10 ms·

Having read Nadella's book Hit Refresh as soon as it went on sale, Microsoft performance since then doesn't look surprising at all. Having listed what's wrong (

Having read Nadella's book Hit Refresh as soon as it went on sale, Microsoft performance since then doesn't look surprising at all. Having listed what's wrong (with their product focus, company culture etc), and where they plan to head, its' almost like the book informs the reader where puck is going to be (from Satya's POV). It's funny that 15 years back I was so anti MS and pro Google and now I think it's the other way!

maxxxxx 7y ago
“It's funny that 15 years back I was so anti MS and pro Google and now I think it's the other way!” Stay skeptical of all of them. No need to be fan of one of the big techs. In the end they are all greedy organizations that want to dominate. None of them should be trusted.
- bovermyer 7y ago
  I'm both wary of and hopeful about Microsoft and Google. "Trust but verify" and all that.
  - spectramax 7y ago
    I’ve always found this phrase an oxymoron.
    - bovermyer 7y ago
      Where humans are involved, mistakes will happen. Trusting someone but verifying their work is a safe and sane pairing.
      - apetresc 7y ago
        But the whole point of trusting is that you get to skip verifying. What's the difference between trusting and not trusting if you still have to put in the work of verification anyway?
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        thaumasiotes 7y ago
        The difference is in when you begin cooperating. You can work much faster by immediately acting on agreements and later making sure the other party is attempting to hold up their end than you can by waiting until you can prove something about the other party and only then starting whatever it is you were supposed to do. Consider these different hiring schemes: 1. Hire whoever applies, and keep them forever, no matter what. ("Trust, don't verify.") 2. Hire whoever applies, and fire them later if they don't seem to be working out. ("Trust, but verify.") 3. Full background check and extensive additional vetting before an offer is made. ("Don't trust, do verify.") 4. Never hire anyone. ("Don't trust, don't verify.") Aside from the obvious pacing differences, note that what's verified (or not) in options 1/2 is different from what is verified in option 3. That's not a coincidence -- before you start working with someone, you can't assess whether they're doing a good job. You have to rely on more general (and therefore less reliable) markers of trustworthiness. (You may think option 4 sounds ridiculous. It isn't -- that is the historical norm for cooperation outside of very well-defined groups like your family or your tribe.)
      - stupidcar 7y ago
        How is verifying everything because you don't trust people not to make a mistake operationally different from verifying everything because you suspect bad faith? To the supposed trusted party, the result is the same: you not taking them at their word and instead checking whatever they do. Even if you're being honest about only verifying to avoid mistakes, you can never prove it. This definition of "trust but verify" would be better reduced to "verify", since it essentially claims that trust is, if not impossible, not practically applicable in any situation.
        scarejunba 7y ago
        The trust part is me trusting you to want to do the right thing. The verify part is me checking that nothing went wrong - either through a mistake on your part, a misunderstanding on mine, or just the signal loss from the fact that human communication is imperfect.
        stupidcar 7y ago
        You've just restated the original post and ignored my question. Again: how does this definition of supposed trust differ from distrust in any verifiable way?
        scarejunba 7y ago
        It affects our interaction. Because I assume you'll act in good faith, I only add verification in the range of errors not in the range of malice.
        stupidcar 7y ago
        It seems to me that the range of human error is rarely smaller than that of malice, so again I'm not sure there will be much apparent difference between an exhaustive verification of either sort.
        scarejunba 7y ago
    - levesque 7y ago
      Don't trust, verify.
      - amelius 7y ago
        And how do you do that? E.g. how do you verify that Google deletes your data when you tell it to?
        levesque 7y ago
        No idea, was just messing around. If one really were to do this, the best way would probably be to trick them into employing you, and then verify from the inside (and even then, good luck!). I do believe it's going to be an issue in the future, if it isn't already one. Even as a government, how do you really make sure that company X erases the data?
    - jasonlotito 7y ago
      It's not. The trust is in the good intentions, the verification is that people do make mistakes. I trust myself, but I still verify my own work.
    - rurp 7y ago
      It is, but also carries a clear message; I think that dichotomy is why it's been such an enduring phrase. The term became well known in the US during the cold war, in the context of arms treaties. The US and Russia were making agreements that relied on at least the appearance of, and some degree of actual, trust. Meanwhile they were undertaking extensive efforts to check if the other party was actually following their obligations.
    - hathawsh 7y ago
      You're correct: an oxymoron is a phrase that is seemingly self-contradictory. While "trust but verify" is an oxymoron, it is not a contradiction or paradox. A simpler oxymoron is "to make haste slowly". In that phrase, the "make haste" part describes velocity, while "slowly" describes acceleration. Anyone who has taken Calculus knows that velocity and acceleration can be independent variables. Thus "to make haste slowly" is an oxymoron but not self-contradictory. Similarly, "trust but verify" describes two possibly independent variables: your attitude about the future and your behavior regarding the past. You can choose to trust people to make good decisions for the future, while simultaneously verifying they made good decisions in the past. Alternatives to "trust but verify" include "always trust", which has obvious bad consequences; "never trust", which has different but also bad consequences; "trust sometimes", which is ambiguous; and "verify always", which is unrealistic. The phrase "trust but verify" describes a healthy attitude and behavior.
      - spectramax 7y ago
        I wasn't 100% sure if I chose the correct term, thanks for the explanation!
    - CodeMage 7y ago
      What it means is "Trust the intentions, but verify the results." It's just that "trust, but verify" is shorter and more memorable.
    - Isamu 7y ago
      It's a punchline from a joke that Reagan told repeatedly around the time of US-USSR weapons treaties. It's supposed to be funny. Something along the lines of: "Q: Can we trust these guys to uphold their side of the deal? A: Sure, trust but verify." Edit: here it is, it's actually a funny Russian proverb that Reagan was repeating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust,_but_verify https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust,_but_verify
    - marmaduke 7y ago
      it's like preparing for the worst, while hoping for the best
  - make3 7y ago
    trust enough to use but keep your eyes open
  - maxxxxx 7y ago
    "Vertrauen ist gut, Kontrolle ist besser" for the Germans here :-)
    - sooper 7y ago
      I think this is a better aphorism than "trust, but verify". I work in the information security assurance field, I swear that 90% of the issues I see at companies with external service providers comes back to the fact that their contract does not have anywhere enough ability to hold the service provider to task... Get everything you need in the contract / agreement, then hope you never have to use it.
      - maxxxxx 7y ago
        From my experience it’s close to impossible to have a 100% bullet proof contract. If you try that you end up with the typical government contracting style where you spend a lot of time with specs and requirements upfront but it falls apart as soon as it touches reality. In the end you need to pick suppliers you can work with productively no matter what the correct details are.
- ticmasta 7y ago
  As a developer MS has treated me really well, IMO. They churn out as much short-lived tech as the next company but I think their windows-based culture of backwards compatibility carried over into the developer ecosystem, and the future of .Net Core running in Linux containers with docker and k8s, against SQL Server on Linux would make anyone who's been away from their tech for the past 5 years think they stepped out of a time machine.
  - phkahler 7y ago
    On backwards compatibility. I recently learned that apple has deprecated OpenGL and soon will not support it at all. What a slap to developers... so yeah there is some value to Microsofts approach.
    - megy 7y ago
      There is an advantage and a disadvantage to backwards compatibility. Letting people keep using old technology that hampers progress. You have to devote resources to ensuring that it still works, and you have less people using the new stuff.
    - SpikeDad 7y ago
      Apple isn't afraid of ditching tech when it becomes clear it's a dead end. In almost all cases they've been correct and the rest of the industry soon follows their leads. Think how reliable Windows would be today if they hadn't left in all the cruft as far back as Windows 2000.
      - yellowapple 7y ago
        > In almost all cases they've been correct and the rest of the industry soon follows their leads. Counterpoint: 3.5mm jacks are perfectly fine and were never a "dead end". OpenGL's indeed pretty crusty, but Vulkan is not. Apple would be better off participating in that ecosystem instead of letting NIH syndrome take hold. > Think how reliable Windows would be today if they hadn't left in all the cruft as far back as Windows 2000. Counterpoint: an x86 Linux executable statically compiled/linked any time after the a.out → ELF migration (so... predating Windows 2000) can be expected to run without issue on a bleeding-edge x86 kernel today (and if it's not able to do so, then that's a bug, and Linus will personally descend upon and eviscerate the one unfortunate enough to have introduced that bug).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- redisman 7y ago
  Tech giants are the biggest companies by market cap and run the world now. They're not the lovable runts from the 90's anymore.
ThrowawayR2 7y ago
> It's funny that 15 years back I was so anti MS and pro Google and now I think it's the other way! You should be pro-neither. Microsoft used to be against FOSS because they thought it would make them more money; Microsoft is currently friendlier to FOSS because they think it will make them more money. Does that make them bad people? No because all businesses are that way, even the vaunted "don't be evil" Google.
- GuiA 7y ago
  Being pro/anti specific companies in a very binary way, like you point out, is a false path. However, placing all companies in the same bucket is committing a similar mistake. There is definitely a “gradient of morality” amongst companies, despite all of them doing things because they think it is what will make them the most money in the long run. A company building products that end up aiding the carrying out of genocides, for instance, is clearly on a more extreme end of the spectrum than a company making money selling music streaming subscriptions.
  - Stratoscope 7y ago
    > A company building products that end up aiding the carrying out of genocides, for instance, is clearly on a more extreme end of the spectrum... Couldn't that describe just about any company or open source project? A database and office software end up helping you manage and track your genocide. A camera company's products and photo/video editing software end up helping people create beheading videos and child porn. When we create a general purpose product and release it to the world, we lose control of who uses it and for what purposes. In fact, that is a specific requirement for free and open source software licenses.
    - GuiA 7y ago
      That's fair. But perhaps you'd agree with me that there's a line between a company making products like cameras - which can certainly be used to cruel ends, but typically easily replaced by any of your competitor's products, and not pivotal to such efforts - and a company building a product that has no real replacement, is central to anti-human practices, and routinely ignores the criticisms and suggestions of human rights groups around the world.
orbifold 7y ago
I feel the same way. Although in my case it is also due to age. I‘ve lost patience with the linux ecosystem a long time ago, it’s all fun and games when you are in control, but being forced to use a Linux cluster or custom Debian installation without admin privileges is so much worse than working on an administered windows or macOS could possibly be. At least there you have sane defaults.
xwhy 7y ago
I'm still highly skeptical. One rather likely scenario is that Nadella slowly wants to turn Microsoft into IBM. IBM has free OSS labor and outsources to India. Choosing Nadella as CEO makes a lot of sense for that plan.
ksec 7y ago
I am Pro Apple, but that is only because for most of the time they have stick to their words. That was Steve's Apple then, Tim Cook doesn't seems to be quite as trust worthy at least according to Qualcomm's case. I was Anti MS, I guess I am neutral on them now. But I never trusted Google in the first place, and found it odd every one jumps to Google's hype. From Gmail to Google Docs. And now I found it funny they are Anti Google again. The only explanation I found plausible, is that people like David and not Goliath. They always prefer the underdogs to win, and the titans to lose.
- eitland 7y ago
  Upvoted. As for why some of us defended Google there was a long time where they - IMO - were very nice. Big contributors to a number of good causes. Fired sysadmin who looked into data of someone he knew, even of he had a good reason, because trust came first. Old AdWords/AdSense with somewhat relevant text only ads wasn't too shady IMO. ... at a time when Microsoft had a CEO that said Open Source was like cancer. Etc. Looking back my guess is it went wrong somewhere around the doubleclick acquisition.
username223 7y ago
> It's funny that 15 years back I was so anti MS and pro Google and now I think it's the other way! Or 15 years before that, pro-MS and anti-IBM. IBM is still huge, but they've found a steady revenue stream doing enterprise stuff, so they're not creating (much) fresh evil. MS could have made steady profits writing decent desktop software (I'm not so sure now). They're both powerful but comfortable. Google is huge, and still thinks it can rule the world. Companies are a bit like religions. When they're small, they can't have much impact. When they're big and young, they can wreak havoc. If they make it to comfortable old age, they're peaceful and stable. The Catholic Church is huge, benign, and stable now, but 1000 years ago they were a bit more conquest-focused and violent, and 2000 years ago they were just a few harmless militants.
- CodeMage 7y ago
  > Companies are a bit like religions. When they're small, they can't have much impact. When they're big and young, they can wreak havoc. If they make it to comfortable old age, they're peaceful and stable. The Catholic Church is huge, benign, and stable now, but 1000 years ago they were a bit more conquest-focused and violent, and 2000 years ago they were just a few harmless militants. That's a really bad analogy and detracts a lot from your point. Big religions that reach old age are merely stable, but that doesn't necessarily make them peaceful or benign. My guess is that you're probably looking at it through the lens of living in United States.
  - username223 7y ago
    Oops... > My guess is that you're probably looking at it through the lens of living in United States. Well, that is where I live, so that's the lens I have... My experience is that religions tend to settle down as they age. Catholics, while they may have firm belief, tend to keep it to themselves, and not to proselytize. It's more of a culture and ritual than a fervent cause. Protestants, especially Evangelicals, tend to be a bit more vocal. Mormons were killing people not so long ago[1] (though my Mormon friends never tried to convert me). Scientologists are just insane. Our older religions are, on average, more peaceful and benign. I don't know where you live or grew up, so I can't guess at your experience with religion. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Meadows_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Meadows_massacre
mandeepj 7y ago
> the book informs the reader where puck is going to be (from Satya's POV) Satya became CEO during the beginning of 2014. And, the book was published on September 26, 2017. So, you read it when the puck was in transit.
- calvinbhai 7y ago
  True. Not disagreeing with that. But it was interesting to know the foundations of the transition being laid from day 1 with Nadella as CEO. The book is more like a little bit of a background of Nadella (his life in India and early days in US) and a little bit about his career in microsoft before becoming CEO and the rest of it is about the transition from pre-CEO to CEO and the initial months. TBH, I was a bit skeptical that culture change that he focussed on would end up having such a huge impact. But I was sure that his work in terms of focus on cloud, AI, ML and also considering the challenges of such computing power, certainly was the right direction for MS to move.
BenoitEssiambre 7y ago
Microsoft's hard turn for the best is a weird mirror image of Google's hard turn for the worst. It almost makes me want to give Windows a try again (ha not really). But I'd try a "Microsoft Linux" desktop (which no longer sounds like a ridiculous concept), before I would try Chrome OS.
- ticmasta 7y ago
  I think that, in addition to mobile devices, the browser is the new desktop and MS has conceded that to Google with Edge to be built on Chromium, so the chance of a MS Linux seem slim. Bill Gates always talked about beating competitors by commoditizing their offering; I think you're seeing MS do that to themselves with containerization built on linux or at the most nanoserver. It may take twenty years to kill off the last version in corporate IT, but windows desktop is dead.
  - e12e 7y ago
    With wsl, "Microsoft Linux" is running Linux binaries on a windows NT derived kernel. With a release of sql server running under Linux, and Linux binaries running on windows under wsl - I'm not sure what Microsoft would want with a Microsoft Linux distribution (Linux kernel running gnu/Linux user land)?

maxxxxx 7y ago

“It's funny that 15 years back I was so anti MS and pro Google and now I think it's the other way!” Stay skeptical of all of them. No need to be fan of one of the big techs. In the end they are all greedy organizations that want to dominate. None of them should be trusted.

bovermyer 7y ago
I'm both wary of and hopeful about Microsoft and Google. "Trust but verify" and all that.
- spectramax 7y ago
  I’ve always found this phrase an oxymoron.
  - bovermyer 7y ago
    Where humans are involved, mistakes will happen. Trusting someone but verifying their work is a safe and sane pairing.
    - apetresc 7y ago
      But the whole point of trusting is that you get to skip verifying. What's the difference between trusting and not trusting if you still have to put in the work of verification anyway?
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - thaumasiotes 7y ago
        The difference is in when you begin cooperating. You can work much faster by immediately acting on agreements and later making sure the other party is attempting to hold up their end than you can by waiting until you can prove something about the other party and only then starting whatever it is you were supposed to do. Consider these different hiring schemes: 1. Hire whoever applies, and keep them forever, no matter what. ("Trust, don't verify.") 2. Hire whoever applies, and fire them later if they don't seem to be working out. ("Trust, but verify.") 3. Full background check and extensive additional vetting before an offer is made. ("Don't trust, do verify.") 4. Never hire anyone. ("Don't trust, don't verify.") Aside from the obvious pacing differences, note that what's verified (or not) in options 1/2 is different from what is verified in option 3. That's not a coincidence -- before you start working with someone, you can't assess whether they're doing a good job. You have to rely on more general (and therefore less reliable) markers of trustworthiness. (You may think option 4 sounds ridiculous. It isn't -- that is the historical norm for cooperation outside of very well-defined groups like your family or your tribe.)
    - stupidcar 7y ago
      How is verifying everything because you don't trust people not to make a mistake operationally different from verifying everything because you suspect bad faith? To the supposed trusted party, the result is the same: you not taking them at their word and instead checking whatever they do. Even if you're being honest about only verifying to avoid mistakes, you can never prove it. This definition of "trust but verify" would be better reduced to "verify", since it essentially claims that trust is, if not impossible, not practically applicable in any situation.
      - scarejunba 7y ago
        The trust part is me trusting you to want to do the right thing. The verify part is me checking that nothing went wrong - either through a mistake on your part, a misunderstanding on mine, or just the signal loss from the fact that human communication is imperfect.
        stupidcar 7y ago
        You've just restated the original post and ignored my question. Again: how does this definition of supposed trust differ from distrust in any verifiable way?
        scarejunba 7y ago
        It affects our interaction. Because I assume you'll act in good faith, I only add verification in the range of errors not in the range of malice.
        stupidcar 7y ago
        It seems to me that the range of human error is rarely smaller than that of malice, so again I'm not sure there will be much apparent difference between an exhaustive verification of either sort.
        scarejunba 7y ago
  - levesque 7y ago
    Don't trust, verify.
    - amelius 7y ago
      And how do you do that? E.g. how do you verify that Google deletes your data when you tell it to?
      - levesque 7y ago
        No idea, was just messing around. If one really were to do this, the best way would probably be to trick them into employing you, and then verify from the inside (and even then, good luck!). I do believe it's going to be an issue in the future, if it isn't already one. Even as a government, how do you really make sure that company X erases the data?
  - jasonlotito 7y ago
    It's not. The trust is in the good intentions, the verification is that people do make mistakes. I trust myself, but I still verify my own work.
  - rurp 7y ago
    It is, but also carries a clear message; I think that dichotomy is why it's been such an enduring phrase. The term became well known in the US during the cold war, in the context of arms treaties. The US and Russia were making agreements that relied on at least the appearance of, and some degree of actual, trust. Meanwhile they were undertaking extensive efforts to check if the other party was actually following their obligations.
  - hathawsh 7y ago
    You're correct: an oxymoron is a phrase that is seemingly self-contradictory. While "trust but verify" is an oxymoron, it is not a contradiction or paradox. A simpler oxymoron is "to make haste slowly". In that phrase, the "make haste" part describes velocity, while "slowly" describes acceleration. Anyone who has taken Calculus knows that velocity and acceleration can be independent variables. Thus "to make haste slowly" is an oxymoron but not self-contradictory. Similarly, "trust but verify" describes two possibly independent variables: your attitude about the future and your behavior regarding the past. You can choose to trust people to make good decisions for the future, while simultaneously verifying they made good decisions in the past. Alternatives to "trust but verify" include "always trust", which has obvious bad consequences; "never trust", which has different but also bad consequences; "trust sometimes", which is ambiguous; and "verify always", which is unrealistic. The phrase "trust but verify" describes a healthy attitude and behavior.
    - spectramax 7y ago
      I wasn't 100% sure if I chose the correct term, thanks for the explanation!
  - CodeMage 7y ago
    What it means is "Trust the intentions, but verify the results." It's just that "trust, but verify" is shorter and more memorable.
  - Isamu 7y ago
    It's a punchline from a joke that Reagan told repeatedly around the time of US-USSR weapons treaties. It's supposed to be funny. Something along the lines of: "Q: Can we trust these guys to uphold their side of the deal? A: Sure, trust but verify." Edit: here it is, it's actually a funny Russian proverb that Reagan was repeating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust,_but_verify https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust,_but_verify
  - marmaduke 7y ago
    it's like preparing for the worst, while hoping for the best
- make3 7y ago
  trust enough to use but keep your eyes open
- maxxxxx 7y ago
  "Vertrauen ist gut, Kontrolle ist besser" for the Germans here :-)
  - sooper 7y ago
    I think this is a better aphorism than "trust, but verify". I work in the information security assurance field, I swear that 90% of the issues I see at companies with external service providers comes back to the fact that their contract does not have anywhere enough ability to hold the service provider to task... Get everything you need in the contract / agreement, then hope you never have to use it.
    - maxxxxx 7y ago
      From my experience it’s close to impossible to have a 100% bullet proof contract. If you try that you end up with the typical government contracting style where you spend a lot of time with specs and requirements upfront but it falls apart as soon as it touches reality. In the end you need to pick suppliers you can work with productively no matter what the correct details are.
ticmasta 7y ago
As a developer MS has treated me really well, IMO. They churn out as much short-lived tech as the next company but I think their windows-based culture of backwards compatibility carried over into the developer ecosystem, and the future of .Net Core running in Linux containers with docker and k8s, against SQL Server on Linux would make anyone who's been away from their tech for the past 5 years think they stepped out of a time machine.
- phkahler 7y ago
  On backwards compatibility. I recently learned that apple has deprecated OpenGL and soon will not support it at all. What a slap to developers... so yeah there is some value to Microsofts approach.
  - megy 7y ago
    There is an advantage and a disadvantage to backwards compatibility. Letting people keep using old technology that hampers progress. You have to devote resources to ensuring that it still works, and you have less people using the new stuff.
  - SpikeDad 7y ago
    Apple isn't afraid of ditching tech when it becomes clear it's a dead end. In almost all cases they've been correct and the rest of the industry soon follows their leads. Think how reliable Windows would be today if they hadn't left in all the cruft as far back as Windows 2000.
    - yellowapple 7y ago
      > In almost all cases they've been correct and the rest of the industry soon follows their leads. Counterpoint: 3.5mm jacks are perfectly fine and were never a "dead end". OpenGL's indeed pretty crusty, but Vulkan is not. Apple would be better off participating in that ecosystem instead of letting NIH syndrome take hold. > Think how reliable Windows would be today if they hadn't left in all the cruft as far back as Windows 2000. Counterpoint: an x86 Linux executable statically compiled/linked any time after the a.out → ELF migration (so... predating Windows 2000) can be expected to run without issue on a bleeding-edge x86 kernel today (and if it's not able to do so, then that's a bug, and Linus will personally descend upon and eviscerate the one unfortunate enough to have introduced that bug).
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
redisman 7y ago
Tech giants are the biggest companies by market cap and run the world now. They're not the lovable runts from the 90's anymore.

ThrowawayR2 7y ago

> It's funny that 15 years back I was so anti MS and pro Google and now I think it's the other way! You should be pro-neither. Microsoft used to be against FOSS because they thought it would make them more money; Microsoft is currently friendlier to FOSS because they think it will make them more money. Does that make them bad people? No because all businesses are that way, even the vaunted "don't be evil" Google.

GuiA 7y ago
Being pro/anti specific companies in a very binary way, like you point out, is a false path. However, placing all companies in the same bucket is committing a similar mistake. There is definitely a “gradient of morality” amongst companies, despite all of them doing things because they think it is what will make them the most money in the long run. A company building products that end up aiding the carrying out of genocides, for instance, is clearly on a more extreme end of the spectrum than a company making money selling music streaming subscriptions.
- Stratoscope 7y ago
  > A company building products that end up aiding the carrying out of genocides, for instance, is clearly on a more extreme end of the spectrum... Couldn't that describe just about any company or open source project? A database and office software end up helping you manage and track your genocide. A camera company's products and photo/video editing software end up helping people create beheading videos and child porn. When we create a general purpose product and release it to the world, we lose control of who uses it and for what purposes. In fact, that is a specific requirement for free and open source software licenses.
  - GuiA 7y ago
    That's fair. But perhaps you'd agree with me that there's a line between a company making products like cameras - which can certainly be used to cruel ends, but typically easily replaced by any of your competitor's products, and not pivotal to such efforts - and a company building a product that has no real replacement, is central to anti-human practices, and routinely ignores the criticisms and suggestions of human rights groups around the world.

orbifold 7y ago

I feel the same way. Although in my case it is also due to age. I‘ve lost patience with the linux ecosystem a long time ago, it’s all fun and games when you are in control, but being forced to use a Linux cluster or custom Debian installation without admin privileges is so much worse than working on an administered windows or macOS could possibly be. At least there you have sane defaults.

xwhy 7y ago

I'm still highly skeptical. One rather likely scenario is that Nadella slowly wants to turn Microsoft into IBM. IBM has free OSS labor and outsources to India. Choosing Nadella as CEO makes a lot of sense for that plan.

ksec 7y ago

I am Pro Apple, but that is only because for most of the time they have stick to their words. That was Steve's Apple then, Tim Cook doesn't seems to be quite as trust worthy at least according to Qualcomm's case. I was Anti MS, I guess I am neutral on them now. But I never trusted Google in the first place, and found it odd every one jumps to Google's hype. From Gmail to Google Docs. And now I found it funny they are Anti Google again. The only explanation I found plausible, is that people like David and not Goliath. They always prefer the underdogs to win, and the titans to lose.

eitland 7y ago
Upvoted. As for why some of us defended Google there was a long time where they - IMO - were very nice. Big contributors to a number of good causes. Fired sysadmin who looked into data of someone he knew, even of he had a good reason, because trust came first. Old AdWords/AdSense with somewhat relevant text only ads wasn't too shady IMO. ... at a time when Microsoft had a CEO that said Open Source was like cancer. Etc. Looking back my guess is it went wrong somewhere around the doubleclick acquisition.

username223 7y ago

> It's funny that 15 years back I was so anti MS and pro Google and now I think it's the other way! Or 15 years before that, pro-MS and anti-IBM. IBM is still huge, but they've found a steady revenue stream doing enterprise stuff, so they're not creating (much) fresh evil. MS could have made steady profits writing decent desktop software (I'm not so sure now). They're both powerful but comfortable. Google is huge, and still thinks it can rule the world. Companies are a bit like religions. When they're small, they can't have much impact. When they're big and young, they can wreak havoc. If they make it to comfortable old age, they're peaceful and stable. The Catholic Church is huge, benign, and stable now, but 1000 years ago they were a bit more conquest-focused and violent, and 2000 years ago they were just a few harmless militants.

CodeMage 7y ago
> Companies are a bit like religions. When they're small, they can't have much impact. When they're big and young, they can wreak havoc. If they make it to comfortable old age, they're peaceful and stable. The Catholic Church is huge, benign, and stable now, but 1000 years ago they were a bit more conquest-focused and violent, and 2000 years ago they were just a few harmless militants. That's a really bad analogy and detracts a lot from your point. Big religions that reach old age are merely stable, but that doesn't necessarily make them peaceful or benign. My guess is that you're probably looking at it through the lens of living in United States.
- username223 7y ago
  Oops... > My guess is that you're probably looking at it through the lens of living in United States. Well, that is where I live, so that's the lens I have... My experience is that religions tend to settle down as they age. Catholics, while they may have firm belief, tend to keep it to themselves, and not to proselytize. It's more of a culture and ritual than a fervent cause. Protestants, especially Evangelicals, tend to be a bit more vocal. Mormons were killing people not so long ago[1] (though my Mormon friends never tried to convert me). Scientologists are just insane. Our older religions are, on average, more peaceful and benign. I don't know where you live or grew up, so I can't guess at your experience with religion. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Meadows_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Meadows_massacre

mandeepj 7y ago

> the book informs the reader where puck is going to be (from Satya's POV) Satya became CEO during the beginning of 2014. And, the book was published on September 26, 2017. So, you read it when the puck was in transit.

calvinbhai 7y ago
True. Not disagreeing with that. But it was interesting to know the foundations of the transition being laid from day 1 with Nadella as CEO. The book is more like a little bit of a background of Nadella (his life in India and early days in US) and a little bit about his career in microsoft before becoming CEO and the rest of it is about the transition from pre-CEO to CEO and the initial months. TBH, I was a bit skeptical that culture change that he focussed on would end up having such a huge impact. But I was sure that his work in terms of focus on cloud, AI, ML and also considering the challenges of such computing power, certainly was the right direction for MS to move.

BenoitEssiambre 7y ago

Microsoft's hard turn for the best is a weird mirror image of Google's hard turn for the worst. It almost makes me want to give Windows a try again (ha not really). But I'd try a "Microsoft Linux" desktop (which no longer sounds like a ridiculous concept), before I would try Chrome OS.

ticmasta 7y ago
I think that, in addition to mobile devices, the browser is the new desktop and MS has conceded that to Google with Edge to be built on Chromium, so the chance of a MS Linux seem slim. Bill Gates always talked about beating competitors by commoditizing their offering; I think you're seeing MS do that to themselves with containerization built on linux or at the most nanoserver. It may take twenty years to kill off the last version in corporate IT, but windows desktop is dead.
- e12e 7y ago
  With wsl, "Microsoft Linux" is running Linux binaries on a windows NT derived kernel. With a release of sql server running under Linux, and Linux binaries running on windows under wsl - I'm not sure what Microsoft would want with a Microsoft Linux distribution (Linux kernel running gnu/Linux user land)?