5 ms·

It's pretty amazing to see how much Microsoft has changed since Nadella took helm (even though as some have stated before -- the efforts already began before Ba

It's pretty amazing to see how much Microsoft has changed since Nadella took helm (even though as some have stated before -- the efforts already began before Ballmer left).

rudiv 8y ago
Just checked his wiki page. I always thought his would be a more humble story than most Indian IT titans since he went to Manipal rather than one of the IITs, but turns out his dad was an IAS officer. Interesting tidbit.
- fxfan 8y ago
  What's IAS? Is it a big deal?
  - blntechie 8y ago
    IAS is Indian Administrative Services. It means his dad most likely worked as a top level bureaucrat in the government and was relatively privileged.
    - puranjay 8y ago
      "relatively" is underselling it. Indian IAS officers are basically modern day nobility.
      - dhruvarora013 8y ago
        That is definitely an oversell. An entry level IAS officer makes Rs. 56100[1] which is about 800 USD a month. Definitely not an amount to scoff at in India but not even close to a level of privilege that would make you the CEO of a trillion-dollar company. Satya has two advanced degrees from US Institutions and has worked at Microsoft for over 27 years. I think his father has had very little to do with his current stature. [1] https://www.clearias.com/salary-of-an-ias-officer/ https://www.clearias.com/salary-of-an-ias-officer/
        puranjay 8y ago
        The original statement was about Nadella's own privileged background. No one is arguing that an IAS officer is more privileged than the CEO of Microsoft. As an aside, salary is just about the worst way to evaluate power and privilege of government officials. By that metric, an AVP at Google is more privileged than the President of the United States.
        telltruth 8y ago
        Getting education in US as a foreign student from 3rd world country typically requires existence of rich parents.
        kamaal 7y ago
        That's like splitting hairs. C'mon. On the job perks include Free accommodation, chauffeured cars, pensions, maids, bribes, pensions, plot buying opportunities in top govt layouts and peons to do everything including for something as simple as forwarding a memo. Heck bribes itself can set your 7 generations for a life time of nobility. There is a reason why people waste years behind cracking these exams.
  - ignoramous 8y ago
    If you're a corrupt IAS officer, you're a big deal: https://www.quora.com/Can-an-IAS-officer-earn-in-crore https://www.quora.com/Can-an-IAS-officer-earn-in-crore If you're not, you are still a big deal, on a different scale.
  - intended 8y ago
    Relatively, The gov of India has a cadre or trained bureaucrats, who are selected after passing a rigorous exam. Its a check on your real world thinking skills in many ways. The exam is hard, and people spend years to ensure they get through. The people who pass are sent to the foreign services, admin services, and police services. IAS officers have over the years earned a rep for being capable bureaucrats (modulo the level of noise coming from a massive developing World population dealing with issues ranging from poverty to corruption). These are the people who run municipalities for what would be high populations cities in the west, secretaries to ministers and so on. They don’t have money, but they are the nerves and ligaments of state machinery.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- truncate 8y ago
  A lot of people (from every kind of background) come to the US and work. I would say someone dad's being an IAS would have almost zero impact on stepping up in the career ladder in a US tech company, however, being from a prestigious university gives one a strong network and connections.
  - kamaal 7y ago
    >>I would say someone dad's being an IAS would have almost zero impact on stepping up in the career ladder in a US tech company That's like saying, having an IAS father makes no impact for someone wanting to be a top doctor in the US. In reality having an IAS dad means having access to tuitions, mentoring, ability to afford a whole lot of other things like say education in a foreign university etc etc. Most kids don't have access to this because they have to work immediately after they finish their education in India, or worse have to work through their education. There is no one back home providing financial support to your family. There is also pressure to send money back home, or handle other responsibilities(eg. Marrying off a sister). Each of these things gradually drive to last straw on the Camel's back for a lot of people. There is only that much you can do in life when you have n things demanding your attention, and resources all at the time when you should be focusing on working on that career.
    - truncate 7y ago
      I expected someone would make such response, and that is exactly why I was talking about people who already made it to US, and talk of that demographic. I by no means, am comparing him with the guy who took a job at Infosys, or he couldn't pursue a masters or get a less paying job at startup for the reasons you mentioned. That said, we are also making this huge presumption that since his dad is an IAS, he must have have shitload of money for US tuitions and rest. This isn't possible with normal salary, unless of course he is corrupted, and I find it distasteful to deduce something like that about someone specific. It is one thing to say most IAS are not honest, and it's another thing to insinuate that this particular IAS isn't honest. We all try to make best of whatever situation we are in, and most of us (at-least I most likely) wouldn't achieve what he did even with 100x resources (lack of hard work, motivation, making excuses to ourselves). Let's not undermine that by saying "there is only that much you can do in life when you have n things demanding your attention".
jillesvangurp 8y ago
Agreed. IMHO Nadella did a few things that made an enormous difference: - End the war on open source and instead embrace it. This unlocked a lot of potential and put a stop to a lot of counter productive efforts in MS where the only point was "not invented here". Some of these things were already tolerated grudgingly under Balmer but Nadella made it company policy to embrace it 100%. There are many examples of this ranging from reviving .net via the mono ecosystem, launching mssql on linux, making linux a first class citizen on Azure (now a key driver in the valuation), vs code studio, the github acquisition, embracing chromium, etc. Through this, MS regained a lot of the street credibility with developers that it used to have in the nineties and subsequently lost. - Kill off windows phone and de-emphasize the windows brand in favor of an office on any platform type approach. Office now runs great on ipads, os-x, browsers, android, as well as windows laptops. Not having the distraction of windows first means all the non windows teams that are making lots of money (azure, office, etc) can now focus on doing the right thing on non MS platforms instead of up-selling windows to their users. Balmer left Nadella one huge headache which was the Nokia acquisition (I used to work there). Nadella killed that off swiftly and decisively by effectively starving it of resources and almost immediately cutting staff by the tens of thousands. - Fix the toxic work culture. There was a lot of negativity around this topic under Balmer. It seems much less of an issue these days.
- telltruth 8y ago
  People tend to see performance of CEOs by stock price. While it makes sense as shareholder, it's a very narrow view. From revenues as well as profit perspective Ballmer actually grew Microsoft more than Nadella. Market just decided not to reward that. Current growth centers including Azure, Surface etc were all started and championed originally by Ballmer. It was Ballmer who was willing to pour in investment like crazy in Hololens as well Bing. On the other hand, Nadella has failed to add single new product in Microsoft's portfolio during his half decade as CEO. Microsoft today has simply no presence in home automation, smart assistants, wearable or self-driving markets that have emerged during past 5 years. Nadella has literally missed boat in every single new category that has came around during his time. All the while its rivals have moved fast and picked up top spots in these new markets. Windows revenues is still falling like crazy and obviously there is no Smarthone story from Nadella yet. The only thing that is compensating all these troubles is cloud and that too had been hazy on actual utilization. The engineering execution in Azure begs a question about how much worse it can get. Out of all providers, Azure literally has been the least impressive from technical standpoint in everything from UX to availability to features to documentation to API design. Once cloud market saturates and race to bottom ensues, Microsoft could have big trouble in maintaining current revenues and profits due to lack of new products. It will take few quarters before stock market reacts but all of these same people praising Nadella right now would suddenly come around and brand him the worst CEO in history as soon as stock dips.
amrrs 8y ago
I've always wondered, Are these heavy bashing against Ballmer as someone he's incompetent or whatever the complaint is, right at all? I agree that Both Gates and Nadella are more of Techies and Ballmer was a Sales guy. But isn't he the guy who actually expanded MSFT Sales Network and made them grow with Office Suite of products?
- MRD85 8y ago
  The way I see is that he was the right person for a certain role at a certain company size in a certain time period. That isn't CEO of Microsoft in 2019 but he served his purpose and became really rich through it.
  - djakjxnanjak 8y ago
    I can’t help but feel Nadella is playing catch-up, and winning at it. It’s almost like Microsoft had a lost decade under Ballmer.
setquk 8y ago
What? They still treat their enterprise customers like shit, have no opt out data collection on all their platforms now, are extending their tentacles across everything that has a processor in it, QA has actually dropped off a cliff and they've left a half finished charred pile of shit for an OS on our laps, disposable low quality line of tablet wannabees and have piled their entire effort into marketing away their problems rather than delivery. But everyone focuses on Nadella being the second coming of corporate Jesus. Wolf in sheep's clothing I'm afraid. In ten years I bet you I am not wrong on this. Honestly I think that windows is the best desktop platform out there (seeing as Apple can't make a keyboard that works) with all the compromises but it's difficult to actually compliment it in any way. We could be somewhere a lot better and everyone knows where that is. For earnings and shareholders they're doing good. But for the customers, not necessarily. They're just doing barely ok in an ocean of crap.
- intended 8y ago
  What? I have a somewhat recent surface. It’s brilliant. It forced the entire windows ecosystem to rethink their approach. Behind the scenes for that miserable OS, is a mountain of work to make all their parts work. No longer will there be three tcp-ip implementations over Xbox,OS,server and other teams. A lot of this was started under ballmer. It’s comtinuing under nadella.
mda 8y ago
TBH they seem to mostly just depend on their enterprise lock in, The azure story is just a reflection of this. Most enterprises just can not move out of the stranglehold and will have to cough out whatever price Microsoft demands,(which will creep up inevitably) for decades.

It's pretty amazing to see how much Microsoft has changed since Nadella took helm (even though as some have stated before -- the efforts already began before Ballmer left).

rudiv 8y ago

Just checked his wiki page. I always thought his would be a more humble story than most Indian IT titans since he went to Manipal rather than one of the IITs, but turns out his dad was an IAS officer. Interesting tidbit.

fxfan 8y ago
What's IAS? Is it a big deal?
- blntechie 8y ago
  IAS is Indian Administrative Services. It means his dad most likely worked as a top level bureaucrat in the government and was relatively privileged.
  - puranjay 8y ago
    "relatively" is underselling it. Indian IAS officers are basically modern day nobility.
    - dhruvarora013 8y ago
      That is definitely an oversell. An entry level IAS officer makes Rs. 56100[1] which is about 800 USD a month. Definitely not an amount to scoff at in India but not even close to a level of privilege that would make you the CEO of a trillion-dollar company. Satya has two advanced degrees from US Institutions and has worked at Microsoft for over 27 years. I think his father has had very little to do with his current stature. [1] https://www.clearias.com/salary-of-an-ias-officer/ https://www.clearias.com/salary-of-an-ias-officer/
      - puranjay 8y ago
        The original statement was about Nadella's own privileged background. No one is arguing that an IAS officer is more privileged than the CEO of Microsoft. As an aside, salary is just about the worst way to evaluate power and privilege of government officials. By that metric, an AVP at Google is more privileged than the President of the United States.
      - telltruth 8y ago
        Getting education in US as a foreign student from 3rd world country typically requires existence of rich parents.
      - kamaal 7y ago
        That's like splitting hairs. C'mon. On the job perks include Free accommodation, chauffeured cars, pensions, maids, bribes, pensions, plot buying opportunities in top govt layouts and peons to do everything including for something as simple as forwarding a memo. Heck bribes itself can set your 7 generations for a life time of nobility. There is a reason why people waste years behind cracking these exams.
- ignoramous 8y ago
  If you're a corrupt IAS officer, you're a big deal: https://www.quora.com/Can-an-IAS-officer-earn-in-crore https://www.quora.com/Can-an-IAS-officer-earn-in-crore If you're not, you are still a big deal, on a different scale.
- intended 8y ago
  Relatively, The gov of India has a cadre or trained bureaucrats, who are selected after passing a rigorous exam. Its a check on your real world thinking skills in many ways. The exam is hard, and people spend years to ensure they get through. The people who pass are sent to the foreign services, admin services, and police services. IAS officers have over the years earned a rep for being capable bureaucrats (modulo the level of noise coming from a massive developing World population dealing with issues ranging from poverty to corruption). These are the people who run municipalities for what would be high populations cities in the west, secretaries to ministers and so on. They don’t have money, but they are the nerves and ligaments of state machinery.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
truncate 8y ago
A lot of people (from every kind of background) come to the US and work. I would say someone dad's being an IAS would have almost zero impact on stepping up in the career ladder in a US tech company, however, being from a prestigious university gives one a strong network and connections.
- kamaal 7y ago
  >>I would say someone dad's being an IAS would have almost zero impact on stepping up in the career ladder in a US tech company That's like saying, having an IAS father makes no impact for someone wanting to be a top doctor in the US. In reality having an IAS dad means having access to tuitions, mentoring, ability to afford a whole lot of other things like say education in a foreign university etc etc. Most kids don't have access to this because they have to work immediately after they finish their education in India, or worse have to work through their education. There is no one back home providing financial support to your family. There is also pressure to send money back home, or handle other responsibilities(eg. Marrying off a sister). Each of these things gradually drive to last straw on the Camel's back for a lot of people. There is only that much you can do in life when you have n things demanding your attention, and resources all at the time when you should be focusing on working on that career.
  - truncate 7y ago
    I expected someone would make such response, and that is exactly why I was talking about people who already made it to US, and talk of that demographic. I by no means, am comparing him with the guy who took a job at Infosys, or he couldn't pursue a masters or get a less paying job at startup for the reasons you mentioned. That said, we are also making this huge presumption that since his dad is an IAS, he must have have shitload of money for US tuitions and rest. This isn't possible with normal salary, unless of course he is corrupted, and I find it distasteful to deduce something like that about someone specific. It is one thing to say most IAS are not honest, and it's another thing to insinuate that this particular IAS isn't honest. We all try to make best of whatever situation we are in, and most of us (at-least I most likely) wouldn't achieve what he did even with 100x resources (lack of hard work, motivation, making excuses to ourselves). Let's not undermine that by saying "there is only that much you can do in life when you have n things demanding your attention".

jillesvangurp 8y ago

Agreed. IMHO Nadella did a few things that made an enormous difference: - End the war on open source and instead embrace it. This unlocked a lot of potential and put a stop to a lot of counter productive efforts in MS where the only point was "not invented here". Some of these things were already tolerated grudgingly under Balmer but Nadella made it company policy to embrace it 100%. There are many examples of this ranging from reviving .net via the mono ecosystem, launching mssql on linux, making linux a first class citizen on Azure (now a key driver in the valuation), vs code studio, the github acquisition, embracing chromium, etc. Through this, MS regained a lot of the street credibility with developers that it used to have in the nineties and subsequently lost. - Kill off windows phone and de-emphasize the windows brand in favor of an office on any platform type approach. Office now runs great on ipads, os-x, browsers, android, as well as windows laptops. Not having the distraction of windows first means all the non windows teams that are making lots of money (azure, office, etc) can now focus on doing the right thing on non MS platforms instead of up-selling windows to their users. Balmer left Nadella one huge headache which was the Nokia acquisition (I used to work there). Nadella killed that off swiftly and decisively by effectively starving it of resources and almost immediately cutting staff by the tens of thousands. - Fix the toxic work culture. There was a lot of negativity around this topic under Balmer. It seems much less of an issue these days.

telltruth 8y ago
People tend to see performance of CEOs by stock price. While it makes sense as shareholder, it's a very narrow view. From revenues as well as profit perspective Ballmer actually grew Microsoft more than Nadella. Market just decided not to reward that. Current growth centers including Azure, Surface etc were all started and championed originally by Ballmer. It was Ballmer who was willing to pour in investment like crazy in Hololens as well Bing. On the other hand, Nadella has failed to add single new product in Microsoft's portfolio during his half decade as CEO. Microsoft today has simply no presence in home automation, smart assistants, wearable or self-driving markets that have emerged during past 5 years. Nadella has literally missed boat in every single new category that has came around during his time. All the while its rivals have moved fast and picked up top spots in these new markets. Windows revenues is still falling like crazy and obviously there is no Smarthone story from Nadella yet. The only thing that is compensating all these troubles is cloud and that too had been hazy on actual utilization. The engineering execution in Azure begs a question about how much worse it can get. Out of all providers, Azure literally has been the least impressive from technical standpoint in everything from UX to availability to features to documentation to API design. Once cloud market saturates and race to bottom ensues, Microsoft could have big trouble in maintaining current revenues and profits due to lack of new products. It will take few quarters before stock market reacts but all of these same people praising Nadella right now would suddenly come around and brand him the worst CEO in history as soon as stock dips.

amrrs 8y ago

I've always wondered, Are these heavy bashing against Ballmer as someone he's incompetent or whatever the complaint is, right at all? I agree that Both Gates and Nadella are more of Techies and Ballmer was a Sales guy. But isn't he the guy who actually expanded MSFT Sales Network and made them grow with Office Suite of products?

MRD85 8y ago
The way I see is that he was the right person for a certain role at a certain company size in a certain time period. That isn't CEO of Microsoft in 2019 but he served his purpose and became really rich through it.
- djakjxnanjak 8y ago
  I can’t help but feel Nadella is playing catch-up, and winning at it. It’s almost like Microsoft had a lost decade under Ballmer.

setquk 8y ago

What? They still treat their enterprise customers like shit, have no opt out data collection on all their platforms now, are extending their tentacles across everything that has a processor in it, QA has actually dropped off a cliff and they've left a half finished charred pile of shit for an OS on our laps, disposable low quality line of tablet wannabees and have piled their entire effort into marketing away their problems rather than delivery. But everyone focuses on Nadella being the second coming of corporate Jesus. Wolf in sheep's clothing I'm afraid. In ten years I bet you I am not wrong on this. Honestly I think that windows is the best desktop platform out there (seeing as Apple can't make a keyboard that works) with all the compromises but it's difficult to actually compliment it in any way. We could be somewhere a lot better and everyone knows where that is. For earnings and shareholders they're doing good. But for the customers, not necessarily. They're just doing barely ok in an ocean of crap.

intended 8y ago
What? I have a somewhat recent surface. It’s brilliant. It forced the entire windows ecosystem to rethink their approach. Behind the scenes for that miserable OS, is a mountain of work to make all their parts work. No longer will there be three tcp-ip implementations over Xbox,OS,server and other teams. A lot of this was started under ballmer. It’s comtinuing under nadella.

mda 8y ago

TBH they seem to mostly just depend on their enterprise lock in, The azure story is just a reflection of this. Most enterprises just can not move out of the stranglehold and will have to cough out whatever price Microsoft demands,(which will creep up inevitably) for decades.