9 ms·

This is remarkable, and impossible to predict from the Microsoft of 10 or 20 years ago. Satya seems to be the rare visionary CEO of a megacorp, instead of just

This is remarkable, and impossible to predict from the Microsoft of 10 or 20 years ago. Satya seems to be the rare visionary CEO of a megacorp, instead of just defaulting to a defensive and reactionary stance like most other leaders.

acomjean 7y ago
I don’t know. I think they’re still the same at the core, they just do enough to try and stay relevant. Office for Linux would be easy, but that’s not going to happen. My companies online outlook shows that MS is adding clones of all the tools (slack/trello). They’ve been successful and monitizing in this new era
- oldjokes 7y ago
  Yeah clearly they are throwing a lot of spaghetti at things, I don't know that that's necessarily bad. At least they are trying to do so openly and in a API-centric way instead of just building the garden walls higher like every other company. I haven't used Office in years and don't know anyone who has, so I'm not sure how big of a priority it is to add platforms to a product like that.
- bunderbunder 7y ago
  > Office for Linux would be easy, but that’s not going to happen. I have a hard time believing it would be easy. I use both Office for Windows and Mac, and the differences are great enough that I'm guessing that there's a huge amount of divergent code in the UIs. And both would be written against GUI toolkits that are not present on Linux, so a Linux port would be yet another major effort. That said, I think that you're right that it's not going to happen. My understanding is that a major consideration for anyone looking to port a commercial desktop product to Linux is that Linux desktop users are, in the broad, very hesitant to spend $100s on a commercial product when open source alternatives exist. My guess would be that a Linux port of Office just isn't a proposition that is likely to generate positive profits.
  - BuckRogers 7y ago
    Office Online is the desktop Linux user's access to Office. Enough people use Macs that it makes sense to invest into the effort, else some other vendor will gobble up Office's marketshare. I use Office Online and LibreOffice all the time on Windows 10, some documents it's just better to have guaranteed formatting compatibility with the majority of documents which are put out through MS Office. I would personally just continue the same pattern if I were a desktop Linux user.
- balls187 7y ago
  Have you looked at Office365?
- Scuds 7y ago
  > Office for Linux would be easy, but that’s not going to happen. They're rewriting Office in React Native so Windows, OSX, and mobile ports will have a lot more in common. But "Desktop Linux" will always be a million support headaches for no market share; which begs the question "Dear Lord, why?"
  - cm2187 7y ago
    And the only way to build market share is through cannibalization of windows licenses. Not in microsoft's interest. If you hae a proper office for windows, I bet many companies would consider seriously switching to Linux.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Office has been available for Mac for well over two decades. There are so many more reasons for companies preferring Windows on the desktop than just Office.
      - cm2187 7y ago
        I think there were so may more reasons. But what I see is all internal apps moving to be web based. 5 more years and Office is really going to be the last thing tying up corporates to Windows.
        AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
        Call me when Linux has anything that works as well as AD.
        scarface74 7y ago
        You just need a server running AD. Third party and browser SSO with AD is a solved problem.
        yellowapple 7y ago
        It does; it's called AD. :) The actual problem is the lack of Group Policy support (or even a viable equivalent - preferably one that's cross-platform).
- luckydata 7y ago
  Office on Linux already exist, it's called Office 365. Porting Office desktop for an operating system that's COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT for office users makes no sense.
  - nicoburns 7y ago
    > an operating system that's COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT for office users Arguably a large part of the reason that Linux isn't used in offices is because MS Office isn't available. Of course it's in Microsoft's interest to keep it that way.
    - BuckRogers 7y ago
      I love Linux Mint and Antergos as much as the next guy but Microsoft built an entire platform/ecosystem around tight integration between a full range of enterprise products. I can't say I blame them, decades of significant effort is required to do that and it's not easy or there would be someone else who has done it. Not only is the incentive not there as you mentioned, but it's definitely not malevolence to avoid trying to support random desktop Linux distros which will likely not cooperate with their integration efforts (and likely take joy in being able to reject or impede MS's efforts), to the degree they can with Windows 10. They have the right idea today, embrace server-side Linux with .Net Core, and soon, .Net 5. That's what Linux is primarily intended for, it's a server kernel and where the action is in regards to that ecosystem. There's a reason some of the code in X11 hasn't been touched in 20 years.
    - luckydata 7y ago
      C'mon, that's complete bullshit. Linux is very hostile to the everyday user, you can't expect a large majority of users to have to fiddle as much as it's necessary to get a barely passable desktop experience on Linux. You buy a Windows or Mac computer and you're going in 10 minutes. There's no combination of distro or hardware where that's true for Linux.
      - tracker1 7y ago
        I pretty much disagree here. Before she passed last year, I had my grandmother on linux for about 11 years. I had wine setup for the handful of old games (95 era) she liked, and made sure to update everything once or twice a year. Of course one time I waited too long. Archived her home dir, and installed the latest Ubuntu, restored her home dir, and she was up and running again. She didn't have to know anything about linux to use it. The same is true for a lot of people. More so in a corporate environment with dedicated staff to handle the harder problems. Hell, most people in offices could get away with a Chromebook and Office 365 today. Of course, general use laptops and proper linux support are not things that are very common. That part truly sucks. And, yeah, it's not pre-installed for the most part except for some boutique vendors and a couple Dell offerings. Aside: Have had a few looks at System 76 lately. May change out my mid-2014 rmbp next year. Unfortunately it's one of the last systems with NVidia, and the metal 2 support for the 750M doesn't work well at all. I'm also probably going to change my desktop to Linux in a few months. Hackintosh support is all but going away, and although I could change out my GTX 1080 with a next gen Navi for hackintosh, but I just don't want to support the mac platform anymore, and my 1080 has a lot of life left in it.
- sabarn01 7y ago
  It only took about 5 years to get one rendering engine for both Mac and windows, but sure it would be easy.
- manigandham 7y ago
  The efforts have been spent on cloud services. Office 365 online is rather good, OneDrive finally works, and other things like Teams and DevOps are being well integrated. For 95% of business users, these online editions have all the capabilities they need without the install headache and are much easier to maintain and update. Office Desktop just had a refresh too but there's basically 0% Linux business users to spend the millions in development costs for a variant.
bunderbunder 7y ago
My guess is that it's also at least partially reflective of how .NET's status at Microsoft has changed over the past two decades. Remember 20 years ago, when .NET wasn't just a managed software development platform? It was a company-wide strategy[1] that was meant to encompass more-or-less their entire product line. The whole Microsoft future was .NET, and they were going to have a .NET edition of Windows, SQL Server, Exchange, etc. Since then, those plans have been dropped, Microsoft's (.NET-based) preferred GUI toolkits, WinForms and WPF, were replaced by one that is .NET-compatible but not .NET-native, etc. etc. .NET just isn't as central to Microsoft's identity as it was 20 years ago. Which, I'm guessing, means that the .NET team is now a lot freer to go cross-platform without inviting the wrath of the Windows team. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_.NET_strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_.NET_strategy
- anotherblue 7y ago
  > wrath of the Windows team. There is not much of Windows team to wield the wrath: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/windows-leader-terry-myerson-out-as-microsoft-reorganizes-windows-division/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/windows-leader-terry...
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    They are still around. https://kennykerr.ca/2019/01/25/the-state-of-cpp-on-windows/ https://kennykerr.ca/2019/01/25/the-state-of-cpp-on-windows/ Read towards the end.
- goto11 7y ago
  I think the initial ".net strategy" was just a (failed) marketing exercise. It was supposedly some kind of grand vision where the .net framework were just one component and SOAP was another. They certainly did not plan to base Windows or SQL Server on the .net framework.
  - BuckRogers 7y ago
    You're correct. I'm certain that you're fully aware of Midori, but as you alluded to, a Microsoft Research initiative, but never was on the official roadmap. .Net itself has been a great success. I was completely sold on .Net Core and .Net 5 is exactly where they needed to take it.
burnte 7y ago
He understand that Microsoft is a software company, and makes money selling software and software services. Steve Ballmer, for all his good attributes, was stuck seeing Microsoft as a Windows company, thinking everything had to relate back to Windows. Nadella understand that companies change or die. Ballmer just thought that meant finding new places to shove Windows.
- stefs 7y ago
  an ironic twist is that microsoft always made very good hardware (typing this on a natural keyboard 4000 & also the xbox controller).
asdfman123 7y ago
Older execs probably had to be defensive and reactionary because they had to protect their main source of income, Windows. But it's clear now that 1) Windows has zero chance of taking a significant market share away from Linux in the cloud and 2) cloud technology is an important area of growth for MS. Satya probably sees that stubbornly sticking to Windows just isn't going to work anymore, so it's better to play nice with the others.
basetop 7y ago
What? Satya didn't invent .Net. The idea of .Net, like the JRE, was to write once and run everywhere. What's visionary about it? It's sad how so many articles and comments come off just pure PR now. Not saying your comment is, but I have to wonder how much of the "news", comments and internet content is now just PR.
- dtech 7y ago
  For a very long time .Net was Windows only. That only changed after Balmer was gone and Satya came in.
  - ygra 7y ago
    Some cross-platform considerations have been built into it from the start, though. And there has been an official open-source implementation on a non-Windows platform. Perhaps more to show that it's possible than as an actual usable artifact, but it was there.
    - kevingadd 7y ago
      I think describing Mono as Official is a bit of a reach. AFAIK they benefited from the patent promise but that was about it until the acquisition. If you mean .NET Core as official open source, that's true, but it's a relatively recent thing.
      - ygra 7y ago
        There was Rotor on FreeBSD. Probably more a proof of concept, but it was there.
  - tracker1 7y ago
    Mono existed from very early on with .Net and the core was pretty compatible. I think when MS bought Xamarin, it finally got the attention it deserved, and really did go to help .Net Core take form.
  - deleted 7y ago
scarface74 7y ago
Not taking anything away from Satya, but all of the big tech CEOs seem to be able to successfully pivot: - Netflix - moved from delivering discs to streaming and moved their entire infrastructure to AWS and CDNs - Amazon - went from just being a first party retailer to being a marketplace, AWS, and Alexa. - Apple - as of last quarter all five of their major verticals are large enough to be a F200 company by itself. - Facebook -- Instagram and WhatsApp were acquisitions but it didn't ruin either and they are both larger than they would have been. - Google -- well still just a one trick pony - search ads (as far as profits) no matter how many things they against a wall.
chubot 7y ago
I'm pretty skeptical of all the Microsoft praise lately, but if this is indeed true, it's a big deal. And probably a management feat somewhere (CEO or otherwise). I worked on dev tools at Google and recall many efforts over the years to try to unify the customer experience -- between internal and external tools, Go and Dart, Android and Chrome devtools, etc. Things always lurched in one direction or another, but never consistently. It was always above someone's pay grade to choose one or the other, so you ended up with both. Convincing engineers on devtools to abandon their babies is indeed hard! On the other hand, I think if you dig deep, Microsoft still has all the legacy, but they cover it up with a lot of branding. Hence the top comment in this thread about confusing branding.

acomjean 7y ago

I don’t know. I think they’re still the same at the core, they just do enough to try and stay relevant. Office for Linux would be easy, but that’s not going to happen. My companies online outlook shows that MS is adding clones of all the tools (slack/trello). They’ve been successful and monitizing in this new era

oldjokes 7y ago
Yeah clearly they are throwing a lot of spaghetti at things, I don't know that that's necessarily bad. At least they are trying to do so openly and in a API-centric way instead of just building the garden walls higher like every other company. I haven't used Office in years and don't know anyone who has, so I'm not sure how big of a priority it is to add platforms to a product like that.
bunderbunder 7y ago
> Office for Linux would be easy, but that’s not going to happen. I have a hard time believing it would be easy. I use both Office for Windows and Mac, and the differences are great enough that I'm guessing that there's a huge amount of divergent code in the UIs. And both would be written against GUI toolkits that are not present on Linux, so a Linux port would be yet another major effort. That said, I think that you're right that it's not going to happen. My understanding is that a major consideration for anyone looking to port a commercial desktop product to Linux is that Linux desktop users are, in the broad, very hesitant to spend $100s on a commercial product when open source alternatives exist. My guess would be that a Linux port of Office just isn't a proposition that is likely to generate positive profits.
- BuckRogers 7y ago
  Office Online is the desktop Linux user's access to Office. Enough people use Macs that it makes sense to invest into the effort, else some other vendor will gobble up Office's marketshare. I use Office Online and LibreOffice all the time on Windows 10, some documents it's just better to have guaranteed formatting compatibility with the majority of documents which are put out through MS Office. I would personally just continue the same pattern if I were a desktop Linux user.
balls187 7y ago
Have you looked at Office365?
Scuds 7y ago
> Office for Linux would be easy, but that’s not going to happen. They're rewriting Office in React Native so Windows, OSX, and mobile ports will have a lot more in common. But "Desktop Linux" will always be a million support headaches for no market share; which begs the question "Dear Lord, why?"
- cm2187 7y ago
  And the only way to build market share is through cannibalization of windows licenses. Not in microsoft's interest. If you hae a proper office for windows, I bet many companies would consider seriously switching to Linux.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Office has been available for Mac for well over two decades. There are so many more reasons for companies preferring Windows on the desktop than just Office.
    - cm2187 7y ago
      I think there were so may more reasons. But what I see is all internal apps moving to be web based. 5 more years and Office is really going to be the last thing tying up corporates to Windows.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
        Call me when Linux has anything that works as well as AD.
        scarface74 7y ago
        You just need a server running AD. Third party and browser SSO with AD is a solved problem.
        yellowapple 7y ago
        It does; it's called AD. :) The actual problem is the lack of Group Policy support (or even a viable equivalent - preferably one that's cross-platform).
luckydata 7y ago
Office on Linux already exist, it's called Office 365. Porting Office desktop for an operating system that's COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT for office users makes no sense.
- nicoburns 7y ago
  > an operating system that's COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT for office users Arguably a large part of the reason that Linux isn't used in offices is because MS Office isn't available. Of course it's in Microsoft's interest to keep it that way.
  - BuckRogers 7y ago
    I love Linux Mint and Antergos as much as the next guy but Microsoft built an entire platform/ecosystem around tight integration between a full range of enterprise products. I can't say I blame them, decades of significant effort is required to do that and it's not easy or there would be someone else who has done it. Not only is the incentive not there as you mentioned, but it's definitely not malevolence to avoid trying to support random desktop Linux distros which will likely not cooperate with their integration efforts (and likely take joy in being able to reject or impede MS's efforts), to the degree they can with Windows 10. They have the right idea today, embrace server-side Linux with .Net Core, and soon, .Net 5. That's what Linux is primarily intended for, it's a server kernel and where the action is in regards to that ecosystem. There's a reason some of the code in X11 hasn't been touched in 20 years.
  - luckydata 7y ago
    C'mon, that's complete bullshit. Linux is very hostile to the everyday user, you can't expect a large majority of users to have to fiddle as much as it's necessary to get a barely passable desktop experience on Linux. You buy a Windows or Mac computer and you're going in 10 minutes. There's no combination of distro or hardware where that's true for Linux.
    - tracker1 7y ago
      I pretty much disagree here. Before she passed last year, I had my grandmother on linux for about 11 years. I had wine setup for the handful of old games (95 era) she liked, and made sure to update everything once or twice a year. Of course one time I waited too long. Archived her home dir, and installed the latest Ubuntu, restored her home dir, and she was up and running again. She didn't have to know anything about linux to use it. The same is true for a lot of people. More so in a corporate environment with dedicated staff to handle the harder problems. Hell, most people in offices could get away with a Chromebook and Office 365 today. Of course, general use laptops and proper linux support are not things that are very common. That part truly sucks. And, yeah, it's not pre-installed for the most part except for some boutique vendors and a couple Dell offerings. Aside: Have had a few looks at System 76 lately. May change out my mid-2014 rmbp next year. Unfortunately it's one of the last systems with NVidia, and the metal 2 support for the 750M doesn't work well at all. I'm also probably going to change my desktop to Linux in a few months. Hackintosh support is all but going away, and although I could change out my GTX 1080 with a next gen Navi for hackintosh, but I just don't want to support the mac platform anymore, and my 1080 has a lot of life left in it.
sabarn01 7y ago
It only took about 5 years to get one rendering engine for both Mac and windows, but sure it would be easy.
manigandham 7y ago
The efforts have been spent on cloud services. Office 365 online is rather good, OneDrive finally works, and other things like Teams and DevOps are being well integrated. For 95% of business users, these online editions have all the capabilities they need without the install headache and are much easier to maintain and update. Office Desktop just had a refresh too but there's basically 0% Linux business users to spend the millions in development costs for a variant.

bunderbunder 7y ago

My guess is that it's also at least partially reflective of how .NET's status at Microsoft has changed over the past two decades. Remember 20 years ago, when .NET wasn't just a managed software development platform? It was a company-wide strategy[1] that was meant to encompass more-or-less their entire product line. The whole Microsoft future was .NET, and they were going to have a .NET edition of Windows, SQL Server, Exchange, etc. Since then, those plans have been dropped, Microsoft's (.NET-based) preferred GUI toolkits, WinForms and WPF, were replaced by one that is .NET-compatible but not .NET-native, etc. etc. .NET just isn't as central to Microsoft's identity as it was 20 years ago. Which, I'm guessing, means that the .NET team is now a lot freer to go cross-platform without inviting the wrath of the Windows team. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_.NET_strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_.NET_strategy

anotherblue 7y ago
> wrath of the Windows team. There is not much of Windows team to wield the wrath: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/windows-leader-terry-myerson-out-as-microsoft-reorganizes-windows-division/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/windows-leader-terry...
- pjmlp 7y ago
  They are still around. https://kennykerr.ca/2019/01/25/the-state-of-cpp-on-windows/ https://kennykerr.ca/2019/01/25/the-state-of-cpp-on-windows/ Read towards the end.
goto11 7y ago
I think the initial ".net strategy" was just a (failed) marketing exercise. It was supposedly some kind of grand vision where the .net framework were just one component and SOAP was another. They certainly did not plan to base Windows or SQL Server on the .net framework.
- BuckRogers 7y ago
  You're correct. I'm certain that you're fully aware of Midori, but as you alluded to, a Microsoft Research initiative, but never was on the official roadmap. .Net itself has been a great success. I was completely sold on .Net Core and .Net 5 is exactly where they needed to take it.

burnte 7y ago

He understand that Microsoft is a software company, and makes money selling software and software services. Steve Ballmer, for all his good attributes, was stuck seeing Microsoft as a Windows company, thinking everything had to relate back to Windows. Nadella understand that companies change or die. Ballmer just thought that meant finding new places to shove Windows.

stefs 7y ago
an ironic twist is that microsoft always made very good hardware (typing this on a natural keyboard 4000 & also the xbox controller).

asdfman123 7y ago

Older execs probably had to be defensive and reactionary because they had to protect their main source of income, Windows. But it's clear now that 1) Windows has zero chance of taking a significant market share away from Linux in the cloud and 2) cloud technology is an important area of growth for MS. Satya probably sees that stubbornly sticking to Windows just isn't going to work anymore, so it's better to play nice with the others.

basetop 7y ago

What? Satya didn't invent .Net. The idea of .Net, like the JRE, was to write once and run everywhere. What's visionary about it? It's sad how so many articles and comments come off just pure PR now. Not saying your comment is, but I have to wonder how much of the "news", comments and internet content is now just PR.

dtech 7y ago
For a very long time .Net was Windows only. That only changed after Balmer was gone and Satya came in.
- ygra 7y ago
  Some cross-platform considerations have been built into it from the start, though. And there has been an official open-source implementation on a non-Windows platform. Perhaps more to show that it's possible than as an actual usable artifact, but it was there.
  - kevingadd 7y ago
    I think describing Mono as Official is a bit of a reach. AFAIK they benefited from the patent promise but that was about it until the acquisition. If you mean .NET Core as official open source, that's true, but it's a relatively recent thing.
    - ygra 7y ago
      There was Rotor on FreeBSD. Probably more a proof of concept, but it was there.
- tracker1 7y ago
  Mono existed from very early on with .Net and the core was pretty compatible. I think when MS bought Xamarin, it finally got the attention it deserved, and really did go to help .Net Core take form.
- deleted 7y ago

scarface74 7y ago

Not taking anything away from Satya, but all of the big tech CEOs seem to be able to successfully pivot: - Netflix - moved from delivering discs to streaming and moved their entire infrastructure to AWS and CDNs - Amazon - went from just being a first party retailer to being a marketplace, AWS, and Alexa. - Apple - as of last quarter all five of their major verticals are large enough to be a F200 company by itself. - Facebook -- Instagram and WhatsApp were acquisitions but it didn't ruin either and they are both larger than they would have been. - Google -- well still just a one trick pony - search ads (as far as profits) no matter how many things they against a wall.

chubot 7y ago

I'm pretty skeptical of all the Microsoft praise lately, but if this is indeed true, it's a big deal. And probably a management feat somewhere (CEO or otherwise). I worked on dev tools at Google and recall many efforts over the years to try to unify the customer experience -- between internal and external tools, Go and Dart, Android and Chrome devtools, etc. Things always lurched in one direction or another, but never consistently. It was always above someone's pay grade to choose one or the other, so you ended up with both. Convincing engineers on devtools to abandon their babies is indeed hard! On the other hand, I think if you dig deep, Microsoft still has all the legacy, but they cover it up with a lot of branding. Hence the top comment in this thread about confusing branding.