57 ms·

How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around

382 points by known 6y ago

abhinav22 6y ago
I don’t like Microsoft Windows or any of its newer products Windows 7 was the best version and Office before 365 was good too - now they just really milking everyone with subscription payments
- DataGata 6y ago
  With office 365, you basically pay for a Dropbox subscription and get all of their office software on multiple computers. Seems like good value
  - abhinav22 6y ago
    Most of us already bought office before in a perpetual license. I’m not sure but I assume companies also had perpetual licenses of Office, so for them to fork over a consistent stream to Microsoft for O365 just to ensure they have the latest version with all the updates is quite expensive over the long run. But most people think in terms of the sticker cost of 1 year and Office 365 and other subscription apps look cheap in that light.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      The idea that “most” people aren’t subscribing to Office365 doesn’t jibe with MS’s financial reporting.
      - abhinav22 6y ago
        Sorry I worded poorly - we don’t like it but we are stuck with it to some degree due to it being always updated (not sure if they even allow personal users now to buy a perpetual license?)
      - whoopdedo 6y ago
        Making it free for a year on new computers with automatic renewal is an easy way to inflate the subscription numbers. How many people are silently paying for something they don't use and aren't concerned about because it's "only" $10 a month?
        scarface74 6y ago
        Enterprise sales dwarf consumer sells and the number of new PC sales have been going down each year. https://www.skyhighnetworks.com/cloud-security-blog/7-charts-reveal-the-meteoric-rise-of-office-365/ https://www.skyhighnetworks.com/cloud-security-blog/7-charts...
  - necovek 6y ago
    If you want a "dropbox subscription".
- sempron64 6y ago
  Windows 7 definitely beats Windows 10 from a privacy, simplicity, and UX consistency perspective. I wish MS had backported the kernel improvements and relegated UWP to to third-party apps instead of integrating it everywhere. I must disagree with you on Office 365 though. It is a marvel. Microsoft has re-engineered compatibility with document, spreadsheet, and presentation formats with a 30 year legacy from scratch, enabled multi-user editing on these formats, and crafted a web experience almost equivalent to desktop. They've really had to innovate to keep up with the advantages of Google Docs, and while they have not matched it from a speed perspective, they're no longer out of the running with consumers. Word and Excel Online are now free with a Microsoft account, and I found them just last week to have a rich selection of templates and had compatibility with Office documents I was sent. Office 365 is also very reasonably priced for it's Family license.
  - orthoxerox 6y ago
    Excel Online lacks pivot tables, which I cannot live without. LibreOffice is equally helpless when it comes to them, so I am limited to the proper Office.
  - abhinav22 6y ago
    I haven’t been a power user in Office for a while, but yes perhaps I have missed a lot of the innovations you have mentioned above. Cross collaboration is something our company should definitely take more advantage of, although it’s hard to train users due to inertia (so I’m left compiling all the changes as always). I agree with you that their web apps are really good now. That said, I still find google docs much easier to use for simplicity (and I at least up to Office 2013, I knew and used every feature in Excel PowerPoint Word) - but a lot of that is UX, Windows 10 and O365 I find too “clunky” and a tad slow on some button clicks
- wesleywt 6y ago
  You get large amount of storage and an always updated product. I am gladly paying for subscription.
  - abhinav22 6y ago
    Fair enough. I just have a general aversion to subscriptions, they add up over time! And how many times do we need to repay for Office? I have probably bought it at least 5 times in the last 20 years, but that’s partly on me too for not being organized and transferring licenses over. Storage imo is a non point since it’s very easy to get free or super cheap storage with a bit of searching. My girlfriend used Dropbox for her business, I was horrified when I saw how much she was paying each month! Moved over to google and her needs are covered in the free plan, so that’s a quality 50$ per month saved. I’m not as rich as I used to be, so have really started to feel the pinch with all these subs, incl office which I don’t have anymore. Before I had the same view as you as it doesn’t feel like a lot. But given we’ve been paying for Office from 1990s onwards, you can see that Microsoft is milking it a fair bit given updates (whilst important, and very important in “enterprise” companies) are not that significant to justify paying for it every year.
    - loufe 6y ago
      IT all depends on your needs. I'm using Libreoffice and Google Drive at home myself, as I'm cheap. But if I was doing more than the occaisional financial spreadsheet, or had lots of writing, or had lots of backups to do my need starts to change. At the end of the day, their success is evidence enough that people heartily agree with their value proposition in light of other offerings.
  - selfhoster11 6y ago
    1. That might have been a good thing back when updates weren't dreaded, because they would rarely if ever add distracting UI elements or take away useful features. 2. If you're a small-scale Office user who's happy not to have the latest and the greatest, and you're happy to update your copy of Office every 5-7 years, then a yearly subscription will not be a good trade-off.
- dartharva 6y ago
  Standalone Office releases are still available though. They're just don't have the bleeding edge updates and collaboration capabilities that O365 does, but it was never built for that anyway.
dimitrios1 6y ago
For better or for worse, time will tell, but there is no denying this at this point. To take an organization of that size with that much legacy managment and business processes, code and do what he has done is quite the feat.
- cammil 6y ago
  Just to play devils advocate, isn't that the whole point of a CEO? It seems to me that true change can only happen if it comes from the highest influence. Of course that's not to say that just because the CEO changes that business change will happen
  - burnte 6y ago
    Yes, it's the job of a CEO, but most CEOs aren't that good.
    - skywhopper 6y ago
      Right, many CEOs don’t seem to understand their own business all that well, much less are they able to deal with the political and cultural challenges of driving a company in the right direction. So many CEOs are just filling space at the top while their company just sort of continues working under its own inertia. Nadella is one of the few who not only clearly had a meaningful vision for his company, but was able to take charge and successfully steer the ship.
      - burnte 6y ago
        Nadella understands something most CEOs don't: The core business of any business is making money. Ballmer thought Microsoft's core business was Windows, Nadella understands it's software as a whole. Ballmer thought for MS to win, Linux had to lose. Nadella understands as long as MS is selling software and services, they win. Ballmer was a great number-two for Gates, but not a leader. Not everyone has it, and that's ok.
- alltakendamned 6y ago
bluedino 6y ago
What's the reason for Microsoft services/support going downhill so bad? I can remember in the 2000's, they had spectacular paid support on their stuff.
- cheschire 6y ago
  Maybe I was lucky and just had a string of good PFE’s, but my experience with MS support has been great.
  - habeebtc 6y ago
    I am a PFE currently. It's the hardest job I have ever had. My colleagues are all rock stars.
    - lazycouchpotato 6y ago
      What's PFE?
      - cheschire 6y ago
        Premier Field Engineer https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/core-infrastructure-and-security/how-to-become-a-premier-field-engineer-pfe/ba-p/255475 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/core-infrastructure-a...
- baybal2 6y ago
  Making bad software in hopes to fix it later for a lot of money would never be a business model anybody can sustain for longer than a few years, let alone 2 decades which Microsoft managed to pull out through extraordinary effort.
- ck425 6y ago
  I've found Azure support reasonable. It's still not an easy product to use overall compared to AWS but the support engineers have been very proactive and keen to jump on calls to fix stuff.
skummetmaelk 6y ago
Nadella turned Microsoft into a data mining operation just like the rest of the FAANG gang and the market rewarded him. Surveillance capitalism must be regulated out of existence.
- actuator 6y ago
  Isn't Azure leading the turnaround, not Windows?
- bachmeier 6y ago
  Was Ballmer a big proponent of privacy?
- cammil 6y ago
  Is this not a market forces cause rather than Nadella? It seems everyone is fighting to control data. Sometimes it seems to me that we forgot that this whole industry comes under the banner of information technology.
  - wombatmobile 6y ago
    Have you ever sailed an enormous tri-masted clipper ship across an ocean to a safe harbour and arrived with your cargo intact, on time, with no illness or injury to yourself or your crew? Was that a wind force thing or your masterful captaincy?
    - Craighead 6y ago
      Its because the United States Navy ensures the ocean is safe to travel on
  - fsflover 6y ago
    > It seems everyone is fighting to control data. Not everyone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purism_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purism_(company).
- burntoutfire 6y ago
xiphias2 6y ago
I'm using Windows 10 because I want to run modern programs, but I still don't see the usability of the operating system to be as good that it was with Windows 7. If I go to settings, or open the start menu, I have latencies measured in seconds, even though I have a fast gaming laptop. As a comparision on my iPad most of the settings windows have about 0.2s rendering latency (some shorter, some longer), but in reality I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be the part of the continuous testing of any operating system. Another important example is that I find it harder to find installed programs in Windows 10 than what it was in Windows 7, as Windows 7 grouped shortcuts installed by programs into folders, now I just see a big mess of shortcuts where I have to remember the name of the shortcut to be able to run it.
- wayf 6y ago
  Agreed. Windows 7's UI is blazing fast compared to Windows 10. Windows 7 inherited all the good things of Windows XP, while Windows 10 tried to look similar to both Windows 8 and Windows 7
- rileyteige 6y ago
  just to counter... i'm on a desktop that's a few years old, i7. win10. start menu loads instantly, settings loads in maybe 1/4 of a second. YMMV?
  - Kye 6y ago
    Same, but on a new laptop. Ryzen 5 4500U. Maybe it'll degrade with time, but I remember how bad the Windows 10 start menu used to be on a fresh install. Nearly unusable. It's fine now for me.
  - xiphias2 6y ago
    Probably the icons for the Windows Store entries were already in the cache for you. Things work the second time, but the fact that it's unpredictable makes the experience less smooth than what it was before. Also I have things like ,,Candy Crash Friends'' icon that's very bright, takes my focus away on what I want to do, and I don't know how to turn it off, as I don't find it in the settings (to tell you the truth, I haven't even played it, but I'm waiting for Cyberpunk 2077, so I don't want to try other games right now).
tiffanyh 6y ago
I'm as big of a Satya fan as anyone, but someone who doesn't get enough credit is Ballmer. It wasn't a coincidence that on the day Ballmer stepped down and Satya became CEO (2014), Microsoft also announced Office for iOS, Cloud first strategy, and a whole slew of cloud/Azure product announcements. All of which was developed under Ballmer watch and he handed off the launch and continued execution to Satya.
- abhinav22 6y ago
  100% truth
- dforrestwilson 6y ago
  Interesting to contrast Satya with Sundar Pichai, whose company seems rudderless by comparison.
  - ck425 6y ago
    The things is I never read about any major decisions Sundar Pichai has made. There's tons online about Tim Cook, Satya, Netflix's various SLs, Daniel Ek, Elon Musk (admittedly more about his tweets than business strat these days) etc. But I never read about Sunder Pichai's strategies or decisions. What is he actually doing?
    - jgalt212 6y ago
      His only job is to fight the DOJ anti trust complaint.
    - Wonnk13 6y ago
      Now that I think about it, I'm really curious as well. I didn't work in Cloud, but my perception is TK is really reshaping GCP as well as the Gsuite to whatever it is now. Sundar's role seems to really be give his lieutenants free reign which I guess makes sense seeing as how he now oversees all of Alphabet.
    - ohazi 6y ago
      Collecting a check? What's the incentive to do anything at that level? He's going to walk away after 5-10 years with OOM a billion dollars regardless of how anything he does or doesn't do pans out for Google. Why not just play the quiet card and pin anything that happens to the fiefdom lords who now have free reign and no oversight? If good things happen, he gets credit for delegating well. If bad things happen, it's their fault. But if he loudly tries something different and it fails, the failure is more likely to get pinned on him. And again, he's already going to walk away with a billion regardless, so "financial upside" as a motivator for success is largely an illusion. He's a "just gotta keep my nose clean and get out with a middling reputation and a shitload of money" CEO.
baybal2 6y ago
No he didn't. He turned the company even harder to farming plumpy corporate clients whom they already had on software+service deals with "cloud" thing subscriptions. A Microsoft salesman who visited us last year was almost begging us to switch to Cloud AD from regular AD. This is how hard they are moving toward that. It was just a long delayed admission that you can't make a lot of money on offline boxed software sales today.
- Closi 6y ago
  Well AAD has a load of advantages, including far wider single sign-on capabilities across loads of apps. And the cloud based features of office make absolute sense from a user perspective. Collaborative document editing on sharepoint just makes sense compared to the old 'non cloud' world, where you had to share documents around documents on emails and save twenty copies for version control (v0.5, v1, v1 final, v1 final final) on some shared drive that you have to VPN into from your home.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  I don't know, this seems like it falls in the category of "a company's goal is to make money". Corporate clients just have no right to complain that Microsoft's sales model isn't structured in the way they'd prefer. It's different for personal usage, of course, but all of their personal usage software I'm aware of still has an offline option.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    > Corporate clients just have no right to complain that Microsoft's sales model isn't structured in the way they'd prefer. How do you figure? If I'm a business and I want things a certain way, and you won't provide that way to me, then I have every right to complain. Complaining is how I tell you I'm not satisfied and therefore might not buy or continue with your product.
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      You're right. I gave the original comment a very uncharitable reading that on reflection I don't think it deserved.
deleted 6y ago
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ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
I agree that he did. What I see, is that MS acted like a small-company startup for many years; ferociously competitive, fairly agile (not the Agile Manifesto kind; just flexible and responsive). That paid off for them (and it's arguable whether or not it was a good thing for the industry in general -it sank a number of companies, but also put Seattle firmly into the center of the tech world). Then they became a blue-chip company, and all that startup-y stuff wasn't working anymore. Also, the consumer market changed a lot, with mobile overtaking desktop systems. For many, many folks, smartphones are the only computers that they will ever use. He did have the right vision for a new corporate direction.
- phendrenad2 6y ago
  This. I feel like Satya brought in fresh eyes to the "project" (that being the running of the office of the CEO of Microsoft). Microsoft was locked into a certain way of doing things, and with Satya, they were free to pop their head up and look around at how the world was evolving without them. And you can see how that led them directly into bold new areas, such as WSL, Azure as it is today (highly Linux-and-kubernetes-focused), Github, Linkedin, lots of gaming companies (Mojang, Havok, etc.). It also allowed them to question areas where Microsoft probably thought it "should be winning", but just wasn't working, and might have poured billions into, such as Nokia phones, Skype, Bing, etc.
pydry 6y ago
Dave Cutler doesn't get nearly enough credit for turning Microsoft around. I don't think it's a coincidence that he was at the helm for two of the most technologically advanced and successful product lines (NT 4.0 and azure).
- justanotheratom 6y ago
  and xbox.
- ls65536 6y ago
  There's a good book, "Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft", which documents the original development of Windows NT in the late 80's and early 90's. A large amount of the focus in the book is on Cutler himself, including some of his history coming from DEC, and his personal style of running the project at the time. I found it quite an interesting read!
- sachinag 6y ago
  I would love to read a long story on Dave Cutler. I've heard the name but don't know the first thing about him.
- swyx 6y ago
  more info on Dave Cutler for those who are new to him: - https://news.microsoft.com/features/the-engineers-engineer-computer-industry-luminaries-salute-dave-cutlers-five-decade-long-quest-for-quality/ https://news.microsoft.com/features/the-engineers-engineer-c... - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29RkHH-psrY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29RkHH-psrY
- mindfulplay 6y ago
  At some point, I hope such hidden heroes get their success outspoken more publicly: Dave cutler, Dianne hackborn are prime examples. I do like the fact John Carmack and Linus who are well-deserved to have a public following. But there are many more. And it doesn't have to be a showoff as much understanding the context in which Dave Cutler or Dianne Hackborn et al actually succeeded as engineers and the deep technical work they are lauded for.
Silhouette 6y ago
It's tough to argue with success. They obviously wanted someone who was going to go all-in on the cloud angle when they picked Nadella, and to give credit where it's due, the stock price chart for Microsoft says everything you need to say about the results he's delivered. What's worrying in a broader sense is that our societies have come to depend heavily on Microsoft's previous flagship offering, Windows. As the article observes, the focus has shifted elsewhere under Nadella's term. And as many people can attest, Windows 10 is far from the Windows we used to rely on, particularly for those not in enterprise world or academia. Many millions of people are now fundamentally depending on a product that is no longer the goose laying golden eggs for its maker, and the maker's economic incentives are no longer aligned with the best interests of their users.
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  Windows still directly generates annualized revenue of $22 billion. Plus Microsoft's dominance in that platform creates a ton of synergies in its other product lines. For example how many Azure customers pick it over AWS because they need a Windows-first cloud. It easily contributes hundreds of billions to Microsoft's market cap. I'm sure Windows is no longer considered the sexy department in Micrsoft's internal culture. But corporate management would have to be ridiculously incompetent to let that business line get significantly neglected.
  - Silhouette 6y ago
    This seems like a classic case of enterprise vs. small business vs. personal use. The serious money is at the enterprise end, and most of the effects you described will be most profitable there. And of course the Windows 10 editions for large organisations don't try to play the same games with things like forced updates and mandatory telemetry, because they know very well that no professional IT department supporting thousands of users is ever going to surrender control of its equipment like that. Still, the reason the makers of expensive professional software have largely turned a blind eye to privacy forever and/or given away very cheap or free copies to students or home users is because they're well aware that it's a huge advantage for their software to be the cultural default. For example, would Adobe really have become dominant in digital content creation software if loads of enthusiastic design students hadn't been honing their skills on ripped off copies of Photoshop? Would Microsoft have come to dominate business desktops if home and school PCs hadn't all come with Windows so everyone already knew how to use it, or if they hadn't given away their development tools mostly for free to anyone who wanted them? We'll never know for sure, but it would be naive to discount the effects of familiarity. This feels a bit like Apple's recent trend for messing up its laptops and largely ignoring the rest of desktop/server space other than producing an occasional statement piece. Sure, they make the vast majority of their money from their mobile devices and the surrounding ecosystem, but someone still has to write the apps that drive that ecosystem, and those people are primarily using Apple laptops. If you ruin your development platform, and the developers start shifting their efforts towards other platforms (presumably Android in this case) then your users will follow, and now your business model is dead, even though the part you neglected was only directly responsible for a tiny part of your revenue stream. Obviously the danger isn't quite the same for Microsoft because strategically it's banking on cloud rather than mobile for its big revenues. But even so, cloud hosting is a pretty competitive space right now, and the Windows-friendly integrations (for developers as well as users) are a competitive advantage, one that is at risk if the very long tail of smaller developers start getting fed up of Windows and shifting to other systems. I suspect Microsoft's leadership are well aware of this danger and the often better developer experience on Linux is a big driver for introducing WSL, but still, if that's all they've got then you can just as well use a real Linux box and not pay the Microsoft tax or deal with all the unwanted games that Windows 10 keeps trying to play. If Windows 10 becomes too much of a liability for small businesses and power users, sooner or later that will inevitably have consequences for the whole business model and all those synergies you mentioned, even if it only happens over a period of years.
ck425 6y ago
If anyone here subscribes to Stratechery I strongly recommend the interview sent out yesterday with Microsofts head of gaming. There's chat there about how gaming shifted internally in part due to how Nadella rethought gaming as it's own strategy and a key future component of Azure, rather than just a part of Windows strategy. He particularly highlights how gaming is a key differentiator vs the other top tech companies. Shows some seriously smart strategic thinking.
- DavidKarlas 6y ago
  Main take away I had from his book "Hit Refresh", was that he made sure products don't hold other products back... Example: Office is free to go and make Office for Mac and grow Office numbers on iOS, Android... Without any burden to prefer Windows to drive Windows sales, Windows has to deliver numbers them self... Same goes for Windows on Azure or many other products that overlap...
- stainforth 6y ago
  What about the failure of Mixer?
tinyhouse 6y ago
Yes, he did. One of the best tech CEOs. Got his MS in CS from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Later got an MBA from Chicago but that's a BS degree for the resume. Shows you can succeed no matter where you start, you just need to work harder usually and not letting others to put you down.
- blueblisters 6y ago
  And an undergrad degree from Manipal, a private university whose reputation pales in comparison to the publicly funded Indian Institutes of Technology that a lot of Indian CEOs seem to be an alumnus of.
  - __tg__ 6y ago
    Being an IIT grad mainly proves how well you could prepare for its brutal entrance exam (<1% acceptance). At work, I've seen IIT grads fare no better than other people. Sure, there are some brilliant people among IIT grads but that's to be expected with a filter that selects the top 1% of any population. A less known aspect of IITs in the past is their gaming of the GRE/US grad school application process, ranging from straight out cheating in the GRE (in the paper-pencil version, IIT students were given a single block of time for all sections rather than having time-limits for the sections, a blatant cheat made possible by their self-proctoring), to creating GRE question banks by collectively memorizing the test, to using the Australian time zone (ahead of India's) to find out the questions on the GRE. When applying to grad school in the US, IIT students would divvy up the schools among the graduating class so that no more than 1-2 would apply to top schools and claim to be in their class' top 10%, regardless of actual standing. So, anytime I see an IIT grad at work, I'm not really impressed by that aspect. The fact that Satya isn't from an IIT is of no consequence and actually makes him more credible in my eyes.
    - carls 6y ago
      Can you share some sources on these claims?
- munchbunny 6y ago
racl101 6y ago
Wish he would turn Excel around. Such an important product, but so buggy. Very bug ridden. Why doesn't it get better?
- vikramkr 6y ago
  What bugs? I know of some that are left in for backwards compatibility, but otherwise its clearly working well enough to be the dominant tool for so many industries. And the parts that work are good enough that its easier to just change the industry to fit excel then change excel at this point since so many people have different requirements- see what happened with genetics recently
  - orthoxerox 6y ago
    > I know of some that are left in for backwards compatibility, but otherwise its clearly working well enough to be the dominant tool for so many industries. Some sort of a strict mode or a way to designate data types on table columns would solve probably 90% of the issues people have with Excel.
  - racl101 6y ago
    Like for example, just off the top of my head: - Why does search not work when the spreadsheet has a few thousand rows? Sometimes, I'll do Ctrl + A, select the entire data set, move my cursor to cell A1, then type Ctrl+F to find text, finds nothing. But if I filter the column where I think it might be for what I was looking for then it finds it. - Sometimes the opposite of the first occurs. I'll filter for something in a column, finds nothing, but Ctrl+A and then Ctrl+F finds it. Super weird. Again, I'm talking like 5000 rows and maybe 25 columns worth of data, a spreadsheet a few Megabytes big. Not the biggest dataset. I also make sure I have no extraneous columns like some people tend to make by mistake which makes the searching take longer. - Ever try to undo (ctrl + z), if you have many sheets open, sometimes your ctrl+ z will start going through the undo history of other files (i.e. not the ones that you're actually working on or the foreground. The ones in the background or minimized. Guess what? Now you can't tell if you altered data on the other sheets because for some reason Excel registers everything as a change to sheet. You want to expand your columns to fit your text. Good, that counts as a change. Filtering your columns? That's a change.) etc. etc. Every action is worthy of a: 'Do you want to save your changes' even if never really added or updated data. So good luck trying to sort through undos that you didn't mean to make. That's but a few things and don't get me started on number and date formatting. And btw, these are bugs I noticed around 2003 btw. Why are they still there? Working on Excel and making sure that it doesn't make mistakes is work on top of the actual work that needs to be done. I've become so distrusting of Excel that I've learned Python so I can use Pandas so that I can get the truth about a spreadsheet because I can't trust Excel. That's incredibly depressing that I have to do that.
muststopmyths 6y ago
nah, he turned the stock price around which is why Wall Street and MSFT employees love him. Every single thing he's credited for "turning around" was launched under Ballmer. My reading of Ballmer from the outside (I'd left long before the recent transition years) is that he probably trusted his division heads too much. He figured they knew what they were doing and he just had to steer the giant ship gently in a general direction. What other explanation is there for letting Sinofsky run amok with the horseshit that was Windows 8 ? Or Office refusing to ship WinRT apps, ever ? Ballmer had Microsoft in his blood and I loved him for that. People like to make fun of his "Developers, Developers, Developers" video, but that man put his soul in his work. Nadella is bent on competing on low-price Linux VMs with AWS and he will lose that bet in the long run. I don't feel like I need to go into the abomination that is Windows 10. Or maybe I'm just a bitter Windows Phone user shaking my fist at the clouds (no pun intended).
- dageshi 6y ago
  Microsoft seems like one of the few companies that can actually succeed with cloud. They have a massive inbuilt market of customers using microsoft server products that they can transition into their cloud, I don't know that there's any other company other than AWS better positioned to do well in that market?
- asveikau 6y ago
  > letting Sinofsky run amok with the horseshit that was Windows 8 ? Or Office refusing to ship WinRT apps, ever ? Strikes me that these two things are the same failure. WinRT wasn't up to the task due to Windows 8 being poorly thought out, so Office couldn't use it.
- flowerlad 6y ago
  > Every single thing he's credited for "turning around" was launched under Ballmer. That's nonsense. Ballmer kept Microsoft in the 90's style of doing business, but this didn't work so well in the 2000's. After Satya took over he embraced opensource. He allowed Linux into Azure, which is bold. He killed the Windows division, which is very bold. He made Windows free. He made Office free for devices with small screens. He opensourced .NET and other products such as VSCode and TypeScript. He incorporated Linux kernel into Windows. None of these things would have happened under Balmer. These are bold moves and these moves are responsible for why customers, developers and investors love the new Microsoft.
typon 6y ago
With VSCode and Typescript, Microsoft owned the web developer space - a feat that I would not have predicted them doing 10 years ago. How did Google/Facebook get beaten here?
- neurobashing 6y ago
  Microsoft has always had a huge developer tools footprint, so it's a natural fit.
  - orthoxerox 6y ago
    That they did, but VS had always been aimed at MS tech stack: VC++, VB, C#, F#. And then VS Code appeared seemingly out of the blue, rapidly becoming the editor of choice for languages all across the tech landscape.
    - scudd 6y ago
      I think the VSCode extension marketplace greatly helps with the huge breadth of tooling. Not sure if this is applicable to regular Visual Studio as well, I've honestly never used it.
      - Osiris 6y ago
        Visual Studio (full edition) doesn't have extensions. It's a full blown IDE and everything is built-in. Despite having a similar name, the two products sharing almost nothing in common.
        nvrspyx 6y ago
        I'm pretty late to this, but Visual Studio (full edition) does have extensions. Resharper, for instance, is a popular Visual Studio extension. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/ https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/
    - WorldMaker 6y ago
cute_boi 6y ago
no, just by installing candy crush and telemetry and phoning home doesn't mean he turned around microsoft .
pietromenna 6y ago
How can I read the full article without having a economist subscriber? It is really annoying to have this walled garden for news that do not support price parity for lower income countries (I live in one).
- Ap0cryph0n 6y ago
  https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
- known 6y ago
  https://archive.vn/FHixO https://archive.vn/FHixO
  - pietromenna 6y ago
    Thank you!
S_A_P 6y ago
I love hate Microsoft. I love the dev tooling for enterprise, but hate the OS. I really want to like Windows 10, but I feel like I am working against it more than it is helping me. I think OSX is also trending toward making my life harder, but the curve is much slower. I think the next step is to try to really use Linux and see if I can finally find a 'home' os...
- munchbunny 6y ago
  Linux these days works fine for a daily driver as long as the software you need is available on it. It still definitely doesn't win any awards for UX though.
undefinednull 6y ago
Why do they even allow posting a pay walled content here?
chanmad29 6y ago
As a casual user, I actually like the "look" of W10, and do not pay much attention to the latency that others have pointed out. What irks me most though is the constant request for updates and strong arm restarts to install them.
Adutude 6y ago
From a business standpoint, I would have to agree he did turn them around from a business standpoint. As a user of Windows since 3.1 (w/out networking). I do the same as MekaiGS "I honestly have no idea where all the Windows settings are anymore so I just search instead." It was like multiple teams designed different parts of the settings but they never had any meetings or talked with each other. There are days when I would rather use Microsoft Bob than Windows 10 Or better yet, Microsoft Joe Bob http://www.bytebrothers.org/joebob.htm http://www.bytebrothers.org/joebob.htm "Go Microsoft -- Go Intel -- Go America," and "QuickTime is for Pinko Hippie Wimps."
nova22033 6y ago
Still trying to wrap my head around the fact that I've have a chromium based browser from microsoft on my iphone.
- Kipters 6y ago
  that's not chromium based, Safari is the only engine that's allowed on iOS so all the browsers are just skins that add features on top of it
tabtab 6y ago
Compatibility and Stability Sometimes success is a matter of being at the right place at the right time. As the article mentions, many customers were afraid of AWS because they feared Amazon snooping in their retail intel. Because MS doesn't have a big e-store presence, they were not a retail threat. And Azure integrates better with existing Windows networks. Compatibility is still a key here, not raw merit. AWS is technically better. That being said, Satya has been a steady hand and has made it fairly easy to keep running legacy software rather than pulling the carpet out, like VB-classic (desktop) did. Google, on the other hand, changes products like a teen changes fashion. The VB-Classic fiasco under Ballmer sent panic through the industry, making customers realize they can no longer bet the farm on any MS tech, which they had been doing. Dot-Net was not backward compatible. COBOL still lives largely because co's don't or can't F with it. That's a lesson to not be ignored. (The need for a network GUI standard with similar properties is still out there.) Businesses hate upgrading just for the sake of upgrading. Satya seems to understand this, making transitions gentler and more gradual.
- greatsaas12 6y ago
  This. A lot of founders seem to underestimate the effect of timing. I've read so many many stories where a startup took off when another product got worse/shut down (for example, Feedly really took off when Google Reader shut down, and so on.)
cxseven 6y ago
Who are the geniuses / slimeballs at Microsoft who snatched the JEDI contract away from AWS for dubious reasons, and who partnered with Duck Duck Go, the most visible complainant about Google's search dominance, and central to the government's antitrust case that it just filed?
dzonga 6y ago
surprised microsoft still has 72% of server market. I thought by now Linux servers will be reigning supreme. Though, I will admit IIS[0] is wonderful piece of software. Also does the open source world have a direct match for active directory etc, that are used by enterprises and smb's ? But then, maybe I could be wrong a killing could be made selling linux boxes to be servers on the intranets around the world. [0]: https://www.iis.net/overview https://www.iis.net/overview
Ecstatify 6y ago
Microsoft share holders will vote on election of directors. Guess who’s on the list... bit of a coincidence.
Zigurd 6y ago
Several commenters make the point that the big successes under Nadella were initiated when Ballmer was CEO. This is true, but business success is often the absence of big, ego-driven mistakes. <cough>Nokia</cough> Microsoft has a huge number of very smart people. Aligning the company behind what they are good at will enable Microsoft to thrive.
anvemaha 6y ago
Bloomberg has a probably similar article[1] that doesn't have a hard paywall. I used it during a uni leadership course for a short essay and found it informative. Just wanted to drop the link here in case anyone's interested. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-02/satya-nadella-remade-microsoft-as-world-s-most-valuable-company https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-02/satya-nad...
cryptica 6y ago
I agree 100%. Satya Nadella stepped up to the CEO role and almost single-handedly turned Microsoft around. You could see the effects within the first few months. He is a genius. A natural born leader.
cutler 6y ago
Microsoft was happy to extort money from Linux distros via its patent racket until it realised it had no choice but to embrace Linux after the failure of Windows Phone. This is not about Satya Nadella or VS Code or cross-platform .Net Core - it's about The Nature of the Beast. Microsoft is a monopolistic enterprise and always will be. Cross-platform doesn't change this fact.

382 points by known 6y ago

I don’t like Microsoft Windows or any of its newer products Windows 7 was the best version and Office before 365 was good too - now they just really milking everyone with subscription payments

DataGata 6y ago
With office 365, you basically pay for a Dropbox subscription and get all of their office software on multiple computers. Seems like good value
- abhinav22 6y ago
  Most of us already bought office before in a perpetual license. I’m not sure but I assume companies also had perpetual licenses of Office, so for them to fork over a consistent stream to Microsoft for O365 just to ensure they have the latest version with all the updates is quite expensive over the long run. But most people think in terms of the sticker cost of 1 year and Office 365 and other subscription apps look cheap in that light.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    The idea that “most” people aren’t subscribing to Office365 doesn’t jibe with MS’s financial reporting.
    - abhinav22 6y ago
      Sorry I worded poorly - we don’t like it but we are stuck with it to some degree due to it being always updated (not sure if they even allow personal users now to buy a perpetual license?)
    - whoopdedo 6y ago
      Making it free for a year on new computers with automatic renewal is an easy way to inflate the subscription numbers. How many people are silently paying for something they don't use and aren't concerned about because it's "only" $10 a month?
      - scarface74 6y ago
        Enterprise sales dwarf consumer sells and the number of new PC sales have been going down each year. https://www.skyhighnetworks.com/cloud-security-blog/7-charts-reveal-the-meteoric-rise-of-office-365/ https://www.skyhighnetworks.com/cloud-security-blog/7-charts...
- necovek 6y ago
  If you want a "dropbox subscription".
sempron64 6y ago
Windows 7 definitely beats Windows 10 from a privacy, simplicity, and UX consistency perspective. I wish MS had backported the kernel improvements and relegated UWP to to third-party apps instead of integrating it everywhere. I must disagree with you on Office 365 though. It is a marvel. Microsoft has re-engineered compatibility with document, spreadsheet, and presentation formats with a 30 year legacy from scratch, enabled multi-user editing on these formats, and crafted a web experience almost equivalent to desktop. They've really had to innovate to keep up with the advantages of Google Docs, and while they have not matched it from a speed perspective, they're no longer out of the running with consumers. Word and Excel Online are now free with a Microsoft account, and I found them just last week to have a rich selection of templates and had compatibility with Office documents I was sent. Office 365 is also very reasonably priced for it's Family license.
- orthoxerox 6y ago
  Excel Online lacks pivot tables, which I cannot live without. LibreOffice is equally helpless when it comes to them, so I am limited to the proper Office.
- abhinav22 6y ago
  I haven’t been a power user in Office for a while, but yes perhaps I have missed a lot of the innovations you have mentioned above. Cross collaboration is something our company should definitely take more advantage of, although it’s hard to train users due to inertia (so I’m left compiling all the changes as always). I agree with you that their web apps are really good now. That said, I still find google docs much easier to use for simplicity (and I at least up to Office 2013, I knew and used every feature in Excel PowerPoint Word) - but a lot of that is UX, Windows 10 and O365 I find too “clunky” and a tad slow on some button clicks
wesleywt 6y ago
You get large amount of storage and an always updated product. I am gladly paying for subscription.
- abhinav22 6y ago
  Fair enough. I just have a general aversion to subscriptions, they add up over time! And how many times do we need to repay for Office? I have probably bought it at least 5 times in the last 20 years, but that’s partly on me too for not being organized and transferring licenses over. Storage imo is a non point since it’s very easy to get free or super cheap storage with a bit of searching. My girlfriend used Dropbox for her business, I was horrified when I saw how much she was paying each month! Moved over to google and her needs are covered in the free plan, so that’s a quality 50$ per month saved. I’m not as rich as I used to be, so have really started to feel the pinch with all these subs, incl office which I don’t have anymore. Before I had the same view as you as it doesn’t feel like a lot. But given we’ve been paying for Office from 1990s onwards, you can see that Microsoft is milking it a fair bit given updates (whilst important, and very important in “enterprise” companies) are not that significant to justify paying for it every year.
  - loufe 6y ago
    IT all depends on your needs. I'm using Libreoffice and Google Drive at home myself, as I'm cheap. But if I was doing more than the occaisional financial spreadsheet, or had lots of writing, or had lots of backups to do my need starts to change. At the end of the day, their success is evidence enough that people heartily agree with their value proposition in light of other offerings.
- selfhoster11 6y ago
  1. That might have been a good thing back when updates weren't dreaded, because they would rarely if ever add distracting UI elements or take away useful features. 2. If you're a small-scale Office user who's happy not to have the latest and the greatest, and you're happy to update your copy of Office every 5-7 years, then a yearly subscription will not be a good trade-off.
dartharva 6y ago
Standalone Office releases are still available though. They're just don't have the bleeding edge updates and collaboration capabilities that O365 does, but it was never built for that anyway.

dimitrios1 6y ago

For better or for worse, time will tell, but there is no denying this at this point. To take an organization of that size with that much legacy managment and business processes, code and do what he has done is quite the feat.

cammil 6y ago
Just to play devils advocate, isn't that the whole point of a CEO? It seems to me that true change can only happen if it comes from the highest influence. Of course that's not to say that just because the CEO changes that business change will happen
- burnte 6y ago
  Yes, it's the job of a CEO, but most CEOs aren't that good.
  - skywhopper 6y ago
    Right, many CEOs don’t seem to understand their own business all that well, much less are they able to deal with the political and cultural challenges of driving a company in the right direction. So many CEOs are just filling space at the top while their company just sort of continues working under its own inertia. Nadella is one of the few who not only clearly had a meaningful vision for his company, but was able to take charge and successfully steer the ship.
    - burnte 6y ago
      Nadella understands something most CEOs don't: The core business of any business is making money. Ballmer thought Microsoft's core business was Windows, Nadella understands it's software as a whole. Ballmer thought for MS to win, Linux had to lose. Nadella understands as long as MS is selling software and services, they win. Ballmer was a great number-two for Gates, but not a leader. Not everyone has it, and that's ok.
alltakendamned 6y ago

bluedino 6y ago

What's the reason for Microsoft services/support going downhill so bad? I can remember in the 2000's, they had spectacular paid support on their stuff.

cheschire 6y ago
Maybe I was lucky and just had a string of good PFE’s, but my experience with MS support has been great.
- habeebtc 6y ago
  I am a PFE currently. It's the hardest job I have ever had. My colleagues are all rock stars.
  - lazycouchpotato 6y ago
    What's PFE?
    - cheschire 6y ago
      Premier Field Engineer https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/core-infrastructure-and-security/how-to-become-a-premier-field-engineer-pfe/ba-p/255475 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/core-infrastructure-a...
baybal2 6y ago
Making bad software in hopes to fix it later for a lot of money would never be a business model anybody can sustain for longer than a few years, let alone 2 decades which Microsoft managed to pull out through extraordinary effort.
ck425 6y ago
I've found Azure support reasonable. It's still not an easy product to use overall compared to AWS but the support engineers have been very proactive and keen to jump on calls to fix stuff.

skummetmaelk 6y ago

Nadella turned Microsoft into a data mining operation just like the rest of the FAANG gang and the market rewarded him. Surveillance capitalism must be regulated out of existence.

actuator 6y ago
Isn't Azure leading the turnaround, not Windows?
bachmeier 6y ago
Was Ballmer a big proponent of privacy?
cammil 6y ago
Is this not a market forces cause rather than Nadella? It seems everyone is fighting to control data. Sometimes it seems to me that we forgot that this whole industry comes under the banner of information technology.
- wombatmobile 6y ago
  Have you ever sailed an enormous tri-masted clipper ship across an ocean to a safe harbour and arrived with your cargo intact, on time, with no illness or injury to yourself or your crew? Was that a wind force thing or your masterful captaincy?
  - Craighead 6y ago
    Its because the United States Navy ensures the ocean is safe to travel on
- fsflover 6y ago
  > It seems everyone is fighting to control data. Not everyone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purism_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purism_(company).
burntoutfire 6y ago

xiphias2 6y ago

I'm using Windows 10 because I want to run modern programs, but I still don't see the usability of the operating system to be as good that it was with Windows 7. If I go to settings, or open the start menu, I have latencies measured in seconds, even though I have a fast gaming laptop. As a comparision on my iPad most of the settings windows have about 0.2s rendering latency (some shorter, some longer), but in reality I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be the part of the continuous testing of any operating system. Another important example is that I find it harder to find installed programs in Windows 10 than what it was in Windows 7, as Windows 7 grouped shortcuts installed by programs into folders, now I just see a big mess of shortcuts where I have to remember the name of the shortcut to be able to run it.

wayf 6y ago
Agreed. Windows 7's UI is blazing fast compared to Windows 10. Windows 7 inherited all the good things of Windows XP, while Windows 10 tried to look similar to both Windows 8 and Windows 7
rileyteige 6y ago
just to counter... i'm on a desktop that's a few years old, i7. win10. start menu loads instantly, settings loads in maybe 1/4 of a second. YMMV?
- Kye 6y ago
  Same, but on a new laptop. Ryzen 5 4500U. Maybe it'll degrade with time, but I remember how bad the Windows 10 start menu used to be on a fresh install. Nearly unusable. It's fine now for me.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  Probably the icons for the Windows Store entries were already in the cache for you. Things work the second time, but the fact that it's unpredictable makes the experience less smooth than what it was before. Also I have things like ,,Candy Crash Friends'' icon that's very bright, takes my focus away on what I want to do, and I don't know how to turn it off, as I don't find it in the settings (to tell you the truth, I haven't even played it, but I'm waiting for Cyberpunk 2077, so I don't want to try other games right now).

tiffanyh 6y ago

I'm as big of a Satya fan as anyone, but someone who doesn't get enough credit is Ballmer. It wasn't a coincidence that on the day Ballmer stepped down and Satya became CEO (2014), Microsoft also announced Office for iOS, Cloud first strategy, and a whole slew of cloud/Azure product announcements. All of which was developed under Ballmer watch and he handed off the launch and continued execution to Satya.

abhinav22 6y ago
100% truth
dforrestwilson 6y ago
Interesting to contrast Satya with Sundar Pichai, whose company seems rudderless by comparison.
- ck425 6y ago
  The things is I never read about any major decisions Sundar Pichai has made. There's tons online about Tim Cook, Satya, Netflix's various SLs, Daniel Ek, Elon Musk (admittedly more about his tweets than business strat these days) etc. But I never read about Sunder Pichai's strategies or decisions. What is he actually doing?
  - jgalt212 6y ago
    His only job is to fight the DOJ anti trust complaint.
  - Wonnk13 6y ago
    Now that I think about it, I'm really curious as well. I didn't work in Cloud, but my perception is TK is really reshaping GCP as well as the Gsuite to whatever it is now. Sundar's role seems to really be give his lieutenants free reign which I guess makes sense seeing as how he now oversees all of Alphabet.
  - ohazi 6y ago
    Collecting a check? What's the incentive to do anything at that level? He's going to walk away after 5-10 years with OOM a billion dollars regardless of how anything he does or doesn't do pans out for Google. Why not just play the quiet card and pin anything that happens to the fiefdom lords who now have free reign and no oversight? If good things happen, he gets credit for delegating well. If bad things happen, it's their fault. But if he loudly tries something different and it fails, the failure is more likely to get pinned on him. And again, he's already going to walk away with a billion regardless, so "financial upside" as a motivator for success is largely an illusion. He's a "just gotta keep my nose clean and get out with a middling reputation and a shitload of money" CEO.

baybal2 6y ago

No he didn't. He turned the company even harder to farming plumpy corporate clients whom they already had on software+service deals with "cloud" thing subscriptions. A Microsoft salesman who visited us last year was almost begging us to switch to Cloud AD from regular AD. This is how hard they are moving toward that. It was just a long delayed admission that you can't make a lot of money on offline boxed software sales today.

Closi 6y ago
Well AAD has a load of advantages, including far wider single sign-on capabilities across loads of apps. And the cloud based features of office make absolute sense from a user perspective. Collaborative document editing on sharepoint just makes sense compared to the old 'non cloud' world, where you had to share documents around documents on emails and save twenty copies for version control (v0.5, v1, v1 final, v1 final final) on some shared drive that you have to VPN into from your home.
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
I don't know, this seems like it falls in the category of "a company's goal is to make money". Corporate clients just have no right to complain that Microsoft's sales model isn't structured in the way they'd prefer. It's different for personal usage, of course, but all of their personal usage software I'm aware of still has an offline option.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  > Corporate clients just have no right to complain that Microsoft's sales model isn't structured in the way they'd prefer. How do you figure? If I'm a business and I want things a certain way, and you won't provide that way to me, then I have every right to complain. Complaining is how I tell you I'm not satisfied and therefore might not buy or continue with your product.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    You're right. I gave the original comment a very uncharitable reading that on reflection I don't think it deserved.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

I agree that he did. What I see, is that MS acted like a small-company startup for many years; ferociously competitive, fairly agile (not the Agile Manifesto kind; just flexible and responsive). That paid off for them (and it's arguable whether or not it was a good thing for the industry in general -it sank a number of companies, but also put Seattle firmly into the center of the tech world). Then they became a blue-chip company, and all that startup-y stuff wasn't working anymore. Also, the consumer market changed a lot, with mobile overtaking desktop systems. For many, many folks, smartphones are the only computers that they will ever use. He did have the right vision for a new corporate direction.

phendrenad2 6y ago
This. I feel like Satya brought in fresh eyes to the "project" (that being the running of the office of the CEO of Microsoft). Microsoft was locked into a certain way of doing things, and with Satya, they were free to pop their head up and look around at how the world was evolving without them. And you can see how that led them directly into bold new areas, such as WSL, Azure as it is today (highly Linux-and-kubernetes-focused), Github, Linkedin, lots of gaming companies (Mojang, Havok, etc.). It also allowed them to question areas where Microsoft probably thought it "should be winning", but just wasn't working, and might have poured billions into, such as Nokia phones, Skype, Bing, etc.

pydry 6y ago

Dave Cutler doesn't get nearly enough credit for turning Microsoft around. I don't think it's a coincidence that he was at the helm for two of the most technologically advanced and successful product lines (NT 4.0 and azure).

justanotheratom 6y ago
and xbox.
ls65536 6y ago
There's a good book, "Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft", which documents the original development of Windows NT in the late 80's and early 90's. A large amount of the focus in the book is on Cutler himself, including some of his history coming from DEC, and his personal style of running the project at the time. I found it quite an interesting read!
sachinag 6y ago
I would love to read a long story on Dave Cutler. I've heard the name but don't know the first thing about him.
swyx 6y ago
more info on Dave Cutler for those who are new to him: - https://news.microsoft.com/features/the-engineers-engineer-computer-industry-luminaries-salute-dave-cutlers-five-decade-long-quest-for-quality/ https://news.microsoft.com/features/the-engineers-engineer-c... - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29RkHH-psrY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29RkHH-psrY
mindfulplay 6y ago
At some point, I hope such hidden heroes get their success outspoken more publicly: Dave cutler, Dianne hackborn are prime examples. I do like the fact John Carmack and Linus who are well-deserved to have a public following. But there are many more. And it doesn't have to be a showoff as much understanding the context in which Dave Cutler or Dianne Hackborn et al actually succeeded as engineers and the deep technical work they are lauded for.

Silhouette 6y ago

It's tough to argue with success. They obviously wanted someone who was going to go all-in on the cloud angle when they picked Nadella, and to give credit where it's due, the stock price chart for Microsoft says everything you need to say about the results he's delivered. What's worrying in a broader sense is that our societies have come to depend heavily on Microsoft's previous flagship offering, Windows. As the article observes, the focus has shifted elsewhere under Nadella's term. And as many people can attest, Windows 10 is far from the Windows we used to rely on, particularly for those not in enterprise world or academia. Many millions of people are now fundamentally depending on a product that is no longer the goose laying golden eggs for its maker, and the maker's economic incentives are no longer aligned with the best interests of their users.

dcolkitt 6y ago
Windows still directly generates annualized revenue of $22 billion. Plus Microsoft's dominance in that platform creates a ton of synergies in its other product lines. For example how many Azure customers pick it over AWS because they need a Windows-first cloud. It easily contributes hundreds of billions to Microsoft's market cap. I'm sure Windows is no longer considered the sexy department in Micrsoft's internal culture. But corporate management would have to be ridiculously incompetent to let that business line get significantly neglected.
- Silhouette 6y ago
  This seems like a classic case of enterprise vs. small business vs. personal use. The serious money is at the enterprise end, and most of the effects you described will be most profitable there. And of course the Windows 10 editions for large organisations don't try to play the same games with things like forced updates and mandatory telemetry, because they know very well that no professional IT department supporting thousands of users is ever going to surrender control of its equipment like that. Still, the reason the makers of expensive professional software have largely turned a blind eye to privacy forever and/or given away very cheap or free copies to students or home users is because they're well aware that it's a huge advantage for their software to be the cultural default. For example, would Adobe really have become dominant in digital content creation software if loads of enthusiastic design students hadn't been honing their skills on ripped off copies of Photoshop? Would Microsoft have come to dominate business desktops if home and school PCs hadn't all come with Windows so everyone already knew how to use it, or if they hadn't given away their development tools mostly for free to anyone who wanted them? We'll never know for sure, but it would be naive to discount the effects of familiarity. This feels a bit like Apple's recent trend for messing up its laptops and largely ignoring the rest of desktop/server space other than producing an occasional statement piece. Sure, they make the vast majority of their money from their mobile devices and the surrounding ecosystem, but someone still has to write the apps that drive that ecosystem, and those people are primarily using Apple laptops. If you ruin your development platform, and the developers start shifting their efforts towards other platforms (presumably Android in this case) then your users will follow, and now your business model is dead, even though the part you neglected was only directly responsible for a tiny part of your revenue stream. Obviously the danger isn't quite the same for Microsoft because strategically it's banking on cloud rather than mobile for its big revenues. But even so, cloud hosting is a pretty competitive space right now, and the Windows-friendly integrations (for developers as well as users) are a competitive advantage, one that is at risk if the very long tail of smaller developers start getting fed up of Windows and shifting to other systems. I suspect Microsoft's leadership are well aware of this danger and the often better developer experience on Linux is a big driver for introducing WSL, but still, if that's all they've got then you can just as well use a real Linux box and not pay the Microsoft tax or deal with all the unwanted games that Windows 10 keeps trying to play. If Windows 10 becomes too much of a liability for small businesses and power users, sooner or later that will inevitably have consequences for the whole business model and all those synergies you mentioned, even if it only happens over a period of years.

ck425 6y ago

If anyone here subscribes to Stratechery I strongly recommend the interview sent out yesterday with Microsofts head of gaming. There's chat there about how gaming shifted internally in part due to how Nadella rethought gaming as it's own strategy and a key future component of Azure, rather than just a part of Windows strategy. He particularly highlights how gaming is a key differentiator vs the other top tech companies. Shows some seriously smart strategic thinking.

DavidKarlas 6y ago
Main take away I had from his book "Hit Refresh", was that he made sure products don't hold other products back... Example: Office is free to go and make Office for Mac and grow Office numbers on iOS, Android... Without any burden to prefer Windows to drive Windows sales, Windows has to deliver numbers them self... Same goes for Windows on Azure or many other products that overlap...
stainforth 6y ago
What about the failure of Mixer?

tinyhouse 6y ago

Yes, he did. One of the best tech CEOs. Got his MS in CS from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Later got an MBA from Chicago but that's a BS degree for the resume. Shows you can succeed no matter where you start, you just need to work harder usually and not letting others to put you down.

blueblisters 6y ago
And an undergrad degree from Manipal, a private university whose reputation pales in comparison to the publicly funded Indian Institutes of Technology that a lot of Indian CEOs seem to be an alumnus of.
- __tg__ 6y ago
  Being an IIT grad mainly proves how well you could prepare for its brutal entrance exam (<1% acceptance). At work, I've seen IIT grads fare no better than other people. Sure, there are some brilliant people among IIT grads but that's to be expected with a filter that selects the top 1% of any population. A less known aspect of IITs in the past is their gaming of the GRE/US grad school application process, ranging from straight out cheating in the GRE (in the paper-pencil version, IIT students were given a single block of time for all sections rather than having time-limits for the sections, a blatant cheat made possible by their self-proctoring), to creating GRE question banks by collectively memorizing the test, to using the Australian time zone (ahead of India's) to find out the questions on the GRE. When applying to grad school in the US, IIT students would divvy up the schools among the graduating class so that no more than 1-2 would apply to top schools and claim to be in their class' top 10%, regardless of actual standing. So, anytime I see an IIT grad at work, I'm not really impressed by that aspect. The fact that Satya isn't from an IIT is of no consequence and actually makes him more credible in my eyes.
  - carls 6y ago
    Can you share some sources on these claims?
munchbunny 6y ago

racl101 6y ago

Wish he would turn Excel around. Such an important product, but so buggy. Very bug ridden. Why doesn't it get better?

vikramkr 6y ago
What bugs? I know of some that are left in for backwards compatibility, but otherwise its clearly working well enough to be the dominant tool for so many industries. And the parts that work are good enough that its easier to just change the industry to fit excel then change excel at this point since so many people have different requirements- see what happened with genetics recently
- orthoxerox 6y ago
  > I know of some that are left in for backwards compatibility, but otherwise its clearly working well enough to be the dominant tool for so many industries. Some sort of a strict mode or a way to designate data types on table columns would solve probably 90% of the issues people have with Excel.
- racl101 6y ago
  Like for example, just off the top of my head: - Why does search not work when the spreadsheet has a few thousand rows? Sometimes, I'll do Ctrl + A, select the entire data set, move my cursor to cell A1, then type Ctrl+F to find text, finds nothing. But if I filter the column where I think it might be for what I was looking for then it finds it. - Sometimes the opposite of the first occurs. I'll filter for something in a column, finds nothing, but Ctrl+A and then Ctrl+F finds it. Super weird. Again, I'm talking like 5000 rows and maybe 25 columns worth of data, a spreadsheet a few Megabytes big. Not the biggest dataset. I also make sure I have no extraneous columns like some people tend to make by mistake which makes the searching take longer. - Ever try to undo (ctrl + z), if you have many sheets open, sometimes your ctrl+ z will start going through the undo history of other files (i.e. not the ones that you're actually working on or the foreground. The ones in the background or minimized. Guess what? Now you can't tell if you altered data on the other sheets because for some reason Excel registers everything as a change to sheet. You want to expand your columns to fit your text. Good, that counts as a change. Filtering your columns? That's a change.) etc. etc. Every action is worthy of a: 'Do you want to save your changes' even if never really added or updated data. So good luck trying to sort through undos that you didn't mean to make. That's but a few things and don't get me started on number and date formatting. And btw, these are bugs I noticed around 2003 btw. Why are they still there? Working on Excel and making sure that it doesn't make mistakes is work on top of the actual work that needs to be done. I've become so distrusting of Excel that I've learned Python so I can use Pandas so that I can get the truth about a spreadsheet because I can't trust Excel. That's incredibly depressing that I have to do that.

muststopmyths 6y ago

nah, he turned the stock price around which is why Wall Street and MSFT employees love him. Every single thing he's credited for "turning around" was launched under Ballmer. My reading of Ballmer from the outside (I'd left long before the recent transition years) is that he probably trusted his division heads too much. He figured they knew what they were doing and he just had to steer the giant ship gently in a general direction. What other explanation is there for letting Sinofsky run amok with the horseshit that was Windows 8 ? Or Office refusing to ship WinRT apps, ever ? Ballmer had Microsoft in his blood and I loved him for that. People like to make fun of his "Developers, Developers, Developers" video, but that man put his soul in his work. Nadella is bent on competing on low-price Linux VMs with AWS and he will lose that bet in the long run. I don't feel like I need to go into the abomination that is Windows 10. Or maybe I'm just a bitter Windows Phone user shaking my fist at the clouds (no pun intended).

dageshi 6y ago
Microsoft seems like one of the few companies that can actually succeed with cloud. They have a massive inbuilt market of customers using microsoft server products that they can transition into their cloud, I don't know that there's any other company other than AWS better positioned to do well in that market?
asveikau 6y ago
> letting Sinofsky run amok with the horseshit that was Windows 8 ? Or Office refusing to ship WinRT apps, ever ? Strikes me that these two things are the same failure. WinRT wasn't up to the task due to Windows 8 being poorly thought out, so Office couldn't use it.
flowerlad 6y ago
> Every single thing he's credited for "turning around" was launched under Ballmer. That's nonsense. Ballmer kept Microsoft in the 90's style of doing business, but this didn't work so well in the 2000's. After Satya took over he embraced opensource. He allowed Linux into Azure, which is bold. He killed the Windows division, which is very bold. He made Windows free. He made Office free for devices with small screens. He opensourced .NET and other products such as VSCode and TypeScript. He incorporated Linux kernel into Windows. None of these things would have happened under Balmer. These are bold moves and these moves are responsible for why customers, developers and investors love the new Microsoft.

typon 6y ago

With VSCode and Typescript, Microsoft owned the web developer space - a feat that I would not have predicted them doing 10 years ago. How did Google/Facebook get beaten here?

neurobashing 6y ago
Microsoft has always had a huge developer tools footprint, so it's a natural fit.
- orthoxerox 6y ago
  That they did, but VS had always been aimed at MS tech stack: VC++, VB, C#, F#. And then VS Code appeared seemingly out of the blue, rapidly becoming the editor of choice for languages all across the tech landscape.
  - scudd 6y ago
    I think the VSCode extension marketplace greatly helps with the huge breadth of tooling. Not sure if this is applicable to regular Visual Studio as well, I've honestly never used it.
    - Osiris 6y ago
      Visual Studio (full edition) doesn't have extensions. It's a full blown IDE and everything is built-in. Despite having a similar name, the two products sharing almost nothing in common.
      - nvrspyx 6y ago
        I'm pretty late to this, but Visual Studio (full edition) does have extensions. Resharper, for instance, is a popular Visual Studio extension. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/ https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/
  - WorldMaker 6y ago

cute_boi 6y ago

no, just by installing candy crush and telemetry and phoning home doesn't mean he turned around microsoft .

pietromenna 6y ago

How can I read the full article without having a economist subscriber? It is really annoying to have this walled garden for news that do not support price parity for lower income countries (I live in one).

Ap0cryph0n 6y ago
https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
known 6y ago
https://archive.vn/FHixO https://archive.vn/FHixO
- pietromenna 6y ago
  Thank you!

S_A_P 6y ago

I love hate Microsoft. I love the dev tooling for enterprise, but hate the OS. I really want to like Windows 10, but I feel like I am working against it more than it is helping me. I think OSX is also trending toward making my life harder, but the curve is much slower. I think the next step is to try to really use Linux and see if I can finally find a 'home' os...

munchbunny 6y ago
Linux these days works fine for a daily driver as long as the software you need is available on it. It still definitely doesn't win any awards for UX though.

undefinednull 6y ago

Why do they even allow posting a pay walled content here?

chanmad29 6y ago

As a casual user, I actually like the "look" of W10, and do not pay much attention to the latency that others have pointed out. What irks me most though is the constant request for updates and strong arm restarts to install them.

Adutude 6y ago

From a business standpoint, I would have to agree he did turn them around from a business standpoint. As a user of Windows since 3.1 (w/out networking). I do the same as MekaiGS "I honestly have no idea where all the Windows settings are anymore so I just search instead." It was like multiple teams designed different parts of the settings but they never had any meetings or talked with each other. There are days when I would rather use Microsoft Bob than Windows 10 Or better yet, Microsoft Joe Bob http://www.bytebrothers.org/joebob.htm http://www.bytebrothers.org/joebob.htm "Go Microsoft -- Go Intel -- Go America," and "QuickTime is for Pinko Hippie Wimps."

nova22033 6y ago

Still trying to wrap my head around the fact that I've have a chromium based browser from microsoft on my iphone.

Kipters 6y ago
that's not chromium based, Safari is the only engine that's allowed on iOS so all the browsers are just skins that add features on top of it

tabtab 6y ago

Compatibility and Stability Sometimes success is a matter of being at the right place at the right time. As the article mentions, many customers were afraid of AWS because they feared Amazon snooping in their retail intel. Because MS doesn't have a big e-store presence, they were not a retail threat. And Azure integrates better with existing Windows networks. Compatibility is still a key here, not raw merit. AWS is technically better. That being said, Satya has been a steady hand and has made it fairly easy to keep running legacy software rather than pulling the carpet out, like VB-classic (desktop) did. Google, on the other hand, changes products like a teen changes fashion. The VB-Classic fiasco under Ballmer sent panic through the industry, making customers realize they can no longer bet the farm on any MS tech, which they had been doing. Dot-Net was not backward compatible. COBOL still lives largely because co's don't or can't F with it. That's a lesson to not be ignored. (The need for a network GUI standard with similar properties is still out there.) Businesses hate upgrading just for the sake of upgrading. Satya seems to understand this, making transitions gentler and more gradual.

greatsaas12 6y ago
This. A lot of founders seem to underestimate the effect of timing. I've read so many many stories where a startup took off when another product got worse/shut down (for example, Feedly really took off when Google Reader shut down, and so on.)

cxseven 6y ago

Who are the geniuses / slimeballs at Microsoft who snatched the JEDI contract away from AWS for dubious reasons, and who partnered with Duck Duck Go, the most visible complainant about Google's search dominance, and central to the government's antitrust case that it just filed?

dzonga 6y ago

surprised microsoft still has 72% of server market. I thought by now Linux servers will be reigning supreme. Though, I will admit IIS[0] is wonderful piece of software. Also does the open source world have a direct match for active directory etc, that are used by enterprises and smb's ? But then, maybe I could be wrong a killing could be made selling linux boxes to be servers on the intranets around the world. [0]: https://www.iis.net/overview https://www.iis.net/overview

Ecstatify 6y ago

Microsoft share holders will vote on election of directors. Guess who’s on the list... bit of a coincidence.

Zigurd 6y ago

Several commenters make the point that the big successes under Nadella were initiated when Ballmer was CEO. This is true, but business success is often the absence of big, ego-driven mistakes. <cough>Nokia</cough> Microsoft has a huge number of very smart people. Aligning the company behind what they are good at will enable Microsoft to thrive.

anvemaha 6y ago

Bloomberg has a probably similar article[1] that doesn't have a hard paywall. I used it during a uni leadership course for a short essay and found it informative. Just wanted to drop the link here in case anyone's interested. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-02/satya-nadella-remade-microsoft-as-world-s-most-valuable-company https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-02/satya-nad...

cryptica 6y ago

I agree 100%. Satya Nadella stepped up to the CEO role and almost single-handedly turned Microsoft around. You could see the effects within the first few months. He is a genius. A natural born leader.

cutler 6y ago

Microsoft was happy to extort money from Linux distros via its patent racket until it realised it had no choice but to embrace Linux after the failure of Windows Phone. This is not about Satya Nadella or VS Code or cross-platform .Net Core - it's about The Nature of the Beast. Microsoft is a monopolistic enterprise and always will be. Cross-platform doesn't change this fact.