3 ms·
A lot of doom and gloom for Microsoft in that thread. But Microsoft has fared much better than anyone expected.
by ra7 7y ago
A lot of doom and gloom for Microsoft in that thread. But Microsoft has fared much better than anyone expected.
- thrwaway69 7y agobetcha if there were prediction thread for another decade, people will post how Google will be turned into former bell labs and eventually seize to exist.
- wyre 7y agoI can see that happening in the second half of this decade as Google continues to grow and absorb more and more of the Internet.
- bobbiechen 7y agoGuessing you meant cease to exist here, but also seizing the intellectual property of Bell Labs seemed to work out in the 1956 consent decree: The Bell System was obligated to license all its patents royalty free, and it was barred from entering any industry other than telecommunications. ... Although the 1956 consent decree was not effective in ending market foreclosure, it permanently increased the scale of US innovation. https://voxeu.org/article/how-antitrust-enforcement-can-spur-innovation https://voxeu.org/article/how-antitrust-enforcement-can-spur...
- sumedh 7y ago> But Microsoft has fared much better than anyone expected. Its probably because they picked the right guy to lead after Ballmer.
- RedBeetDeadpool 7y agoThinking back to Satya Nadella's book, I still think its incredible that he was selected, and even after it was incredible that he the impact that he had. I guess where I'm getting with this is that to have been able to see and recognize that he had the potential to take Microsoft in the right direction and that he actually was able to take them there is pretty awesome. They could have hired someone from outside, or someone who might fit the look / character of a mega corp CEO but they took a risk with him and I'm glad that it paid off.
- swyx 7y agofor what its worth, Ballmer was apparently a massive, massive sponsor of Satya all the way to the top. Satya wouldnt have happened without Ballmer. for all his flaws as CEO, he did one thing right.
- mooman219 7y agoI disagree, I think anyone the put in charge would have done well. Satya came in during one of the biggest bull runs in history and just surfed the wave. Even Ballmer would have had a hard time to stop that.
- ricardobeat 7y agoSurface, Azure, Minecraft, Github, VSCode and the whole renewed developer focus... those seem like pretty strong shifts and not just 'surfing the wave'.
- olliepop 7y agoThey are. Microsoft, especially under Ballmer, was notoriously anti-OSS (open-source). Not only did Satya make the decision to shift the company to be cloud focused, he represented a change of guard when it was critically important to make peace with the open-source community. Ballmer: Called Linux "Cancer". Literally. Satya: "We are all in on open-source"
- tootie 7y agoNot just that, but their core business is strong. Even with the rise of Apple and Google OSes, Windows and Office is still a humongous market.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- baron816 7y agoYou don't become a $1.2T company by surfing a wave. Its stock price has more than quintupled. IBM's stock price is almost flat over 10 years. GE is down over the decade. Changing direction for a ship that large is very, very hard--a seemingly intractable problem but not for the model Microsoft has provided.