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Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem
- B1FF_PSUVM 10y agoMaybe, but I'm worried they've given up on consumer devices, and decided to stick to the enterprise cash cow, in the Oracle-lesser-evil model. Entirely egotistical of me, I came from an iPhone to a Lumia and I'm not too enthusiastic about going back (although I also use iPads, and like them). I find Android a bit of a swamp, and having only iOS as an alternative is sad.
- scholia 10y agoThey're still doing Windows 10 for smartphones and there are other hardware suppliers besides Microsoft. The OS is free, after all. Whether the Surface phone will make any difference is open to doubt, but it might ;-) As an Android user, I'd be prepared to have a serious look at one.
- overgryphon 10y agoSurface Pro and Surface Book are definitely consumer devices. As are Band, and Xbox.
- labrador 10y agoUse my bookmarklet to hide that horrible image of Balmer sticking his tongue out javascript:(function (){var x = document.getElementsByTagName("img");for (i = 0; i < x.length; i++){x[i].setAttribute("src","");}}());
- aedron 10y agoSeriously, this should almost have a NSFW warning for that image alone. Brrr.
- Razengan 10y agoOh my, that is some Jabba the Hutt + Baron Harkonnen + Aeon Flux level of excrescence. I feel violated just by having seen it.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoHilarious and excellent references. I couldn't agree more. I kind of read it with the left eye shut.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- abledon 10y agoI thought it was interesting to try and diagnose his imbalances via the ancient indian/chinese medical systems: http://healthy-ojas.com/assets/system/ayurveda-tongue-diagnosis.jpg http://healthy-ojas.com/assets/system/ayurveda-tongue-diagno...
- throwanem 10y agoHere's one you can use to delete arbitrary elements from a page by clicking on them. It's handy in this age of unfortunate design decisions. javascript:for(var%20i=0;%20i<(document.getElementsByTagName('a')).length;%20i++)%20{(document.getElementsByTagName('a')[i]).style.pointerEvents%20=%20'none';}function%20handler(e)%20{e%20=%20e%20||%20window.event;var%20target%20=%20e.target%20||%20e.srcElement;target.style.display%20=%20'none';document.removeEventListener('click',%20handler,%20false);cursor('default');for(var%20i=0;%20i<(document.getElementsByTagName('a')).length;%20i++)%20{(document.getElementsByTagName('a')[i]).style.pointerEvents%20=%20'initial';}}document.addEventListener('click',%20handler,%20false);cursor('crosshair');function%20cursor(cur)%20{%20document.body.style.cursor%20=%20cur;%20}
- mrob 10y agoOr in Firefox, select "Inspect Element" from the right click menu then press delete.
- filereaper 10y agoInteresting article, IBM seems the same, Sales and everything else. Maybe this is a relic of old apex predators that are past their age.
- cptskippy 10y agoYou can throw Cisco, Oracle, HP, and just about any other enterprise company on that list.
- known 10y agoWriting software(GNU) != Selling software(Microsoft/Oracle) != Selling support(RedHat) != Selling solutions(IBM) != Selling gadgets(Apple) != Selling advertisements(Google/Facebook/Twitter) != Selling consulting(Accenture) != Body shopping(TCS/Infosys/Wipro/HCL/Cognizant)
- youdontknowtho 10y agoSO, writing software is a distinct activity from not writing software? That's really thought provoking. It's also different that water skiing. Mountain climbing. Lint rolling. Resting quietly. Para-sailing. There are also people who write software at all of those places...Which isn't distinct from writing software at all.
- codingmyway 10y agoI've always said sales (and marketing) was Microsoft's biggest problem. The are finally starting to be cool again as the engineers take over. The silo between Windows and development (Azure, .net etc) needs to come down fully to fix Sinofsky's mess too. We're still left with a desktop OS UI with huge animated icons designed for a phone even though they've now given up on the phone market anyway. They gave up too easily just as Windows phone was starting to overcome that screw up and become popular with some non techy users as it really is the most user friendly.
- hitr 10y agoVery well said on the Windows phone.I have used three windows phones before switching to Android and I think the UI for simpler things like dialer ,messages or emails was better on windows phone.Especially email was so good ,it used to work a charm even on 2G.I have used built in clients and other options on Android and nothing beats the basic email client on windows phone.May be it was not feature rich for gmail but usability was better .Many of my colleagues is of the same opinion who switched from windows phone to Android.All Microsoft had to do was fix the developer ecosystem but looks like the platform is abandoned. An alternative other than Android or iOS would have been better
- marcusjt 10y agoBut those are just apps, not the OS and there are any number of replacement dialler, messaging and email apps for Android - are you suggesting that NONE of them are as good as the Windows Phone default apps?
- hitr 10y agoI have tried at least 3 most popular dialer in play store and none of that was as good or simple as windows phone's.I did find T9 search good but searching through the recent call list or finding a linked contact was felt better on windows phone.My biggest gripe is about the email clients.I am still looking for one which is very simple to use and has a simple UI.I find even Microsoft outlook offering is bloated or not simple as windows phone's.
- drinchev 10y agoI was a Windows user for a long time. 5 years ago I switched to OS X, because I think it's closer to the deployment environment I use as a dev. However what OS X did ( when they killed the old one - MacOS 9 and rewrote the whole thing on UNIX based kernel ) was the single greatest move, which I think pays off even these days. This is what I hope should happen with Windows. They should decide on POSIX kernel and completely rewrite most of it. This will put Windows as an option for me.
- UK-AL 10y agoThere are lots of flaws with the POSIX models. NT's creater (cutler) fixed a lot of them. Your dismive attitude is probably due to ignorance instead deep knowledge of what the NT kernel is capable of. Just a few days ago there was post about how NT's IO by default is more performant.
- youdontknowtho 10y agoCutler is a nerd-hero of mine. Yeah, the NT kernel design is pretty frickin awesome. There is a great book about the run up to NT's release. He took on the job because he thought that writing operating systems would happen fewer and fewer times in the future. I think he actually said that he thought this might be one of the last times a commercial OS would be written from scratch. The thing about operating systems is that everyone thinks they know everything there is to know, but wow are they off the mark.
- niroze 10y agoAwesome! Glad someone is actually talking sense here :) The idea that windows=bad across the board is terrible. Most don't even know what VMS is/was.
- orf 10y agoSuggesting a rewrite of something as important as the NT kernel is ignorant at best. I think Bash on Windows is a great compromise.
- timwaagh 10y agoI'm reading this from my linux laptop running firefox. my colleagues use macs. I don't think microsoft is gaining anything. nothing against the guy but perhaps its too little too late.
- zaphar 10y agoMicrosoft has shifted focus from the laptop to the cloud. And they are most definitely gaining there. You're just measuring the wrong thing.
- aabbccdd 10y agoMicrosoft has no product for private cloud. You're sure about the measure?
- UK-AL 10y agoMicrosoft have tons of tools for private cloud? Including the upcoming ability deploy the azure platform to your own machines.
- aabbccdd 10y agoTons of tools? Dare to mention any? Upcoming ability - any official announcements?
- UK-AL 10y agoHyper-V + System Center + Azure Pack? Already available. Azure Stack? This is coming up. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/overview/azure-stack/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/overview/azure-stack/ Azure's focus is hybrid.
- aabbccdd 10y agoThese tons of tools yet to be released in September 2016 :)
- scholia 10y agoBit too much Ballmer bashing. He made plenty of mistakes so he's an easy target for the ignoranti, but the adoption of open source, the move to the cloud, the writing of Android and iOS apps etc all started under Ballmer. Ballmer also cleaned up the anti-trust mess and -- while his hands were somewhat tied by a dozen years of constant DoJ supervision -- tripled Microsoft's sales and doubled its profits. This was despite competition from free Linux and OpenOffice, whose fans used to tell me that Microsoft would be out of business within five years....
- kabdib 10y agoBallmer's biggest mistake was the review system at Microsoft. - Managers spent easily a quarter of their year on reviews - Employees often competed against one another (have a great idea? Okay, but That Guy down the hall found out about it and did a half-assed implementation and got a great annual review, and you got slammed for not accomplishing enough. Or maybe your idea simply got sabotaged in some closed-door meetings. Customers? What are those?) - Sorry, we know all the people on your team are good, but you have to fire five of them. And . . . don't bother picking them, HR already did that without your input. In 11 years I went through four changes in how reviews were done, and things got steadily worse with each iteration. I hear things are better now; it wouldn't be hard. There was a ton of bad attrition, of really good people who got fed up with things and quit. In a Q&A session I asked Lisa Brummel, the then head of HR, what she was doing about bad attrition, about good employees who were leaving because of the review system and politics. She wouldn't even admit that the problem existed. The board should have fired Ballmer five years earlier; on the other hand, they might have wound up with Kevin Turner running things, OMFG. Microsoft Kremlinology is a thing.
- amelius 10y agoSo by "becoming Sales and everyone else", they actually got bad at sales. Ironic.
- youdontknowtho 10y agoExcept that they have had many many very healthy quarters over the last decade as they became less and less relevant to the tech vanguard. Don't f*ck it up, son...they clock a grip.
- hacknat 10y ago>At Microsoft, those resources are so disconnected from engineering that they seem to rely on whitepapers and customers to learn about their own products. This is so true. My company was being courted by Azure folks so we got some premium access and it was always laughable and frustrating how much more I knew about their cloud architecture than they did. I remember finally being able to talk to the head of network engineering, who was able to talk me through the finer points of how their load balancers worked (we were bumping up against some limitations). That 5 minute conversation was worth more than all their white papers (which were incorrect and contradictory at times) combined. I think I asked her why they didn't publish this information. She didn't say anything.
- liquidchicken 10y agoWe had an escalation to "the expert" on an Azure product one time and the guy's response to one of my questions was literally "I don't know, that isn't in the PowerPoint I brought."
- zimbatm 10y agoAzure is the worst. I think their strategy is to throw money at addon providers (and other customers) until something sticks. The issue is that their API is so horrible that unless you use .NET and use their official client libraries it's way too much work. I remember one time we published our addon on production and it had a different behavior than staging...
- youdontknowtho 10y agoThat hasn't been my experience, but I have heard that from other people. I personally like most of the API's that I've used.
- youdontknowtho 10y agoI've had some pretty intense problems there myself. I've found that a particularly good conference to attend to get access to people involved in Azure is put on by a company from England called Oxford Computing. It's identity focused, but touches on other aspects of security. It's also hosted on the MS campus in Redmond. Last time I was there I actually had a sit down with one of the guys working on their provisioning engine. The tech and engineering people really seem to want to engage with people using their stuff. The sales support people usually just describe features to people. Very, "Ill have to get back to you", kind of stuff. In their defense, though, in our area they do actually get back to you with real info. It's weird, though.
- puranjay 10y agoTry this: Google "Office 365" The first result just says "Email". The second result says "Office 365 login" I'm not an internet dunce, but this is just bad user-experience. Why not have a modern landing page that tells me a bit about the product, it's price and what I can expect from it? Why is the first result a login page? I've been using Google Docs almost exclusively for work now. I've ditched Word completely. I was willing to give Office 365 a shot, but the signup process is so infuriatingly out of date that I don't feel like bothering.
- widforss 10y agoBecause Microsoft is Microsoft and everybody knows everything about Microsofts products. There is no need to explain anything, right?
- samfisher83 10y agoHow many people don't know what office is at this point?
- widforss 10y agoThe standalone Office suite and Office 365 are two entirely different beasts I would say.
- samfisher83 10y agoThe products are pretty much the same. The difference is just the way you pay for it and number of licenses you get.
- cptskippy 10y agoOh, you'd like it to be that simple wouldn't you? Office is both a standalone product and an optional subset of Office 365. Oh and if your Office 365 license is just standard but you have an individual license for Visio or Publisher then you can have Office installed locally with Office 365 integrate except for those individual licenses that you have install separately and aren't integrated. And then there's client versioning because licenses could be perpetual, instance, instance or prior. I could keep going.... All that being said, Microsoft has made efforts with 365 to fix these issues and the abolishing of the Sales Silo can only help matters.
- grandalf 10y ago> Microsoft’s Outlook iOS app is probably the best mail client on iOS I used it about a year ago and it was horrible, many broken features and fairly slow and unresponsive, and also exceptionally poor UX (like office for web).
- tdkl 10y agoIt also stores your email on their servers to get push messages, which no UI can fix.
- illumin8 10y agoWorse than that, it stores your email credentials on their servers, so it can retrieve email on your behalf. Terrible, terrible security. I wouldn't be surprised if the passwords are stored in cleartext in the database.
- cocotino 10y agoIf you're talking about Gmail accounts for example only the oauth tokens are stored (which you can revoke from your google account config panel). If you're talking about an IMAP account of yours, how are they supposed to log into it without storing your password in clear text?
- sickbeard 10y agoWe'll see what happens when profitability takes a dive.
- rainhacker 10y agoIf 'Engineering and everyone else' beats 'Sales and everyone else' (Google vs MS) How about Twitter ? it's of the former type. As an engineer, engineering first company is more appealing. However, we'd end up again with a different silo.
- dredmorbius 10y agoClickbait title
- leonroy 10y agoThere is one damn thing I would love from Microsoft. And that's to get rid of adverts from their software. I use Windows 7 and Windows 10 Enterprise. We paid for those licenses. It boggles my mind that anyone at MS would think sticking ads in the Windows Weather App or Skype would be a good idea for paid for software.
- delazeur 10y agoThis is my least favorite thing. I realize that often when you pay for software you don't truly own it in the legal sense, but I still want to feel like it's mine and ads don't let me do that. For this reason, even though I think it's an interesting idea, I am deeply repulsed by Amazon's discounted "with special offers" Kindles. Somehow, just the fact that those exist erodes my sense of ownership of my "without special offers" Kindle.
- Theizestooke 10y agoThey're definitely sending more marketing people to post on reddit and Hackernews.
- jaseemabid 10y agoClick bait title?
- justinclift 10y ago> He drove smart acquisitions ... And the author has "LinkedIn" listed?!?!?!?! Does anyone - aside from some MS staff and the article author - think LinkedIn was a smart buy for MS? Everyone I know is welcoming the likely fade out of LinkedIn in not-many-years.
- mrpippy 10y agoNot to mention, the acquisition was announced a month ago. It's not even close to being approved yet by LNKD shareholders or closing. No case could be made that it was smart, since...it hasn't happened yet.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- baybal2 10y agoMicrosoft caters more to business and OEMs than to anythybody else. Consumer market is largely irrelevant to them. Why you sell your stuff this way, you need a good salesman. Yes, Microsoft is "uncool", but it doesn't matter to them
- niroze 10y agoBashing on NT kernel without knowing what VMS is, and what improvements were made that we all can learn from is terribly ignorant at best. Sure, Microsoft has had terrible problems, but the true innovations and improvement on kernel design and implementation are truly amazing. Kernel programmers are underappreciated.