack of trust in corporations in today's economic and political climate and * the skyrocketing growth of the online advertising business, which has made user data quite literally the gold mines of the digital age The incentives today are very…
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If people don't pay for software maintenance, e.g. Windows 10 updates, what do you do? Ads, harvest data... Windows (likely) always could offer better privacy for a fee. You can buy a Windows computer incl. services at a price point you can only dream of Apple hardware. Facebook/Inst/Wapp and Google show that the majority of people go with 'Geiz ist geil' (cheap is cool), privacy be damned. Awareness doesn't necessar…
Linux seems to be doing just fine keeping software maintained without ads or harvesting data. This mindset is toxic and needs to die.
By contrast most Windows users consider bugs to be something that requires an anti-bug spray.
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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…
If you just look at the time between 2000-2007, the first half of Ballmer’s tenure. The stock wasn’t doing well, but revenues were steadily increasing. During this time: - Apple was still on PowerPC processors until 2006 and weren’t really any threat to Microsoft. - GSuite didn’t even launch until 2006 and even today, it’s really not that much competition to MS Office. It has less than a tenth of the revenue and only…
Windows Phone was a nice effort but years late and bogged down in a continued windows everywhere strategy and aggravated by lousy execution combined with institutional arrogance. They initially launched it as a windows CE shell with severe limitations. Then they alienated their OEMs and users with a highly disruptive and backwards incompatible move to windows NT. Finally, they topped it up with the Nokia acquisition. Nokia had committed early to windows phone which because of the prolonged uncertainty around this platform proved to be a major disaster. I used to work at Nokia, I've seen them fuck this up close. It wasn't pretty and Balmer was right at the center of it. MS ultimately acquired it and then proved it did not know how to fix it either. I still believe they could have pulled it off but not with the leadership (or lack thereof) that they had.
Balmer missed the boat utterly and completely, misread the market signals, and came up empty handed. The doomed Nokia acquisition was the proverbial nail in his coffin: the last in a decade long series of expensive failures.
The Google thing a few years ago was an existential threat to MS. Google was pushing users to chrome books running google office in a chrome browser on cheap hardware that ran Linux. The existential threat was two fold: no windows and no office. Nadella turned that around by making office 365 something that runs well everywhere, including on Chrome OS. The recent reverse takeover of Chromium by making that the centerpiece of Edge, sort of solidifies this. Up until then MS strategy was charging loads of money for windows on expensive laptops. Small form factor laptops became a thing during the mid 2000s and one key problem with those was that the windows license was substantial cost factor. It sort of made putting linux on hardware like that inevitable. It's the same problem they had on mobile. Expensive windows licenses for cheap phones did not make sense. That's why Android happened.
WSL indeed only matters to techies. But if techies pull their nose up for your platform, you have a long term problem because techies are the people that produce the things that make your platform long term viable. Five years ago, no self respecting engineer deploying on Linux would bother much with a windows machine. It was just too painful. Nothing worked and a typical README for developer tools on e.g. Github would be heavily mac/linux centric. Things like node.js, git, etc. barely even worked on it or only with a lot of workarounds and kludges. It was a big reason for Azure flopping in the market because MS sold windows in the cloud when the market was moving away from Windows. Nadella turned that around by embracing OSS, linux, and turning Balmer's mantra of "developers, developers, developers" into something that actually meant something to developers again. VS Studio Code and typescript now dominating the node.js and javascript ecosystem is quite a contrast with half a decade ago.
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If you just look at the time between 2000-2007, the first half of Ballmer’s tenure. The stock wasn’t doing well, but revenues were steadily increasing. During this time: - Apple was still on PowerPC processors until 2006 and weren’t really any threat to Microsoft. - GSuite didn’t even launch until 2006 and even today, it’s really not that much competition to MS Office. It has less than a tenth of the revenue and only…
Balmer missed the boat on all of this because he was out of touch. Android and Iphone indeed happened around the 2006-2008 time frame after having been rumored since about 2003-2006. They both were the logical conclusion from OSS and Linux emerging in the late nineties as a viable platform for development on embedded hardware. The difference between Balmer and Jobs is what they did in the nineties. Jobs ran a startup…
But if techies pull their nose up for your platform, you have a long term problem because techies are the people that produce the things that make your platform long term viable.
Techies don’t matter. The people that were making Windows viable were Microsoft themselves with Office, other major software vendors, and the dark matter developers writing bespoke software that never saw the light of day outside of internal use. There is a reason that VB6 still shows up in Stack Overflow rankings almost 20 years after MS abandoned it.
What were developers going to do? Ignore 90% of the market and wait for the year of Linux on the desktop?
IIS was used plenty for corporate Intranets and many low bandwidth sites. The dark matter developers who develop for the enterprise and go home at night and don’t post on HN or before that Slashdot are everywhere.
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Linux seems to be doing just fine keeping software maintained without ads or harvesting data. This mindset is toxic and needs to die.
[disclosure, MS employee] With the absence of telemetry, how do you know Linux is doing just fine? (specifically in the desktop world, not server world). Microsoft has an interest in knowing how well Windows is doing, and Windows has lived in a world both with and without telemetry. It was way, way harder to gauge success prior to telemetry, and it was also much more frustrating for the user to communicate their prob…
I look at Linux-focused communities on Reddit, Hacker News, etc (there’s always a good rant about Linux’s shortcomings).
But that would, you know, mean you actually need to pay competent people that can understand the discourse and engage with the community, something you guys clearly don’t give a shit about (have you ever seen the Microsoft Support forums? It’s a disaster).
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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).