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Satya Nadella Added $850B to Microsoft
- new_realist 7y agoSatya takes all the credit for Trump wanting to punish Bezos?
- trianglem 7y agoWith that relatively measly $10 billion defense deal?
- saagarjha 7y ago> The company is the world's strongest supporter of the Linux open source coding system Citation needed. Also, a gentle reminder that Satya Nadella, as amazing as he might be, is not the sole reason why Microsoft's stock price has gone up.
- haasted 7y agoThe phrase "coding system" provides a good hint of the level of insight possessed by the journalist.
- saagarjha 7y agoI'd rather not judge the journalist's sourcing abilities by a perception of their expertise in the field that comes from two words. To put it another way: assuming good faith, it's entirely possible that the journalist was told some sort of statistic that agreed with the statement they made; I'm simply curious as to what it might be.
- jdminhbg 7y agoThat's too charitable. I wouldn't accept the vetting of any football-related news by a journalist who referred to the NFL as a "ball management organization."
- saagarjha 7y agoI would if they cited their sources so I could verify their claims for myself. In my eyes it's OK for the journalist of an article like this to not to be an expert in the field, but they should be able to provide a somewhat coherent summary of a topic and allow readers to perform their own analysis on the parts they care about.
- jdminhbg 7y agoWe're not talking about whether or not someone is an expert, we're talking about whether they have even a passing familiarity. What an operating system is isn't esoteric knowledge.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y agoLinux isn't an operating system.
- falcor84 7y ago"Linux" is as much "an operating system" as "Windows" is. Single words aren't expected to catch the nuances of decades long ecosystems, but are still very useful.
- saagarjha 7y agoYou'll find that it's not common knowledge among the general population, and presumably to some extent among the readership and authors of a financial newspaper.
- jdminhbg 7y agoIt's fine to not know what an operating system is. There are lots of areas of life where I'm almost totally ignorant. The difference is I wouldn't try to report on them before I learned very basic, elementary things about them. It's not too much to expect someone to learn "it's like Android or iOS" before professionally writing about it.
- throwaheyy 7y agoWell to be fair, the target audience for this newspaper is stuffy finance types.
- cheez 7y agoTwo ways to read it: the way you read it and "out of all the people who support Linux, MSFT is the strongest".
- cyphar 7y agoExcept "strongest supporter" has a particular meaning in English, and it's not the one you proposed.
- ThrowawayR2 7y ago> Also, a gentle reminder that Satya Nadella, as amazing as he might be, is not the sole reason why Microsoft's stock price has gone up. Yeah, Nadella laying off all of Microsoft's QA staff in 2014 helped considerably. /s
- stakhanov 7y agoFirst: A stock can rise for reasons having zero to do with the reality of the business behind the stock, for example mispricing, availability or the lack thereof of alternative investments, inflation, currency devaluation etc. Second: To me it always leaves a very foul aftertaste when the achievements of a team are ascribed to whoever the visible front-person is. I find it hard to believe that among the other 149999 employees that Microsoft has, there aren't some that deserve to be mentioned in relation to this achievement as much or even more than Satya Nadella does.
- yodon 7y agoBill Gates built an amazing airplane. Steve Ballmer crashed it in the desert. Satya Nadella rallied the survivors, put it back together, and got it flying again. Yes, he absolutely deserves the credit just as Ballmer absolutely deserves the blame.
- saagarjha 7y agoThis is a very simplistic view, as the comment you're replying to has been trying to point out.
- manigandham 7y agoIf you’re only looking at stock price then Ballmer did exceptionally well.
- ibatindev 7y agoHe made the right call by putting the cloud first, that's where real revenue come from. Nevertheless, let's remind that $MSFT has around 150k employees, where literally thousands are top tier in their position all across the industry.
- intsunny 7y agoIsn't the lion's share of MSFT's profits from their traditional OS and Office business units?
- eigenvalue 7y agoThat may be, but each incremental dollar of cloud revenue is assigned a much higher multiple by investors because it is growing quickly and seen as being more defensible over the long term.
- dharmab 7y agoCheck out their Q4 earnings release; Azure and cloud services are the products with highest growth. IIRC While Office desktop is still a major revenue source the market is trending towards Office 365, and Windows is behind cloud services revenue.
- raxxorrax 7y agoMicrosoft currently capitalizes on their monopoliy for office software with their new form of cloud monetization. But many users are very discontent.
- randcraw 7y agoCounterpoint: Maybe the departure of Steve Ballmer added $850B to Microsoft?
- ur-whale 7y agoCounter-counterpoint: but there's a lot less onstage dancing and screaming.
- notmyaccount 7y agoCounter-counter-counterpoint: That erased 850b in value. It could have been 1700b but Nadella doesn't dance or scream. Just stares angrily.
- cheez 7y agoYou leave IT Ghandi alone.
- notmyaccount 7y agoYour Windows is gonna spontaneously explode killing all of humanity.
- croon 7y ago> but there's a lot less [...] screaming Far-far aside: I watched his recent appearance on the daily show. Regardless of your views of him (he gave off a more sympathetic sheen as a basketball team owner and public service contributor [usafacts] than he did as a business man), but man does he not have an inside voice. He (or rather anyone around) would not function in an open plan office.
- WorldMaker 7y agoSemi-related to your aside, but I sometimes feel like the impression that people hold against Ballmer as CEO at Microsoft, was that he was a bit of a "basketball team owner". He was absolutely fired up with team spirit (sometimes to a fault). He never really "played" (wasn't very technical), but he loved to watch the sport and figured he knew good plays when he saw them. In the end, he needed to have better "coaches" working for him on the team, or to stop incentivizing (stack-ranking) the "coaches" to play mostly safe plays. Good/bad/and indifferent a lot of the takes on Ballmer seem to reflect how much you think a tech company needs a "basketball team owner".
- panpanna 7y agoWell, these days you _can_ run a company without a single Windows machine. What you cannot do (once you are more than a handful) is to not use any Microsoft cloud services (exchange online, office 365, skype fb, teams, ...) while doing business with other companies. Satya saw this way before the rest of us.
- nooyurrsdey 7y agoMicrosoft has defintiely made great business decisions under Nadella. His vision in recognizing cloud investment must not have been an easy thing for the board to accept. Two things I dislike about this article 1. It's tone is so favorable to Nadella and Microsoft, it feels like it was written by a fan. Amazon and Bezos are described as childish. They may be but it feels like the article has an agenda 2. Why is this a novel? The first third of this covers the main points but it keeps going
- kickscondor 7y agoIf you're curious why this run-of-the-mill PR piece is rising on HN, keep in mind that Microsoft (and other FAANG) posts like these are gamed by employees. https://www.kickscondor.com/satya-nadella-'reads''games'-hacker-news/ https://www.kickscondor.com/satya-nadella-'reads''games'-hac...
- maaaats 7y agoMeh, I upvoted because I thought it was interesting reading about the differences and how MS has changed over the years.
- notmyaccount 7y agoI upvoted it for the MS bucks I got.
- jessaustin 7y agoWhere do I sign up for that? I won't have to use windows, will I?
- notmyaccount 7y agoYou just have to use Bing Search. You get MS Bucks.
- tikkabhuna 7y agoWhilst that doesn't read well, is that quote confirming that he's "gaming" HN? To me that could be read as "We're focusing on interacting with the community to answer questions, gain feedback, and address concerns." I do tend to give people the benefit of the doubt though...
- ShteiLoups 7y agoWell there's a fine line between employees having a job duty as "participate in online forum" and straight up astroturfing. Especially on sites like HN and reddit which are relatively easy to manipulate. I don't know how comfortable I am with any company posting and promoting their own product/content. Even employees voting on posts seems like a potential conflict of interest to me.
- mathattack 7y agoUnfair to give him credit for all 850, but he’s done a phenomenal job as CEO. The cloud focus is obvious in hindsight, but Ballmer would still be milking Windows, and imagine if they installed a non-tech CEO.
- nabla9 7y agoThe JEDI deal going to MS might have lot to do with Trump-Bezos feud. Amazon is suing and there may be good reason for them to do so.
- Mountain_Skies 7y agomight, may So it might also just be because Microsoft had the better offering and Amazon may not have a good reason to sue. Might, may, could end up either way.
- nabla9 7y agoTrump has publicly interferd with the process and apparently also pressured Mattis in private. I think Amazon has a case.
- tempsy 7y agoMicrosoft's P/E ratio is a bit nutty. Investors are expecting big things.
- gzu 7y agoAlso this Nadella period coincided with a massive rise in passive investing and buyback of shares. Investors are buying the stock because it’s one of the largest in the indexes weighing in at nearly 5% of the SP 500 market cap. Because of passive investments and mutual funds trying to match passive (index) returns, a nickel of every dollar invested in the stock market goes directly to buy Microsoft without any human consideration.
- JustSomeNobody 7y agoAnd when it drops, the engineers will get fired before he does. This is an example of where you can have it both ways.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ozborn 7y agoI absolutely despise these hero worship type headlines, even if the individual made an important contribution. I realize headlines are written by editors (not by the author) so I don't blame the writer (the article is well written) but such headlines contribute to the already awful cult of celebrity worship and CEO salary inflation which doesn't need any more fuel. Headlines like these are the equivalent of scientific papers with no citations, no coauthors, no acknowledgements - as if the author was solely responsible for creating all the value merely by thinking in the aether. These types of scientific papers don't exist outside crank pot science for good reason - they are ludicrous. Just like this headline.
- EGreg 7y agoWhy so little? What went wrong?
- rdlecler1 7y agoYou could also frame it as Balmer was depressing Microsoft by $850b, that they were not reaching their potential.
- chasingthewind 7y agoIt would be great if there was a "billions above replacement" statistic for CEOs.
- cryptica 7y agoThe title is bs. Microsoft had a lot of legacy software which served as an on-ramp for Microsoft Cloud. MS success in the cloud is all a result of MS's past monopoly and has nothing to do with any individual who works for Microsoft. I bet Satya Nadella is just another corporate bureaucrat who is skilled at taking credit for success which has nothing to do with them. I don't buy it for 1 second that someone who is good at creating value could have the patience to spend almost 30 years working in a bureaucratic and monopolistic corporation like Microsoft and I doubt that it's even possible to learn these kinds of skills there. On the other hand, I think there is probably no better place to master the art of social manipulation and backstabbing.
- hos234 7y agoI am skeptical about the whole Cloud story. Has the faint stench of the housing bubble. It made sense when the story was about renting out spare data center capacity. Amazon and Google had a ton of excess which started the story. Microsoft, Oracle, IBM et al did not, but had to react to Amazon and Google Cloud and had to build up capacity. Then the game turned into ensuring all that new capacity was utilized. Enterprise needing to make the shift to Cloud is driven almost mindlessly by that fact, much more than actual Enterprise needs and issues. Utilization is achieved by smart marketing, a ton of it, targeted at dumb Enterprise. This feels like some honeymoon period.
- soared 7y ago> Enterprise needing to make the shift to Cloud is driven almost mindlessly by that fact Is your claim that there are almost no legitimate reasons to move enterprise applications to the cloud? I don't want to hire more engineers, buy more servers, etc. I just want to pay money and skip everything else.
- gph 7y agoI don't think it's dumb for most small to mid-size enterprise companies to migrate to the cloud. Being able to outsource IT/infrastructure is quite beneficial when your needs aren't so big that it makes sense to set up your own datacenter. And it's far more flexible, if you suddenly start getting a lot more or less traffic you can quickly upgrade/downgrade to what you need.
- eirini1 7y agotbh I think its eventually going to be an enviromental requirement to put everything in the cloud. At work we have an application used by financial advisors in offices during working hours only. Why do we need to have 4 whole machines spinning 24/7 (in the name of reliability and availability) when we only need a fraction of that computing power and only between 08:00 and 17:00?
- blobbers 7y agoThe CEO does not deserve all of the credit. American compensation mechanisms for executives are completely broken. The concept of WAR (Wins Above Replacement) needs to be brought into the business world. An sub par player on the Yankees will still win a lot of pennants. I'm not saying Satya is that guy, but generally speaking these sensationalist headlines are a problem!
- sumedh 7y ago> The CEO does not deserve all of the credit. Who gets the blame when companies like Nokia and RIM implode?
- anoncake 7y agoNo, the question is who deserves the blame.
- sumedh 7y agoSo who deserves the blame?
- blobbers 7y agoThe large group of strategy executives that had hubris related to touch screens. RIM got killed by the iphone AND android. Perhaps it was inevitable - the iphone is the only real premium smartphone on the market. It's a zero sum game?
- sumedh 7y ago> The large group of strategy executives that had hubris related to touch screens. So in a way its the CEO's fault for hiring/having such executives?
- coliveira 7y agoHe didn't add anything! Most of the fluctuation in a stock are due to market conditions. Second, almost all the work was done by workers in that company. The narrative that CEOs can do anything by themselves is a stupid myth that needs to be combatted.
- bitxbit 7y agoReally, it’s the fact that MS had enough cash to burn through all the bad mistakes and arrive at the next technology leap in cloud computing. They were able to fail their way toward success because of the monopoly they enjoyed for two decades. I am afraid the same thing will happen (or is already happening) to Apple.
- WooShoa 7y agoDoes anyone know what this $850,000,000,000.00 looks like in reality? Where was that value created? Did they sell that many more … what exactly? I am just trying to understand where that value is. Or was this essentially all stock buybacks that artificially inflate the "value" as established by the market cap? Ironically too is that when you control the MSFT market cap against the Trump inflated stock market, there is actually no actual gain, especially when you control for stock buybacks, aka, corporate stock self-inflation.
- cheez 7y ago850 billion can be broken down by: * Long term customers gained * Goodwill created * New products All of this reduces to "discounted future revenue". Say you have a 10 year target on MSFT. Do you think MSFT will make $850 billion dollars more in the next ten years than they did in the last ten years? MSFT revenue has doubled in the last ten years. Even if it does not grow at all, they will earn around $1T in the next ten years as compared to (about) $800 billion in the last ten. Edit: and if you DO think it will grow then perhaps $850B of value is perhaps the top line.
- BLanen 7y agoMicrosoft workers added $850b while Satya Nadella is CEO.
- systemdtrigger 7y agoHalf of that is Trump though.
- csomar 7y agoFrom his chart: - MSFT revenue/share price @ 2014: 86.8 / 37.1 - MSFT revenue/share price @ 2019: 125.8 / 133.52 -> revenue growth: 44.93% / price growth: 259.89% So either MSFT was significantly under-priced in 2014 or it's over-priced right now. Also: Disclosure: The author's self-managed super fund owns shares in Microsoft.
- Jyaif 7y agoThe share price is not correlated the current revenue, otherwise it would be extremely simple to predict the share price. It's correlated to the predicted future profit.
- agumonkey 7y agoThe fact that Microsoft is still alive and somehow kicking is a surprise in itself. Computing market swerved wildly and they could have fall apart easily
- systemdtrigger 7y agoIt's a surprise only if you live in hn bubble
- agumonkey 7y agoI sounded exagerating but you know that they were under attack in many fields. They failed on the phone market. The tablet market. (although it may be coming back now). Office got pressure from Google Docs. The desktop market has shrunk.. Even their server side was not strong.
- dr-detroit 7y agoYeah okay boomer, so you're saying they're almost keeping up with inflation?
- blueboo 7y agoThe only thing that matters in companies is the CEOs. You can tell because the stock changed when they held the position.
- juststeve 7y agoSocialize the development, privatize the profits.
- gist 7y agoThis is a typical cherry picked business leader article where you can find examples to make any point that you want (or don't want). This is the reason that I stopped years ago even reading business magazines (you know the ones with the airport candy shop headlines). They all follow the same 'hero' or 'zero' angle and typically have no access to the nuance (or underplay it) and complexity that goes into any success or failure. Nice reading though. Note: Then I see this of all things: 'Disclosure: The author's self-managed super fund owns shares in Microsoft."
- salvagedcircuit 7y agoI would argue that even though the surface line has been a regarded as a financial failure, it is one of their most important developments to this date. Microsoft has been developing hardware for user interface design behind closed doors for years, and never released anything to the public before surface. Sure, the surface line was originally pushed by Ballmer, but I am so very glad that Nadella did not just look at financial statistics and just kill it. Hats off to you Nadella.
- whalabi 7y agoPretty sure the employees had something to do with it
- stephbu 7y agoPerson of the year should go to Amy Hood - she brought the divide under control by starving funding and driving consolidation. It’s hard to have internecine fights when you can’t afford the guns.