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How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

economist.com

451–460 of 487 posts

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#451

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So Nadella is half as effective as Cook? More seriously, I shouldn't have put the comparison to Nadella in there at all. They are both great CEOs.

Exactly, Satya Nadella is an awesome leader. Who is to say Tim Cook could have taken all these difficult challenges which MSFT was facing at the time? It's 100% speculation.

> Who is to say Tim Cook could have taken all these difficult challenges which MSFT was facing at the time?

Cook probably wouldn't have ever been a good fit for Microsoft. His expertise is in physical products logistics.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I know a fair amount of devs who are forced to use Mac hardware because of Apple restricting dev and testing environments to the MacOS. Says a lot when a developer recommended me to use a Linux+Hackintosh (I'm not from a dev background). About your last point, it would be every designer's dream to work in a company with as powerful a brand as Apple, with as big a war chest and as global a reach for massive adopti…

I’m a developer, I use a Mac, it’s still the best Unix laptop out there. But I have a Ryzen 3950X desktop with a real GPU (RTX 2080) running Windows and Linux, for when I am not portable. Same dotfiles for all, any operating system these days has the terminal + browser story covered, if you then use VS Code and languages like Go or Rust, you don’t really need to care what the OS is. Getting religious over any one pla…

Funny, its the MacOS apologists that usually are religious about their OS.

Gamers who use Windows and devs using Unix seem not to mind.

As an aside, I have almost the same setup as you(just waiting for the 5950x). Probably the most bang for buck setup for devs.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#453
post #340
post #280

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Collecting a check? 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…

My sense is that people who think like this don't make it this high up. Sundar has already had opportunities to sell out much earlier; Money stopped becoming a problem for him long ago.

Have you seen his body language?

He looks as meek as a hamster to me, i have no clue how he became CEO of google.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#454
post #381

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Steve Ballmer was a guy who restlessly milked two Microsoft cash cows (Windows and Office) to accommodate investors quarter after quarter. He didn't have a vision or courage to push Microsoft in some other direction, and my impression was that all good things that started under his regime (Azure, more openness) was either reactionary or he simply didn't care (most of early open source push was from his lieutenants).…

Cook was also running Apple ops for a decade before being CEO. It's not like he appeared out of nowhere. One can argue Apple's design chops and freedom to innovate were because of Cook, who cleaned up all the business and ops shenanigans that were driving Apple bankrupt under Scully, Spindler and Amelio, and create a stable foundation for Jobs to work his magic.

I am certainly not happy with Tim Cook from a Product and Strategy perspective. But from an Operation / COO perspective. He is second to none. So good that I put him as Genius in this Category.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#455

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> Another example of such uninspired CEO that keeps making good quarters but tarnishes his company advantages is Tim Cook. I can't wait for him to be replaced. Comments like this make zero sense to me. Apple might be better if Jobs was still alive. But without a time machine, and potentially better medicine, that's not an option. Under Cook Apple: - Increased profitability and market share massively. - Created the mo…

Apple under Tim enjoy short term gains and greed has blinded them. The company will soon start failing because of their anti-consumer and anti-environment culture. They create false image of themselves to be super friendly innovative brand for creative people, but the truth is far from this. Their products are designed to fail and to be only repairable by Apple. If your charging port dies on a new Mac, you cannot rep…

Sounds like you've got an axe to grind with Apple though, and are biased negatively because of it.

Apple's products are demonstrably supported in software far longer than other manufacturers. People rate the physical build quality of their products very high as well.

It seems that people like the benefits and features of Apple hardware enough to overlook the problems with self-repairability.

And regarding the app store, maybe because you're in the industry you think it's a generally big problem, because you're affected. But it's a 1% privilege issue to most of the world.

It seems Apple is doing enough right that its value is climbing.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#456
post #432

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That was Gates.

Hard to tell. Ballmer became CEO in 2000. But Bill Gates continued being involved in day to day operations until 2009. Considering that Microsoft got religious about security in the 2000s, and this was a shift in corporate policy, I give credit to Ballmer.

He's talking about the TwC initiative, which came from Gates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trustworthy_computing. Even after stepping down as CEO, Gates maintained an informal role at MS as an ideas guy for a number of years.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#457
post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another example of such uninspired CEO that keeps making good quarters but tarnishes his company advantages is Tim Cook. I can't wait for him to be replaced. Comments like this make zero sense to me. Apple might be better if Jobs was still alive. But without a time machine, and potentially better medicine, that's not an option. Under Cook Apple: - Increased profitability and market share massively. - Created the mo…

That is the same argument with Microsoft in the 90s. Windows are selling great, they have great Market Share etc.... Steve Jobs: We are still Better! Bill Gates: Does it Matter? Time will tell.

Just an aside. Steve Jobs was only CEO of Apple for a few months in 97,98,& 99. The rest of the 90s he was running NEXT & Pixar after getting the boot from Apple in the 80s.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#458

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Good thing that's not the only feather in Tim's cap. He's vastly expanded Apple's valuation while simultaneously introducing new, successful products, and growing Apple's place in the tech world. Steve was visionary, but Tim has taken that vision farther than anyone ever gives him credit for.

What new products? The iPhone and iPads I use today are materially the same things as the ones I had half a decade ago. The only new products that come to mind are airpods and the Watch, and I credit Tim Cook with those, but I can't think of anything else. Apple's valuation doesn't do me any good (or ill!) as a customer. I feel like there are a lot more bugs in Mac OS than there were in the past, and I'd happily trad…

Other than earpods, I'm not sure what they person above you is talking about. All the stuff started and matured under Jobs and otherwise Apple made some good company buys with beats, etc. Cook is a great CEO, but he's not a visionary, Apple needs to find one of those as well.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#459

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FWIW, Jobs was diagnosed in 2003, so he lived another 8 years after his initial diagnosis.

Which says to me that he was a good candidate for real treatment.

Yeah, I'm not sure how such an intelligent person could get suckered in by that mumbo jumbo. I guess one can be a savante in some things and dumb as a rock at others.

Re: How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

#460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple under Tim enjoy short term gains and greed has blinded them. The company will soon start failing because of their anti-consumer and anti-environment culture. They create false image of themselves to be super friendly innovative brand for creative people, but the truth is far from this. Their products are designed to fail and to be only repairable by Apple. If your charging port dies on a new Mac, you cannot rep…

Sounds like you've got an axe to grind with Apple though, and are biased negatively because of it. Apple's products are demonstrably supported in software far longer than other manufacturers. People rate the physical build quality of their products very high as well. It seems that people like the benefits and features of Apple hardware enough to overlook the problems with self-repairability. And regarding the app sto…

Yeah I don't like the walled garden myself, but the hardware I've bought from them has been well designed, supported for quite some time, and trustworthy. I never even had to get anything repaired. My line of work requires me to have both Linux and Apple machines and Apple is working just fine along with Linux.
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