Nadella has done a better job than Ballmer but don't overrate him too much! He has many major failures on his watch. Microsoft has been very effectively buying

Nadella has done a better job than Ballmer but don't overrate him too much! He has many major failures on his watch. Microsoft has been very effectively buying a warm reputational glow with developers by splashing money around, but that's all relative to their previous state. It's still a company with a lot of problems: - With the exception of VS Code, the Microsoft things developers like are purchased or just catching up with where competitors were 20 years ago e.g. GitHub, Minecraft, OpenAI, Windows Terminal, WSL. - There's a top thread today on HN all about how much people hate Teams. Teams is an abomination yet forms the central pillar of their collaboration strategy; how can they have executed so badly that people seriously say they'd rather quit their job if it's introduced than deal with its terrible design? - Windows has totally rotted away on Nadella's watch. The execution failure here is total. Does Nadella even use Windows himself? It's still critical infrastructure for much of the world but the entire Windows platform has no vision, no ideas and has become (just like Teams) mind-blowingly buggy. Absolutely nothing they introduced in the last 15 years or so actually works properly. A good measure of the totality of Nadella's failure here is that Microsoft's new apps are all Electron based and Edge is a fork of Chrome i.e. they institutionally prefer to use Google's code to their own. Also they apparently hand out MacBooks to new employees! - Visual Studio was once dominant in its space but is now apparently considered a writeoff, so VS Code is a totally different app written from scratch. - .NET has experienced major product and branding churn that has left anyone not fully committed to the ecosystem confused about what it is and can do e.g. .NET Core vs Framework. .NET isn't a failure but it doesn't seem to be growing or exciting devs either, and in terms of core R&D they've been blown away by the work Oracle is doing with Graal. - Azure is very successful but is showing worrying signs of the same bugs-and-tech-debt problems that plagues the rest of their products. When I had to use Azure, I was constantly amazed at how even basic things were flaky or did not work. Like even just holding open TCP connections between machines wouldn't work properly. This is despite the fact that Microsoft was able to built out Azure seemingly only by raiding the rest of the firm for talent, hence the Windows brain drain. Also cloud is becoming strongly associated with cost disease, which opens up a possible weakness in future (in fairness, a problem shared with AWS and GCP). - HoloLens is cool but does anyone use it? Nadella fixed the monolithic our-way-or-the-highway approach, which allowed them to import tech from elsewhere to fix their weaknesses. But compare that to Apple, which consistently doubles down on its own tech stack and has become even more successful with the monolithic integrated approach and it's hard not to see this as something Nadella was forced into rather than some great act of leadership.