16 ms·

How Satya Nadella revived Microsoft

199 points by ghosh 10y ago

intended 10y ago
>Nadella, meanwhile, is keen to stress that the goodwill and positive headlines the company is receiving is only of temporary importance. The main responsibility is ensuring Microsoft remains on the right path in the long-term. Key point. I'm very happy with Microsoft, and have been since they first announced the surface line and the various other moves they've made to make a single OS. But They've crossed the threshold of the "holy crap? MSFT did that?" And they are in the "well, this needs to work a whole lot better for me to stick around." The fact that the CEO is aware of this already is a good sign. Looking forward to the surface event this year.
igravious 10y ago
Well, if that isn't that a comically spooky infographic: https://data.afr.com/2017/01jan/microsoft-ceo-hype/index.html?initialWidth=620&childId=microsoft https://data.afr.com/2017/01jan/microsoft-ceo-hype/index.htm...
- nmeofthestate 10y ago
  Yeah, I'm a bit confused - it seems like MS has just continued to do what they had already started doing before Nadella took over. For example, their cloud computing offering was released in 2010.
  - GCA10 10y ago
    But bear in mind that anyone can have a cloud-computing initiative. Hewlett Packard Enterprises has one. Executing well and building momentum in the face of AWS is the hard part. If Microsoft is making headway, that's interesting.
  - sn41 10y ago
    IIRC Satya was in charge of Azure in 2010, which is a large part of why he got the top job.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- d--b 10y ago
  Yeah, Ballmer is responsible for the 2001 tech crash!
  - booi 10y ago
    I could overlay Apple vs. Microsoft from 2001 but you won't like that graph... https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=Logarithmic&chdeh=1&chfdeh=0&chdet=1311364800000&chddm=1039708&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=NASDAQ:MSFT&cmptdms=0&q=NASDAQ:AAPL&ntsp=0&ei=Gy6eWIHQD5OymAHhtI3oAQ https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&... or how about Google? https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=Logarithmic&chdeh=1&chfdeh=0&chdet=1300478400000&chddm=992618&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=NASDAQ:GOOG&cmptdms=0&q=NASDAQ:MSFT&ntsp=0&ei=iC6eWKDyDou9mAGEv6ToBQ https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&... Success and failure can and should be measured relative to other related companies in the same industry. Last 3 years https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=Logarithmic&chdeh=1&chfdeh=0&chdet=1486761778048&chddm=323178&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=NASDAQ:AAPL&cmptdms=0&q=NASDAQ:MSFT&ntsp=0&ei=iC6eWKDyDou9mAGEv6ToBQ https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...
seunosewa 10y ago
Somehow, they managed to give Satya the credit for things that, by their own admission, started under his predecessor, such as Office for iPad, the One Microsoft initiative, and the rebound in Microsoft's stock price. They didn't let the facts get in the way of their heartwarming story.
- 3adawi 10y ago
  this is the case for most articles about 'reformers', always selling a story rather than the truth
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - scholia 10y ago
    People like stories. They don't like details. This is why we have HN ;-)
- logicuce 10y ago
  Nadella wasn't an outsider. He was with Microsoft when all this happened. May be he had something to do with these initiatives and lead to him being promoted eventually.
anjc 10y ago
Ehh. All the credit being given to Nadella are initiatives that Ballmer not only started, but has to push against the will of the board to pursue. I had major hope for Microsoft in the last few years, and I'm starting to see Nadella's MS slowly unravelling all of the good progress. I just can not believe that Windows Phone adoption got as high as 15% in Europe and then under Nadella they immediately dropped it like it was dirt. The hardware and software was superior in every way to every alternative, and this deprecation has made many of their other successful manoeuvres pointless. It's mindboggling to me that they're crediting Nadella with Surface and Hololens, in particular.
- ghaff 10y ago
  Leaders generally get an outsized share of blame and an outsized share of credit for results that become apparent on their watch. I agree that Microsoft didn't suddenly turn 180 degrees the day Nadella took charge. As for the phone though? Microsoft lost that one a long time ago. They can/should continue to milk other client cash cows and continue with other businesses like Xbox that are peripheral but they're well-established in. But phone would require an all-in push and it's hard to see how that would make sense for Microsoft as a distant #3. Focusing on Azure doesn't preclude them doing something like that of course; Microsoft's a big company. But I can't fault them from deciding that they largely missed mobile and moving on. (I'm unconvinced Surface and Hololens will amount to anything significant either but I don't really see those as a focus.)
  - anjc 10y ago
    Oh Phones are gone. Finito. But they weren't a few years ago. They were taking a sharp incline with the 9xx range of Lumias in Europe, and they only declined when Microsoft whipped all Lumias from stores and released nothing for a year, the 950 range, which they stopped supporting before they'd even stopped selling it. W10M is effectively still in beta and there are no phones to use it now. But in the meantime they'd been pushing Continuum, W10/Phone integration, UWP, Xbox/Phone integration and so on. So removing phones tarnished a large chunk of their product line imo. Same for the Band. There's no competitor to it, still, and it's also gone. Same for Kinect. Same for Onedrive subscriptions, etc etc. This is what worries me about Nadella's MS and it's the same thing that worries me about Cook's Apple...treating the product line like commodities without acknowledging the importance of the ecosystem. Having said that, as you say, they're a big company. My perspective is solely from that of a devices user.
mark_l_watson 10y ago
I really like the direction Microsoft is going in, especially Surface devices, the very nice Office 355 service, and Azure. The one area where I think they have failed horribly is in the phone market. The lack of having a solid phone that interacts with their other devices, and has a rich app/developer ecosystem cost them my business recently: I am in my 60s, and comfortably semi-retired. After decades of being a Linux-as-much-as-possible enthusiast, I now want my interaction with my devices to be as easy and workable as possible. The time I still spend writing and software development should be as efficient as possible, in the deep work sense I want to spend just a few hours a day producing things hopefully useful to society, as effectively as possible. Recently I spent a month evaluation of staying with Apple or getting a Surface Pro. I stuck with getting a new MacBook and with my iPad Pro because of the availability of the iPhone (I am still on Android, but will switch soon), with nothing comproble from Microsoft. Whatever it takes, I think Microsoft should get back in the phone business with a winning product.
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  They're pretty aware of this. But breaking a duopoly like this requires more than just a "great phone". Microsoft has had and does have "great phones", but without the app ecosystem to back them, it doesn't matter that the phones are great. The Windows Phone might run faster, have a longer battery life, and just work better than the comparable Android flagship, but since you can get freaking Pokémon GO on the Android, people will buy the latter. Microsoft is basically waiting for a chance at a paradigm shift in what it means to have a smartphone, so that they can release something you can get nowhere else. In the meantime, they're kinda just treading water and keeping their mobile OS workable and modern.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    > The Windows Phone might run faster, have a longer battery life, and just work better than the comparable Android flagship Which is the reason when my S3 dies, I might just adopt one of my Lumias as main device. I am not willing to pay more than 300€ for a smartphone and it is pretty clear Google has no motivation to fix the mess of Android upgrades.
yaseer 10y ago
Although I think Nadella has made some good changes to company culture, there's a lot more variables that influence a company's performance than the CEO, just as there's a lot more variables that influence a country's Economic performance than a ruling party. The piece does that all-too-common simplification of providing a single cause to explain the fluctuation is MSFT's fortunes, a form of cognitive bias I believe. We like simple stories for complex phenomena. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_the_single_cause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_the_single_cause
- perseusprime11 10y ago
  I agree there is no single cause but you are also under estimating the power of a CEO who is responsible for resource allocation and investments. Where he chooses to invest is what becomes of a company. Culture also flows from top down and CEO plays a big role.
  - yaseer 10y ago
    Oh I don't dispute that his impact has been significant and positive. I just think there's other factors at play here. For example, Google was extremely slow to market with a competitive cloud strategy, and Apple has been a less competitive player the last 3 years with its own product innovation.
    - zdean 10y ago
      Isn't that kind of like saying that a runner doesn't deserve credit for her win because the other people in the race ran slower than she did?
      - yaseer 10y ago
        Change the runner analogy to manager of a sports team. It's hard to only credit one manager over another when the opposition is a big factor in the equation (along with the strength of the team).
    - 10y ago
d--b 10y ago
People at Microsoft said the wind of change was blowing long before Nadella took the job. They timed the announcement of Nadella to coincide with deliveries of new products / open platforms. The whole thing was to change the image of Microsoft: New products + new face = new Microsoft. It's not like Nadella fired every one and started afresh.
- jonknee 10y ago
  > It's not like Nadella fired every one and started afresh. He announced huge layoffs (18,000 people) almost as soon as he took over. A lot of Nokia people, but also 5,500 people not related to mobile and 1,400 of them at HQ. A year later he made another huge cut of 7,800 people.
  - simonh 10y ago
    More evidence for d--b's point. Firing 18k people at Microsoft's scale isn't even close to burning it down and starting from scratch. It's also not something a newly minted CEO would be able to get past the board on such short notice. It must have been planned in advance. Whatever you say about Balmer, someone at MSFT knew how to flawlessly execute a masterful transition plan. I though Apple did a good job, but MSFT nailed it.
    - piaste 10y ago
      > Firing 18k people at Microsoft's scale isn't even close to burning it down and starting from scratch. Eh... According to Wikipedia, MS had 114k employees total as of mid-2016. Given that, I'd say a 18k layoff definitely counts as a big deal.
      - rugdobe 10y ago
        majority of this layoff was the hardware guys from Nokia acquisition.
      - jonknee 10y ago
        It was certainly treated as such locally in Seattle.
johnnycarcin 10y ago
I can't speak to the product side because up until a year ago I hardly used any MSFT products but I can say that the culture that has been brought by Satya, and likely his reports, is one of the reasons I joined MSFT after being a longtime hater. When I was approached to come work for MSFT I said "no" right away. The person recruiting me said "just listen to our pitch and then you can say 'no' if you want". After hearing Satya talk about where he wants the company to go and what it'll take to get there I had a 180 degree switch on how I felt about MSFT. I talked with some other old-timers who were there to see if things really had changed and they all told me that it was a slow progression but things were certainly changing for the better. Now it's totally possible that they all are just good at selling to people but it was enough to get me to join and 95% of the time I'm glad I did.
- ditados 10y ago
  You aren't at a subsidiary, obviously. As the tide shifts to pushing Azure, the sales people are going ballistic and circle customers like sharks, with insane targets. I joined a short while ago and deeply regret it, since all we do is sales. Even OSS is treated as a pure sales play.
  - johnnycarcin 10y ago
    I actually think we are in the same roles (CSA) :). I have seen the same thing you are talking about and it is certainly one of the shitty parts of the job. Luckily I've done enough with the sales group around me that they are starting to understand that you don't sell Azure like you would O365 or whatever. There are still days where I walk away thinking that I must be on a different planet but the time I get to spend working with customers and building cool shit makes up for all of the bs.
starik36 10y ago
I am not sure how he "revived" Microsoft. 1. They've completely dropped the Phone market under him. As in gave up. 2. They are not in the personal assistant game at all. Alexa & Google have that market all to themselves. 3. The educational market is steadily switching to Chromebooks. The new generation of kids will likely not even know how to use MS Office. 4. On the back end, they've made .NET work on Mac and Linux. This is great for me, since I don't have to worry about Windows Server licenses, but doesn't this eat into their large cash cow? 5. SQL Server - the other cash cow, is great, but free alternatives will start affecting the bottom line. 6. Windows 10 rollout stalled very much short of their stated goal of being on 1 billion devices.
- hunterwerlla 10y ago
  1. The phone line that was losing a ton of money 2. This is being worked on, there is cortana for cars, pc's and phones, so it would make sense for it to expand to even more devices in the future. 3. This is the point of windows 10 cloud, which recently leaked. 4. Windows is really not the cash cow of Microsoft, getting more people into the ecosystem is better for buisiness. 5. Free alternatives have existed forever, alternatives that you could argue are the same or better, recently SQL Server was ported to linux which actually should shore up its market share, and even possibly increase it. 6. True but does this actually matter that much?
  - ConceptJunkie 10y ago
    hunterwerlia, I find it amusing that your response, which came in while I was writing mine, says pretty much the same thing. :-)
  - starik36 10y ago
    You are kind of proving my point that Microsoft, in fact, was not "revived" by Nadella. 2. Maybe it is being worked on and maybe it'll even be great. The problem is that people don't replace personal assistants every 2 years. They lost the first mover advantage. 4. Windows for enterprises, specifically server versions are cash cows. I fail to see the value (to Microsoft) of a developer getting into the .NET ecosystem if they intend to run your code on Linux. 5. It's true that free alternatives have always been around. But now, they are reasonably good. And more importantly, good enough. 6. Yes, it does. It's actually one of the few places where they could monetize people getting into their ecosystem.
floopidydoopidy 10y ago
This whole article is an example of astroturfing. Why don't you guys ban this shit?
kermittd 10y ago
Is everyone a cynic online?
- simplehuman 10y ago
  I have a great theory here. If you agree entirely mostly with the article, there is nothing to comment. Or you have to write something boring. But if you want to comment and get karma, you have to write something spicy. And thus the comments are all cynical and contrarian.
- tortasaur 10y ago
  No, but they're generally less susceptible to the more transparent forms of marketing.
awinder 10y ago
I think Microsoft has done a great job of transforming to being very brand-conscious and these stories are both a recognition of that from the press, and a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy (they talk about how different they are, the press does, then they point to the press and dress up their UX, it's very self-feeding in a way). That said -- I can't say I've experienced great technical changes in the products from microsoft that I do use, at least yet. Windows 10 is still windows underneath, and I've run into some real rough patches on windows 10 on my tower setup. Xbox controllers are still breaking down after several months. Their Cloud offering just blows my mind in a bad way in almost every interaction I've had the displeasure of experiencing. So I read articles like this and look at the rebranding and really have a hard time deciding whether I want to point to these things as at least having a good direction, and showing that they understand that they need to care about these things. But then I'm dismayed at the execution. Does anyone else have the same thing going on?
z0d 10y ago
Shocked to see Windows 10 being depicted as an advancement in some of the comments along with that office 365 service. Yeah the Halcyon days of PC ate definitely gone by looking at these cringrworthy points. M$ clearly have made their point with continuous eternal Beta program and sheeple insider ring, UWP and WDDM2.0, Gimmicky stuff cough DX12 gamemode cough. Destroyed the PC, Mr Nadella should be praised for all this...
bcg1 10y ago
They credit Nadella with increasing the stock price... but MSFT performance is basically the same as the overall NASDAQ composite (of course I'm sure MSFT itself is a large portion of that index) as well as the larger S&P 500 index. http://stockcharts.com/freecharts/perf.php?$COMPQ,MSFT,$SPX&n=4556&O=011000 http://stockcharts.com/freecharts/perf.php?$COMPQ,MSFT,$SPX&...
- awa 10y ago
  you dont see it behind by 30+% in 2013 to nasdaq and now meeting it to equal now. See: http://stockcharts.com/freecharts/perf.php?$COMPQ,MSFT,$SPX&n=3006&O=011000 http://stockcharts.com/freecharts/perf.php?$COMPQ,MSFT,$SPX&... .
camdenlock 10y ago
Having spent my youth childishly ranting against the evils of M$, and now coming to terms with the fact that I sincerely use VS Code because it's great, I can't shake the frequent uncanny feeling that I'm stuck in an episode of Sliders.
- ino 10y ago
  DOS 6.22 + WIN 3.11 were great. Windows 7 was great. Windows 10 is not. Having a good cross platform code editor surely isn't going to make me use Windows 10.
  - bsaul 10y ago
    Dos + win 3.11 was an absolute crap. Had a mac at the time and i couldn't understand how people could cope with that horror. Anything, from atari to amiga to mac was obviously better. Windows started to be usable starting windows 95. Before that, it was mainly a hack.
    - scholia 10y ago
      Windows 3.x was wonderful if you had DOS, which was almost everyone did. DOS, WordStar (or Word Perfect) and Lotus 1-2-3. It was really cheap [1], and it ran on top of DOS, so you didn't lose anything you already had. The big advantage was access to a GUI and new graphical applications. If you didn't like it, you didn't have to run it, but it was always more useful than the old-style character-based DOS front-ends. The alternatives to Windows 3.x involved paying up to 20x more for a different operating system, installing it, and possibly losing what you already had, OR dumping your whole expensive system and buying another expensive system, buying expensive new apps, and relearning everything. Worse, you'd be buying another expensive system while losing access to Lotus 1-2-3 (on which your commercial life probably depended). The real alternatives weren't the 68000-based Amiga/Atari/Mac etc, they were DesQview and DR GEM. Not sure why DesQview failed. However, Apple did Microsoft a huge favor by suing Digital Research and effectively killing GEM (except on the Atari ST). [1] From my faulty memory, it was something like $40 when business applications cost $200 to $600. OS/2 cost around $500 and Sun was charging $950 for Unix.
Entangled 10y ago
Revived? I haven't touched a ms product in over a decade. And by god I won't until the end of my miserable days in this world.
jernfrost 10y ago
Refreshing to see somebody who is not an asshole succeed. Too many people seem to have concluded that success can only be achieved by being some variation of asshole whether it is Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Steve Balmer or Larry Ellison. Mind you I am a huge fan of Steve Jobs, despite the fact that I think he also was kind of an asshole. People are complicated I don't think Steve succeeded because he was an asshole but due to the other qualities he had not related to being an asshole. And people of course change. Bill Gates seems like a much nicer man today than he was when he ran Microsoft. I guess much the same happened with Steve Jobs. He was a better person in his older years than in his younger.
- mhermher 10y ago
  A coworker once described to me how he thought people misinterpreted Jobs' success. Jobs didn't succeed because he was an asshole, he succeeded despite being an asshole. You sometimes see people trying to emulate Jobs and thinking they need to be an asshole. His take was that they completely missed the reasons for Jobs' success. He was definitely an asshole though, especially early on.
- v3gas 10y ago
  How is (or was?) Bill Gates an asshole?
  - Truth_Stands 10y ago
    Sam Altman is the epitomized replication of Steve Ballmer, just give it a few years until theres an Indian replacement before YC gets back on track. Hubris makes it easy to deviate from the optimal form over function till it devolves into a wild goose chase. Its just a matter of time but until someone gets that Sam Altman's head out of his orifice, we're bound to see that trend Microsoft experienced during the Ballmer days
  - gozur88 10y ago
    You need to read the "fuck counter" story. I woldn't work for someone like this: >"Bill doesn’t really want to review your spec, he just wants to make sure you’ve got it under control. His standard M.O. is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don’t know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared." https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
woofdogwoof 10y ago
It really helps when you have a monopoly, for both operating systems and Office applications, and more cash than most countries in the world.

199 points by ghosh 10y ago

>Nadella, meanwhile, is keen to stress that the goodwill and positive headlines the company is receiving is only of temporary importance. The main responsibility is ensuring Microsoft remains on the right path in the long-term. Key point. I'm very happy with Microsoft, and have been since they first announced the surface line and the various other moves they've made to make a single OS. But They've crossed the threshold of the "holy crap? MSFT did that?" And they are in the "well, this needs to work a whole lot better for me to stick around." The fact that the CEO is aware of this already is a good sign. Looking forward to the surface event this year.

igravious 10y ago

Well, if that isn't that a comically spooky infographic: https://data.afr.com/2017/01jan/microsoft-ceo-hype/index.html?initialWidth=620&childId=microsoft https://data.afr.com/2017/01jan/microsoft-ceo-hype/index.htm...

nmeofthestate 10y ago
Yeah, I'm a bit confused - it seems like MS has just continued to do what they had already started doing before Nadella took over. For example, their cloud computing offering was released in 2010.
- GCA10 10y ago
  But bear in mind that anyone can have a cloud-computing initiative. Hewlett Packard Enterprises has one. Executing well and building momentum in the face of AWS is the hard part. If Microsoft is making headway, that's interesting.
- sn41 10y ago
  IIRC Satya was in charge of Azure in 2010, which is a large part of why he got the top job.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
d--b 10y ago
Yeah, Ballmer is responsible for the 2001 tech crash!
- booi 10y ago
  I could overlay Apple vs. Microsoft from 2001 but you won't like that graph... https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=Logarithmic&chdeh=1&chfdeh=0&chdet=1311364800000&chddm=1039708&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=NASDAQ:MSFT&cmptdms=0&q=NASDAQ:AAPL&ntsp=0&ei=Gy6eWIHQD5OymAHhtI3oAQ https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&... or how about Google? https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=Logarithmic&chdeh=1&chfdeh=0&chdet=1300478400000&chddm=992618&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=NASDAQ:GOOG&cmptdms=0&q=NASDAQ:MSFT&ntsp=0&ei=iC6eWKDyDou9mAGEv6ToBQ https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&... Success and failure can and should be measured relative to other related companies in the same industry. Last 3 years https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=Logarithmic&chdeh=1&chfdeh=0&chdet=1486761778048&chddm=323178&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=NASDAQ:AAPL&cmptdms=0&q=NASDAQ:MSFT&ntsp=0&ei=iC6eWKDyDou9mAGEv6ToBQ https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...

seunosewa 10y ago

Somehow, they managed to give Satya the credit for things that, by their own admission, started under his predecessor, such as Office for iPad, the One Microsoft initiative, and the rebound in Microsoft's stock price. They didn't let the facts get in the way of their heartwarming story.

3adawi 10y ago
this is the case for most articles about 'reformers', always selling a story rather than the truth
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- scholia 10y ago
  People like stories. They don't like details. This is why we have HN ;-)
logicuce 10y ago
Nadella wasn't an outsider. He was with Microsoft when all this happened. May be he had something to do with these initiatives and lead to him being promoted eventually.

anjc 10y ago

Ehh. All the credit being given to Nadella are initiatives that Ballmer not only started, but has to push against the will of the board to pursue. I had major hope for Microsoft in the last few years, and I'm starting to see Nadella's MS slowly unravelling all of the good progress. I just can not believe that Windows Phone adoption got as high as 15% in Europe and then under Nadella they immediately dropped it like it was dirt. The hardware and software was superior in every way to every alternative, and this deprecation has made many of their other successful manoeuvres pointless. It's mindboggling to me that they're crediting Nadella with Surface and Hololens, in particular.

ghaff 10y ago
Leaders generally get an outsized share of blame and an outsized share of credit for results that become apparent on their watch. I agree that Microsoft didn't suddenly turn 180 degrees the day Nadella took charge. As for the phone though? Microsoft lost that one a long time ago. They can/should continue to milk other client cash cows and continue with other businesses like Xbox that are peripheral but they're well-established in. But phone would require an all-in push and it's hard to see how that would make sense for Microsoft as a distant #3. Focusing on Azure doesn't preclude them doing something like that of course; Microsoft's a big company. But I can't fault them from deciding that they largely missed mobile and moving on. (I'm unconvinced Surface and Hololens will amount to anything significant either but I don't really see those as a focus.)
- anjc 10y ago
  Oh Phones are gone. Finito. But they weren't a few years ago. They were taking a sharp incline with the 9xx range of Lumias in Europe, and they only declined when Microsoft whipped all Lumias from stores and released nothing for a year, the 950 range, which they stopped supporting before they'd even stopped selling it. W10M is effectively still in beta and there are no phones to use it now. But in the meantime they'd been pushing Continuum, W10/Phone integration, UWP, Xbox/Phone integration and so on. So removing phones tarnished a large chunk of their product line imo. Same for the Band. There's no competitor to it, still, and it's also gone. Same for Kinect. Same for Onedrive subscriptions, etc etc. This is what worries me about Nadella's MS and it's the same thing that worries me about Cook's Apple...treating the product line like commodities without acknowledging the importance of the ecosystem. Having said that, as you say, they're a big company. My perspective is solely from that of a devices user.

mark_l_watson 10y ago

I really like the direction Microsoft is going in, especially Surface devices, the very nice Office 355 service, and Azure. The one area where I think they have failed horribly is in the phone market. The lack of having a solid phone that interacts with their other devices, and has a rich app/developer ecosystem cost them my business recently: I am in my 60s, and comfortably semi-retired. After decades of being a Linux-as-much-as-possible enthusiast, I now want my interaction with my devices to be as easy and workable as possible. The time I still spend writing and software development should be as efficient as possible, in the deep work sense I want to spend just a few hours a day producing things hopefully useful to society, as effectively as possible. Recently I spent a month evaluation of staying with Apple or getting a Surface Pro. I stuck with getting a new MacBook and with my iPad Pro because of the availability of the iPhone (I am still on Android, but will switch soon), with nothing comproble from Microsoft. Whatever it takes, I think Microsoft should get back in the phone business with a winning product.

ocdtrekkie 10y ago
They're pretty aware of this. But breaking a duopoly like this requires more than just a "great phone". Microsoft has had and does have "great phones", but without the app ecosystem to back them, it doesn't matter that the phones are great. The Windows Phone might run faster, have a longer battery life, and just work better than the comparable Android flagship, but since you can get freaking Pokémon GO on the Android, people will buy the latter. Microsoft is basically waiting for a chance at a paradigm shift in what it means to have a smartphone, so that they can release something you can get nowhere else. In the meantime, they're kinda just treading water and keeping their mobile OS workable and modern.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  > The Windows Phone might run faster, have a longer battery life, and just work better than the comparable Android flagship Which is the reason when my S3 dies, I might just adopt one of my Lumias as main device. I am not willing to pay more than 300€ for a smartphone and it is pretty clear Google has no motivation to fix the mess of Android upgrades.

yaseer 10y ago

Although I think Nadella has made some good changes to company culture, there's a lot more variables that influence a company's performance than the CEO, just as there's a lot more variables that influence a country's Economic performance than a ruling party. The piece does that all-too-common simplification of providing a single cause to explain the fluctuation is MSFT's fortunes, a form of cognitive bias I believe. We like simple stories for complex phenomena. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_the_single_cause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_the_single_cause

perseusprime11 10y ago
I agree there is no single cause but you are also under estimating the power of a CEO who is responsible for resource allocation and investments. Where he chooses to invest is what becomes of a company. Culture also flows from top down and CEO plays a big role.
- yaseer 10y ago
  Oh I don't dispute that his impact has been significant and positive. I just think there's other factors at play here. For example, Google was extremely slow to market with a competitive cloud strategy, and Apple has been a less competitive player the last 3 years with its own product innovation.
  - zdean 10y ago
    Isn't that kind of like saying that a runner doesn't deserve credit for her win because the other people in the race ran slower than she did?
    - yaseer 10y ago
      Change the runner analogy to manager of a sports team. It's hard to only credit one manager over another when the opposition is a big factor in the equation (along with the strength of the team).
  - 10y ago

d--b 10y ago

People at Microsoft said the wind of change was blowing long before Nadella took the job. They timed the announcement of Nadella to coincide with deliveries of new products / open platforms. The whole thing was to change the image of Microsoft: New products + new face = new Microsoft. It's not like Nadella fired every one and started afresh.

jonknee 10y ago
> It's not like Nadella fired every one and started afresh. He announced huge layoffs (18,000 people) almost as soon as he took over. A lot of Nokia people, but also 5,500 people not related to mobile and 1,400 of them at HQ. A year later he made another huge cut of 7,800 people.
- simonh 10y ago
  More evidence for d--b's point. Firing 18k people at Microsoft's scale isn't even close to burning it down and starting from scratch. It's also not something a newly minted CEO would be able to get past the board on such short notice. It must have been planned in advance. Whatever you say about Balmer, someone at MSFT knew how to flawlessly execute a masterful transition plan. I though Apple did a good job, but MSFT nailed it.
  - piaste 10y ago
    > Firing 18k people at Microsoft's scale isn't even close to burning it down and starting from scratch. Eh... According to Wikipedia, MS had 114k employees total as of mid-2016. Given that, I'd say a 18k layoff definitely counts as a big deal.
    - rugdobe 10y ago
      majority of this layoff was the hardware guys from Nokia acquisition.
    - jonknee 10y ago
      It was certainly treated as such locally in Seattle.

johnnycarcin 10y ago

I can't speak to the product side because up until a year ago I hardly used any MSFT products but I can say that the culture that has been brought by Satya, and likely his reports, is one of the reasons I joined MSFT after being a longtime hater. When I was approached to come work for MSFT I said "no" right away. The person recruiting me said "just listen to our pitch and then you can say 'no' if you want". After hearing Satya talk about where he wants the company to go and what it'll take to get there I had a 180 degree switch on how I felt about MSFT. I talked with some other old-timers who were there to see if things really had changed and they all told me that it was a slow progression but things were certainly changing for the better. Now it's totally possible that they all are just good at selling to people but it was enough to get me to join and 95% of the time I'm glad I did.

ditados 10y ago
You aren't at a subsidiary, obviously. As the tide shifts to pushing Azure, the sales people are going ballistic and circle customers like sharks, with insane targets. I joined a short while ago and deeply regret it, since all we do is sales. Even OSS is treated as a pure sales play.
- johnnycarcin 10y ago
  I actually think we are in the same roles (CSA) :). I have seen the same thing you are talking about and it is certainly one of the shitty parts of the job. Luckily I've done enough with the sales group around me that they are starting to understand that you don't sell Azure like you would O365 or whatever. There are still days where I walk away thinking that I must be on a different planet but the time I get to spend working with customers and building cool shit makes up for all of the bs.

starik36 10y ago

I am not sure how he "revived" Microsoft. 1. They've completely dropped the Phone market under him. As in gave up. 2. They are not in the personal assistant game at all. Alexa & Google have that market all to themselves. 3. The educational market is steadily switching to Chromebooks. The new generation of kids will likely not even know how to use MS Office. 4. On the back end, they've made .NET work on Mac and Linux. This is great for me, since I don't have to worry about Windows Server licenses, but doesn't this eat into their large cash cow? 5. SQL Server - the other cash cow, is great, but free alternatives will start affecting the bottom line. 6. Windows 10 rollout stalled very much short of their stated goal of being on 1 billion devices.

hunterwerlla 10y ago
1. The phone line that was losing a ton of money 2. This is being worked on, there is cortana for cars, pc's and phones, so it would make sense for it to expand to even more devices in the future. 3. This is the point of windows 10 cloud, which recently leaked. 4. Windows is really not the cash cow of Microsoft, getting more people into the ecosystem is better for buisiness. 5. Free alternatives have existed forever, alternatives that you could argue are the same or better, recently SQL Server was ported to linux which actually should shore up its market share, and even possibly increase it. 6. True but does this actually matter that much?
- ConceptJunkie 10y ago
  hunterwerlia, I find it amusing that your response, which came in while I was writing mine, says pretty much the same thing. :-)
- starik36 10y ago
  You are kind of proving my point that Microsoft, in fact, was not "revived" by Nadella. 2. Maybe it is being worked on and maybe it'll even be great. The problem is that people don't replace personal assistants every 2 years. They lost the first mover advantage. 4. Windows for enterprises, specifically server versions are cash cows. I fail to see the value (to Microsoft) of a developer getting into the .NET ecosystem if they intend to run your code on Linux. 5. It's true that free alternatives have always been around. But now, they are reasonably good. And more importantly, good enough. 6. Yes, it does. It's actually one of the few places where they could monetize people getting into their ecosystem.

floopidydoopidy 10y ago

This whole article is an example of astroturfing. Why don't you guys ban this shit?

kermittd 10y ago

Is everyone a cynic online?

simplehuman 10y ago
I have a great theory here. If you agree entirely mostly with the article, there is nothing to comment. Or you have to write something boring. But if you want to comment and get karma, you have to write something spicy. And thus the comments are all cynical and contrarian.
tortasaur 10y ago
No, but they're generally less susceptible to the more transparent forms of marketing.

awinder 10y ago

I think Microsoft has done a great job of transforming to being very brand-conscious and these stories are both a recognition of that from the press, and a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy (they talk about how different they are, the press does, then they point to the press and dress up their UX, it's very self-feeding in a way). That said -- I can't say I've experienced great technical changes in the products from microsoft that I do use, at least yet. Windows 10 is still windows underneath, and I've run into some real rough patches on windows 10 on my tower setup. Xbox controllers are still breaking down after several months. Their Cloud offering just blows my mind in a bad way in almost every interaction I've had the displeasure of experiencing. So I read articles like this and look at the rebranding and really have a hard time deciding whether I want to point to these things as at least having a good direction, and showing that they understand that they need to care about these things. But then I'm dismayed at the execution. Does anyone else have the same thing going on?

z0d 10y ago

Shocked to see Windows 10 being depicted as an advancement in some of the comments along with that office 365 service. Yeah the Halcyon days of PC ate definitely gone by looking at these cringrworthy points. M$ clearly have made their point with continuous eternal Beta program and sheeple insider ring, UWP and WDDM2.0, Gimmicky stuff cough DX12 gamemode cough. Destroyed the PC, Mr Nadella should be praised for all this...

bcg1 10y ago

They credit Nadella with increasing the stock price... but MSFT performance is basically the same as the overall NASDAQ composite (of course I'm sure MSFT itself is a large portion of that index) as well as the larger S&P 500 index. http://stockcharts.com/freecharts/perf.php?$COMPQ,MSFT,$SPX&n=4556&O=011000 http://stockcharts.com/freecharts/perf.php?$COMPQ,MSFT,$SPX&...

awa 10y ago
you dont see it behind by 30+% in 2013 to nasdaq and now meeting it to equal now. See: http://stockcharts.com/freecharts/perf.php?$COMPQ,MSFT,$SPX&n=3006&O=011000 http://stockcharts.com/freecharts/perf.php?$COMPQ,MSFT,$SPX&... .

camdenlock 10y ago

Having spent my youth childishly ranting against the evils of M$, and now coming to terms with the fact that I sincerely use VS Code because it's great, I can't shake the frequent uncanny feeling that I'm stuck in an episode of Sliders.

ino 10y ago
DOS 6.22 + WIN 3.11 were great. Windows 7 was great. Windows 10 is not. Having a good cross platform code editor surely isn't going to make me use Windows 10.
- bsaul 10y ago
  Dos + win 3.11 was an absolute crap. Had a mac at the time and i couldn't understand how people could cope with that horror. Anything, from atari to amiga to mac was obviously better. Windows started to be usable starting windows 95. Before that, it was mainly a hack.
  - scholia 10y ago
    Windows 3.x was wonderful if you had DOS, which was almost everyone did. DOS, WordStar (or Word Perfect) and Lotus 1-2-3. It was really cheap [1], and it ran on top of DOS, so you didn't lose anything you already had. The big advantage was access to a GUI and new graphical applications. If you didn't like it, you didn't have to run it, but it was always more useful than the old-style character-based DOS front-ends. The alternatives to Windows 3.x involved paying up to 20x more for a different operating system, installing it, and possibly losing what you already had, OR dumping your whole expensive system and buying another expensive system, buying expensive new apps, and relearning everything. Worse, you'd be buying another expensive system while losing access to Lotus 1-2-3 (on which your commercial life probably depended). The real alternatives weren't the 68000-based Amiga/Atari/Mac etc, they were DesQview and DR GEM. Not sure why DesQview failed. However, Apple did Microsoft a huge favor by suing Digital Research and effectively killing GEM (except on the Atari ST). [1] From my faulty memory, it was something like $40 when business applications cost $200 to $600. OS/2 cost around $500 and Sun was charging $950 for Unix.

Entangled 10y ago

Revived? I haven't touched a ms product in over a decade. And by god I won't until the end of my miserable days in this world.

jernfrost 10y ago

Refreshing to see somebody who is not an asshole succeed. Too many people seem to have concluded that success can only be achieved by being some variation of asshole whether it is Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Steve Balmer or Larry Ellison. Mind you I am a huge fan of Steve Jobs, despite the fact that I think he also was kind of an asshole. People are complicated I don't think Steve succeeded because he was an asshole but due to the other qualities he had not related to being an asshole. And people of course change. Bill Gates seems like a much nicer man today than he was when he ran Microsoft. I guess much the same happened with Steve Jobs. He was a better person in his older years than in his younger.

mhermher 10y ago
A coworker once described to me how he thought people misinterpreted Jobs' success. Jobs didn't succeed because he was an asshole, he succeeded despite being an asshole. You sometimes see people trying to emulate Jobs and thinking they need to be an asshole. His take was that they completely missed the reasons for Jobs' success. He was definitely an asshole though, especially early on.
v3gas 10y ago
How is (or was?) Bill Gates an asshole?
- Truth_Stands 10y ago
  Sam Altman is the epitomized replication of Steve Ballmer, just give it a few years until theres an Indian replacement before YC gets back on track. Hubris makes it easy to deviate from the optimal form over function till it devolves into a wild goose chase. Its just a matter of time but until someone gets that Sam Altman's head out of his orifice, we're bound to see that trend Microsoft experienced during the Ballmer days
- gozur88 10y ago
  You need to read the "fuck counter" story. I woldn't work for someone like this: >"Bill doesn’t really want to review your spec, he just wants to make sure you’ve got it under control. His standard M.O. is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don’t know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared." https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

woofdogwoof 10y ago

It really helps when you have a monopoly, for both operating systems and Office applications, and more cash than most countries in the world.