5 ms·

Its far from trivial to change an entire corporate culture on a dime. You can say that, but when it's a response to the fact that Microsoft did that EXACT THIN

Its far from trivial to change an entire corporate culture on a dime. You can say that, but when it's a response to the fact that Microsoft did that EXACT THING on the the scale in which they did it your statement doesn't hold any water. Go back in time and walk onto the Microsoft campus in Seattle and tell anyone that will listen in say 1995, 1999, 2001, 2007, or 2012 that Windows licensing is a dead end and see if you don't get lumped in with the loonies talking about the end of the world. To say that Google can't do it is more an indictment of Google's leadership as opposed to the enormity of the task. To thinking a company with a 934 billion dollar market cap (Alphabet) can't figure out how to do enterprise software support if it wanted to, what a joke. Edit: spelling.

dragonsh 7y ago
I am not sure why you are saying Microsoft transformed, its still the same old one now trying to embrace Linux as it runs as the main workload on Azure instead of windows. This is just done for survival, otherwise Microsoft would have gone to irrelevance. Windows and Office licenses are still the main driver for Microsoft, just with accounting tricks and office 360 made into cloud revenues. This is an investor story to jack up the stocks. They are no better than google when it comes to platform lock-in. On top of it having used Azure services, I can say without a doubt its inferior to Amazon and Google cloud experience. Microsoft didn't transform it's just that enterprises who hold up upgrading Windows and Office did so after windows 7 debacle to Windows 10. This is just cyclical uptick, not really transformation, its just lucky Nadella. The only good thing Nadella did is, didn't take any disastrous decision to thwart the uptick by embracing Linux and trying open source, by understanding that if it's not done Microsoft will go the IBM path to irrelevance. In the process Microsoft having an old relationship with enterprises helped them to move some workloads to Azure even though it is an inferior service, by supporting Linux and showing commitment to it for financial gain not out of goodwill towards open source. Still today Microsoft relevance on mobile is due to its office products, otherwise it is as good as irrelevant on mobile application and development front. It's alive on mobile just due to proprietary platform lock-in to .NET. Now made it open source to try to increase the share as it's not as useful given the rise of nodejs, Python, rust and other platforms.
- tsimionescu 7y ago
  Windows has not seen a payed upgrade for 5 years - that is in itself a major change. We'll see if they continue on this road, but for now their announced plan is that there will not be a new paid update of Windows. This clearly cuts down on one of the revenue streams for Windows Licensing. Microsoft is the largest single contributor to Linux development. They have a large hand in Kubernetes. .NET is open source and runs on Linux/Mac natively. They have released and are maintaining the most popular lite IDE/editor of the decade simultaneously for Linux/Mac/Windows, and it was open source from the start. MSVC has a Clang frontend. That they are not relevant on mobile seems a non-sequitur. The discussion was on whether the Microsoft Windows-first culture has changed, and it clearly has. They have clearly embraced open-source as a good strategy for them, and are making massive investments in it. I would also note that Azure, while having all sorts of unexpected limitations, is at least much more transparent about pricing than AWS. The Azure UI almost always includes pricing information on the resources you are creating, which AWS carefully segregates away.
  - dragonsh 7y ago
    This licensing does not apply to enterprise editions and volume licensing, I believe you are still looking at consumer market which Microsoft already lost to a Apple and lately google chromebooks. The major revenue stream for Microsoft is still old long term licensing deal for office combined with windows and than related server technologies to support office applications. The model changed from licensing+upgrade fee to new subscription fees. This can be office 360 subscriptions which get you office products and windows or volume license subscriptions. Depending on the type of subscriptions these are classified as cloud or windows and office revenue. Azure come into picture as those companies having volume licenses have applications in legacy .NET which they move to Azure. Microsoft is supporting Linux today because they lost the battle of technical superiority and most of the azure workloads for supporting internal business apps run on Linux. They ported .NET to Linux just to have those old accounts do not move out of azure and Microsoft proprietary eco-system easily and move them to subscription with long term contracts. Majority of the revenue effect you see is just because Microsoft abandoned product updates for old versions and forced customers to move to windows 10 and above by making old one economically very expensive. So Nadella was lucky because he got the benefit of the cyclical revenue increase due to enterprise upgrades which companies didn’t do for many years. Obviously adoption of Linux as primary driver for Azure kept those old customers from moving out of Azure to Amazon or google, even though technically azure quality and services were inferior. A company will not move to amazon or google unless there is significant exponential gains. If the old vendor can still support and give something which is not bad but not the best, customer will still stay on and here Nadella was good not to bash Linux like Balmer.
deboflo 7y ago
Jeff Bezos in 2002: “All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces. Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces. There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network. It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care. All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions. Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired. Thank you; have a nice day!” https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
hinkley 7y ago
Microsoft’s culture didn’t change one little bit until after they started having trouble recruiting. I doubt Google will learn anything until most people stop thinking a Google job is the best of all outcomes.
- badtux 7y ago
  They're already there on my part. Between their firing employees who organize or complain that their corporate slogan apparently now is "Be Evil", their chaotic product decision making, and their toxic internal politics, I have absolutely no interest in working for Google. Furthermore, I've noticed that the Google workforce seems to be becoming less.... Googly.... recently (disclaimer: I work down the street from the Googleplex and see many Googlers as they do their daily migrations). As in, they're now hiring a broader selection of people who aren't just the top 5% in class. What that tells me is that they're having more difficulty on the recruiting front and having to cast their net wider.
  - hinkley 7y ago
    When I first wrote that sentence, I said "until people", but it occurred to me that being shunned by a small group of engineers probably barely registers on any metric that a large company would pay attention to. It wouldn't be actionable until the well had been running dry for a while. I mean, shit, I work at a place where many of my favorite people have moved on to other things, few have been replaced, and yet we're only just having sincere conversations about how to fix our culture problems. That had to wait for one of the ringleaders to quit. So far as I can tell from my minuscule keyhole, Sergey and Larry are the ringleaders. They'll never quit, and it'll take hitting rock bottom for them to have a change of heart. Not unlike Microsoft, after their stock began to tank.
zubairshams 7y ago
One great book on how the culture of an entire giant company can change is "Who says elephants can't dance" by Lou Gerstner. He was the CEO of IBM who orchestrated IBM's transformation from a mainframe supplier to a service-oriented company. My take on the process is this - the change can be done and has been done when there is an existential crisis. The crisis may not be apparent from the outside, but company internals can notice a terminal decline of their core product/service and has an impetus to change the direction. Even then, it's not easy. I would argue that Microsoft had to make somewhat of an about-turn from Windows because first the Internet and second the Cloud was putting pressure on their core business threatening to make the OS a marginal player. I don't think Google is in that position, at least not yet. Google Ad business is not facing any terminal threat. Thereby it is much harder for Google to make a culture change because simply the pressure to make the change is not there at an organizational level. [Edit: Prepositional corrections]

dragonsh 7y ago

I am not sure why you are saying Microsoft transformed, its still the same old one now trying to embrace Linux as it runs as the main workload on Azure instead of windows. This is just done for survival, otherwise Microsoft would have gone to irrelevance. Windows and Office licenses are still the main driver for Microsoft, just with accounting tricks and office 360 made into cloud revenues. This is an investor story to jack up the stocks. They are no better than google when it comes to platform lock-in. On top of it having used Azure services, I can say without a doubt its inferior to Amazon and Google cloud experience. Microsoft didn't transform it's just that enterprises who hold up upgrading Windows and Office did so after windows 7 debacle to Windows 10. This is just cyclical uptick, not really transformation, its just lucky Nadella. The only good thing Nadella did is, didn't take any disastrous decision to thwart the uptick by embracing Linux and trying open source, by understanding that if it's not done Microsoft will go the IBM path to irrelevance. In the process Microsoft having an old relationship with enterprises helped them to move some workloads to Azure even though it is an inferior service, by supporting Linux and showing commitment to it for financial gain not out of goodwill towards open source. Still today Microsoft relevance on mobile is due to its office products, otherwise it is as good as irrelevant on mobile application and development front. It's alive on mobile just due to proprietary platform lock-in to .NET. Now made it open source to try to increase the share as it's not as useful given the rise of nodejs, Python, rust and other platforms.

tsimionescu 7y ago
Windows has not seen a payed upgrade for 5 years - that is in itself a major change. We'll see if they continue on this road, but for now their announced plan is that there will not be a new paid update of Windows. This clearly cuts down on one of the revenue streams for Windows Licensing. Microsoft is the largest single contributor to Linux development. They have a large hand in Kubernetes. .NET is open source and runs on Linux/Mac natively. They have released and are maintaining the most popular lite IDE/editor of the decade simultaneously for Linux/Mac/Windows, and it was open source from the start. MSVC has a Clang frontend. That they are not relevant on mobile seems a non-sequitur. The discussion was on whether the Microsoft Windows-first culture has changed, and it clearly has. They have clearly embraced open-source as a good strategy for them, and are making massive investments in it. I would also note that Azure, while having all sorts of unexpected limitations, is at least much more transparent about pricing than AWS. The Azure UI almost always includes pricing information on the resources you are creating, which AWS carefully segregates away.
- dragonsh 7y ago
  This licensing does not apply to enterprise editions and volume licensing, I believe you are still looking at consumer market which Microsoft already lost to a Apple and lately google chromebooks. The major revenue stream for Microsoft is still old long term licensing deal for office combined with windows and than related server technologies to support office applications. The model changed from licensing+upgrade fee to new subscription fees. This can be office 360 subscriptions which get you office products and windows or volume license subscriptions. Depending on the type of subscriptions these are classified as cloud or windows and office revenue. Azure come into picture as those companies having volume licenses have applications in legacy .NET which they move to Azure. Microsoft is supporting Linux today because they lost the battle of technical superiority and most of the azure workloads for supporting internal business apps run on Linux. They ported .NET to Linux just to have those old accounts do not move out of azure and Microsoft proprietary eco-system easily and move them to subscription with long term contracts. Majority of the revenue effect you see is just because Microsoft abandoned product updates for old versions and forced customers to move to windows 10 and above by making old one economically very expensive. So Nadella was lucky because he got the benefit of the cyclical revenue increase due to enterprise upgrades which companies didn’t do for many years. Obviously adoption of Linux as primary driver for Azure kept those old customers from moving out of Azure to Amazon or google, even though technically azure quality and services were inferior. A company will not move to amazon or google unless there is significant exponential gains. If the old vendor can still support and give something which is not bad but not the best, customer will still stay on and here Nadella was good not to bash Linux like Balmer.

deboflo 7y ago

Jeff Bezos in 2002: “All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces. Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces. There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network. It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care. All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions. Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired. Thank you; have a nice day!” https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

hinkley 7y ago

Microsoft’s culture didn’t change one little bit until after they started having trouble recruiting. I doubt Google will learn anything until most people stop thinking a Google job is the best of all outcomes.

badtux 7y ago
They're already there on my part. Between their firing employees who organize or complain that their corporate slogan apparently now is "Be Evil", their chaotic product decision making, and their toxic internal politics, I have absolutely no interest in working for Google. Furthermore, I've noticed that the Google workforce seems to be becoming less.... Googly.... recently (disclaimer: I work down the street from the Googleplex and see many Googlers as they do their daily migrations). As in, they're now hiring a broader selection of people who aren't just the top 5% in class. What that tells me is that they're having more difficulty on the recruiting front and having to cast their net wider.
- hinkley 7y ago
  When I first wrote that sentence, I said "until people", but it occurred to me that being shunned by a small group of engineers probably barely registers on any metric that a large company would pay attention to. It wouldn't be actionable until the well had been running dry for a while. I mean, shit, I work at a place where many of my favorite people have moved on to other things, few have been replaced, and yet we're only just having sincere conversations about how to fix our culture problems. That had to wait for one of the ringleaders to quit. So far as I can tell from my minuscule keyhole, Sergey and Larry are the ringleaders. They'll never quit, and it'll take hitting rock bottom for them to have a change of heart. Not unlike Microsoft, after their stock began to tank.

zubairshams 7y ago

One great book on how the culture of an entire giant company can change is "Who says elephants can't dance" by Lou Gerstner. He was the CEO of IBM who orchestrated IBM's transformation from a mainframe supplier to a service-oriented company. My take on the process is this - the change can be done and has been done when there is an existential crisis. The crisis may not be apparent from the outside, but company internals can notice a terminal decline of their core product/service and has an impetus to change the direction. Even then, it's not easy. I would argue that Microsoft had to make somewhat of an about-turn from Windows because first the Internet and second the Cloud was putting pressure on their core business threatening to make the OS a marginal player. I don't think Google is in that position, at least not yet. Google Ad business is not facing any terminal threat. Thereby it is much harder for Google to make a culture change because simply the pressure to make the change is not there at an organizational level. [Edit: Prepositional corrections]