4 ms·

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 subscript

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.
easton 6y ago
Azure AD is much better for a lot of companies in the long term than regular AD. No more FSMO, spending weekends troubleshooting replication errors after dcpromo, or wondering why the heck Microsoft wouldn’t enable the darn AD recycle bin out of the box. If you don’t need LDAP and your apps all support SAML, it really is better. And cheaper, since it’s free with anything you buy in Microsoft 365 (No more CALs that only work for a single release of Windows Server). And they have fairly decent zero-trust in the form of Conditional Access, which is like an extra dollar or two per user per month, and is included in many of the higher plans.
raesene9 6y ago
Of course they're moving to cloud, that's the direction of travel all software companies want, with nice recurring monthly revenue and plently of lock-in. Microsoft's achievement (in relation to their "legacy" enterprise peers like Oracle and IBM) is making a much better job of the transition. For example, where are IBM cloud and Oracle cloud in terms of market share, relative to Azure...
wastedhours 6y ago
> It was just a long delayed admission that you can't make a lot of money on offline boxed software sales today. Well, yeah. That's the turnaround. And it's worked. It's not easy to get a large company, fat off the proceeds of boxed software to actually reinvent their business model to shift to what lots of companies actually want (easy-in/easy-out licenses on their whole software stack to scale with their workforce, like with O365). Ballmer and Nadella have pulled it off remarkably well - few legacy companies manage to stay in with their existing clientele whilst also adapting themselves to changing landscapes like that.
- Silhouette 6y ago
  It's not easy to get a large company, fat off the proceeds of boxed software to actually reinvent their business model to shift to what lots of companies actually want I'm not so sure. The biggest problem Windows has long had in this respect is that its application installation and update model is awful. Installation is haphazard and every program does its own thing. Updates even more so. Data security and application access control are barely existent, which wasn't so bad 30 years ago when the worst you were going to suffer was a virus wiping your disk and having to restore from backups, but has become a (perhaps the) critical problem for software management in today's connected world. Microsoft could have fixed almost all of that relatively quickly at any time, by providing the kind of robust installation/update/permissions models we see on numerous other platforms today, implementing an online store for vetted software from credible sources, and then perhaps extending that idea from selling the single licences that facilities like the mobile app stores offer up to selling and managing organisation-wide licensing for serious professional software. It would have made life easier for developers at all scales, it would have made life easier for users, it would have given them an extremely lucrative store model to use as a revenue generator, and they wouldn't even have had to shut down installing software from other sources and try to lock their systems down, just provide the option to limit installation on centrally managed systems for organisational users. But instead all we've seen is variations on poor imitation app stores, which have mostly offered toy applications using half-baked runtimes instead of the full power of Windows, as Microsoft tried to dumb the big desktop OS down to mobile OS levels instead of realising that it could still dominate professional and power user desktops.
jondubois 6y ago
I'm sure he is a very smart guy and he did a good job but the past 10 years of the economy have been essentially 100% about luck/timing. Most of these large corporations have become self-sustaining capital blackholes. In our inflationary fiat monetary system, once enough capital gets dumped into something, it just keeps attracting capital no matter what. Just look at any major tech corporation, gold, silver, Bitcoin... They're mostly stores of value, the business utility is not a factor. The only thing that counted over the past decade is perception. Improving the perception of Microsoft is Satya's main achievement. Anyone with a good trustworthy face and a good story to tell could have achieved that.

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.

easton 6y ago

Azure AD is much better for a lot of companies in the long term than regular AD. No more FSMO, spending weekends troubleshooting replication errors after dcpromo, or wondering why the heck Microsoft wouldn’t enable the darn AD recycle bin out of the box. If you don’t need LDAP and your apps all support SAML, it really is better. And cheaper, since it’s free with anything you buy in Microsoft 365 (No more CALs that only work for a single release of Windows Server). And they have fairly decent zero-trust in the form of Conditional Access, which is like an extra dollar or two per user per month, and is included in many of the higher plans.

raesene9 6y ago

Of course they're moving to cloud, that's the direction of travel all software companies want, with nice recurring monthly revenue and plently of lock-in. Microsoft's achievement (in relation to their "legacy" enterprise peers like Oracle and IBM) is making a much better job of the transition. For example, where are IBM cloud and Oracle cloud in terms of market share, relative to Azure...

wastedhours 6y ago

> It was just a long delayed admission that you can't make a lot of money on offline boxed software sales today. Well, yeah. That's the turnaround. And it's worked. It's not easy to get a large company, fat off the proceeds of boxed software to actually reinvent their business model to shift to what lots of companies actually want (easy-in/easy-out licenses on their whole software stack to scale with their workforce, like with O365). Ballmer and Nadella have pulled it off remarkably well - few legacy companies manage to stay in with their existing clientele whilst also adapting themselves to changing landscapes like that.

Silhouette 6y ago
It's not easy to get a large company, fat off the proceeds of boxed software to actually reinvent their business model to shift to what lots of companies actually want I'm not so sure. The biggest problem Windows has long had in this respect is that its application installation and update model is awful. Installation is haphazard and every program does its own thing. Updates even more so. Data security and application access control are barely existent, which wasn't so bad 30 years ago when the worst you were going to suffer was a virus wiping your disk and having to restore from backups, but has become a (perhaps the) critical problem for software management in today's connected world. Microsoft could have fixed almost all of that relatively quickly at any time, by providing the kind of robust installation/update/permissions models we see on numerous other platforms today, implementing an online store for vetted software from credible sources, and then perhaps extending that idea from selling the single licences that facilities like the mobile app stores offer up to selling and managing organisation-wide licensing for serious professional software. It would have made life easier for developers at all scales, it would have made life easier for users, it would have given them an extremely lucrative store model to use as a revenue generator, and they wouldn't even have had to shut down installing software from other sources and try to lock their systems down, just provide the option to limit installation on centrally managed systems for organisational users. But instead all we've seen is variations on poor imitation app stores, which have mostly offered toy applications using half-baked runtimes instead of the full power of Windows, as Microsoft tried to dumb the big desktop OS down to mobile OS levels instead of realising that it could still dominate professional and power user desktops.

jondubois 6y ago

I'm sure he is a very smart guy and he did a good job but the past 10 years of the economy have been essentially 100% about luck/timing. Most of these large corporations have become self-sustaining capital blackholes. In our inflationary fiat monetary system, once enough capital gets dumped into something, it just keeps attracting capital no matter what. Just look at any major tech corporation, gold, silver, Bitcoin... They're mostly stores of value, the business utility is not a factor. The only thing that counted over the past decade is perception. Improving the perception of Microsoft is Satya's main achievement. Anyone with a good trustworthy face and a good story to tell could have achieved that.