11 ms·
Ask HN: Is Satya Nadella the best tech CEO of last decade?
He turned around an almost dying windows to become this Kraken that has the majority dev environment in its chokehold. That's impressive
Other candidates in my list are Frank Slootman of Snowflake and Tim Cook of Apple for how he has not dropped the ball from Steve Jobs. What are yours?
- brodouevencode 3y agoNice try, Satya
- easytiger 3y agoWhat did you think was going to happen to Microsoft's embedded and deeply moated monopoly? It was just going to go away? It was bedded in. Anyone who has used office in the enterprise environment over the last 15 years can tell you it wasn't a strategy or software quality that got them here.
- tdsanchez 3y agoMicrosoft SHOULD be a leader in mobile and instead they just pivot from one tech hype to the next. Windows 11 is a laughing stock to many and it isn't exactly flying off the shelves. Microsoft is a hot mess and Nadella is a trader the same way Pichai is at Google. Same for Tim Cook. Look back at news articles for the past year and watch how fast Nadella pivoted from "the metaverse" to GPT. Stock buybacks make CEOs look impressive if you don't know about stock buybacks. https://money.usnews.com/investing/articles/s-p-500-stocks-with-the-biggest-stock-buybacks https://money.usnews.com/investing/articles/s-p-500-stocks-w...
- toast0 3y ago> Microsoft SHOULD be a leader in mobile and instead they just pivot from one tech hype to the next. They are, they had flat UI and dark mode years before anyone else. I imagine iOS and Android will get live tiles one of these days, too.
- throw47463 3y agoLisa Su of AMD. She made it relevant again.
- ipaddr 3y agoWouldn't that be pre-twitter Musk?
- bruce511 3y agoOh dear. You asked an honest open-ended question, but failed to define any criteria for being "best". So let me summarise - clearly not, because they don't make a consumer/device (aka phone). Only phone companies can have a best CEO. Then again Apple doesn't have a successful cloud platform, Google doesn't make cars, Amazon's rockets aren't very useful, SpaceX doesn't make a phone, Tesla -is- a phone (the best "mobile" phone ever?). What about social media, ad-platform, AI? Clearly deciding it based on product is absurd. Equally we could debate the merits of owning an OS, or an Office platform, or a streaming service. We could base it on innovation, stock price and growth, market cap, employee numbers, cash in the bank, acquisitions, willingness to kill projects, ability to smoke weed. We could define it as having laid off no-one ever. All of which is to say, there's no "best" to begin with. There are thousands of companies,of every scale, which have done well by some metric, which have survived rocky roads, which have provided value to society, to customers, to employees. My hat is off to all if them. Their success keeps food on the table, and roofs over heads. Asking which is best, without define criteria is hopeless because clearly all companies have strengths and weaknesses. We might as well puck which sport is "best". (Where the right answer is golf because, um, that's what I like. And because more 80+ year-olds do golf than everything else combined. They're experienced enough to know.)
- uberman 3y agoI don't know how much of the MS turnaround can be attributed to him, but if we take it at face value that the CEO is responsible for everything, then MS definitely has had a dramatic positive run following Nadella taking the reigns from Ballmer. MS still lacks a industry leading 21st century consumer device and Nadella has not been able to change that but his bets on cloud computing, embracing of Linux and open source and the rise of VSCode are something to behold. As an "older-school" dev, I am constantly amazed that I can open a linux prompt on windows or do VSCode work with a local gui on a remote computer or inside a docker container.
- steve1977 3y ago> As an "older-school" dev I assume this means "older-school Windows dev", as none of that is new in the UNIX world.
- zamnos 3y agoBalmer said it best, 'Developers, developers, developers!' And then Microsoft bought Github.
- rhaway84773 3y agoBallmer may have screamed “Developers, developers, developers”, but what he actually meant was “Windows, Office, developers”. Windows and Office came before everything. The big change Nadella brought to the table was completely eliminating Windows as a primary goal for the company, and reducing Office’s importance as well.
- endisneigh 3y agowhether you are using profit or market cap it's clear Apple, and therefore Tim Cook, is the winner. add to the fact that Apple clearly has been the most responsible in terms of keeping costs under control and therefore not having layoffs or other cost cutting measures now, says it all.
- duped 3y agoTim Cook quintupled the value of Apple and passed on a lot of the fads that other tech companies fell victim to.
- barelyauser 3y agoValue for who? No innovation, just hoarding massive profits. Quintupled stock price for shareholders.
- PestoDiRucola 3y ago> Value for who? No innovation Apple silicon?
- barelyauser 3y agoI urge you to research how much cash and investments Apple currently holds. Last year it was around 200B. Yes, Apple Silicon is innovation. But is a drop in the bucket. A sense of scale is very important.
- VirusNewbie 3y agoI can't live without my airpods. There aren't many things that I would buy immediately if they were destroyed. Airpods alone are a multibillion dollar company. So i'd say that's innovation.
- Traubenfuchs 3y agoTo many, that's probably the foremost goal of a CEO, no?
- barelyauser 3y agoMany? To the shareholders it is. But as a consumer I prefer innovation and not money hoarding. Shareholders think otherwise.
- 3y ago
- meerita 3y ago[flagged]
- quadrifoliate 3y agoCan we have an official policy against AI-written comments, please? It is in the long-term interests of HN to not have this place be riddled with bland autogenerated comments.
- josephcsible 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35206303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35206303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33950747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33950747
- dang 3y agoQuite so. Thanks!
- quadrifoliate 3y agoOops, sorry! I will keep that in mind for the future.
- gopuck16 3y agoThis looks like ChatGPT copy-paste.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kastden 3y agoDid ChatGPT write this?
- formerly_proven 3y agoYes
- blindriver 3y agoI think his flexibility to not make Windows first gave his engineers new life. Not being forced into a set of predictable actions based on ideology and being flexibly minded to let his engineer follow the best path is why Microsoft has risen from its decades of stagnation. He didn't lead with fear the same way Sundar is leading Google.
- bobleeswagger 3y agoI don't care what Microsoft turned around, what they did to stagnate and gatekeep technology in the 90's is unforgivable, and always will be.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- irrational 3y agoBetteridge's law of headlines says, “no”.
- reportgunner 3y agoI love you. I fail to remember the name of this phenomenon and I spend 3 minutes googling for it every time I see a headline that is a question.
- LadyCailin 3y ago“Is there any CEO better than Satya Nadella?” The “law” is no such thing.
- irrational 3y agoOf course it’s a thing. It even has a Wikipedia article. You might not agree with it, but that’s not the same as it not being a thing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headline...
- LadyCailin 3y agoAs it says in the article you yourself linked, it is an adage, not a law. My point is, this is not a generalizable thing, so comments using this to defend their response is not useful.
- zeroonetwothree 3y agoThat isn’t a headline though
- gentleman11 3y agoDidn’t he oversee turning windows into spyware? In my mind, he’s the worst ceo of the last decade
- tomstockmail 3y agoDesktop windows is a dead end product. Extracting any value from the few that still use it is natural.
- phkahler 3y agoWindows is a platform for everything else Microsoft rents. Driving people away from it will hopefully work one of these days ;-)
- midoridensha 3y agoTurning Windows into spyware is working out very financially for MS, so doing so makes him an excellent CEO. Your personal feelings about the company's products are irrelevant; only their financial performance is important. If you don't like the product, you're free to not buy it, and use something else. There are many alternatives.
- gentleman11 3y agoNo there isn’t. That’s what a monopoly is. I can’t not use windows. I need it for work
- midoridensha 3y agoSorry, that's BS. You made a choice to work at a job that uses Windows. You could work someplace else. At my job, I can't not use Linux. If I refuse to use Linux, I get fired, because all our work is done on that. Your job is exactly the same: they chose, for whatever reasons, to use Windows for their IT infrastructure. You chose to take that job. If not using Windows was important to you, you would have asked about this before taking the job, and declined, and looked for a job that uses the OS you prefer. There's tons of jobs out there that require using either Linux or Mac. There might even be a few still using z/OS. Part of working at a real job is using whatever tools they require you to use. I don't care much for Confluence, but I use it because my company requires it.
- dev_0 3y ago[dead]
- blueflow 3y ago> the majority dev environment in its chokehold Is that so?
- tomnipotent 3y agoThe 2022 Stack Overflow survey has it at 75% market share. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#most-popular-technologies-new-collab-tools https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#most-popular-technolog...
- blueflow 3y agoRelying on stack overflow data is biased towards badly documented technologies, which Microsoft Products usually are.
- tomnipotent 3y ago> is biased towards badly documented technologies What a nonsensical, unverifiable statement. Stack Overflow is for better or worse a statistically valid sample of programmers from around the world.
- mnd999 3y agoI still don’t understand why VSCode is so popular. I don’t like it very much. I’ll stick with IntellliJ for Java / Scala and Neovim for everything else.
- daveed 3y agoIt's fast, easy for beginners, and free. That's pretty good to start with.
- qbasic_forever 3y agoMicrosoft completely lost mobile. Like not just a few goofy phones like Kin, they just straight up have no relevance or marketshare or anything in what is clearly the future platform for all computing. A lot of this damage was done under Balmer, but IMHO Nadella has a lot of blame too. Microsoft has gone from domination of computing platforms and making money on every single device sale to competing for scraps in someone else's app store (making that someone else money!) as they sell office apps and such ported to platforms they don't control anymore. I think there isn't more outrage or unrest about this failure from Microsoft shareholders since Azure and other service growth has kept dollars flowing in and the share price up. But Microsoft is nowhere near their 90s peak of total control over consumer computing.
- goolz 3y agoThey also have control of a swath of the gaming sector and that is one of the biggest and fastest growing industries in the world. You are totally right I just think that should be considered.
- voisin 3y ago> Microsoft completely lost mobile. Like not just a few goofy phones like Kin, they just straight up have no relevance or marketshare or anything in what is clearly the future platform for all computing. Lost on mobile hardware and OS but their software (office, outlook, OneDrive) is extremely popular on mobile, no?
- prepend 3y agoMicrosoft wants $100/year for Office for every mobile user. So they’ll likely make more money off mobile than Google will. Although they don’t build any phones or mobile OSes, they are making a ton of money off mobile (without paying the App Store percentages to Apple or Google).
- qbasic_forever 3y agoThe more popular those apps the more money Microsoft is paying Apple and Google to sell the apps in their stores. Nothing is stopping Apple or Google from shaking MS down for more dollars by bumping up app store profit sharing splits. I have to imagine being forced to play by someone else's rules and live in their ecosystem would have completely enraged 90's era Microsoft led by Bill Gates--he would have moved heaven and earth to own the platform and all the dollars consumers spend.
- osigurdson 3y agoI'd say he is the best non-founder CEO perhaps ever.
- endisneigh 3y agoTim Cook and Apple have better stats by virtually every metric - also a non-founder.
- osigurdson 3y agoI don't think Tim Cook has had much impact on Apple however.
- pell 3y agoHe has lead Apple after Jobs died which is no small task. He oversaw the iPhone market which has been growing continuously under his leadership. He started and grew Apple’s services division, launched Apple Watch, AirPods and the Apple Silicon transition which have all been massively successful by any metric. I don’t understand how Tim Cook’s tenure can be considered not impactful.
- osigurdson 3y agoI agree with "Apple Silicon transition". Everything else is obvious / organic growth.
- pell 3y ago> He turned around an almost dying windows to become this Kraken that has the majority dev environment in its chokehold. Microsoft was still growing under Ballmer. Windows was far away from “dying”.
- linguae 3y agoThere are many ways of defining "best." There's not only "best" in terms of the bottom line, but also "best" in terms of their stewardship of the product line and customer satisfaction. Personally I am very fond of Lisa Su's leadership of AMD. AMD's offerings have become very compelling under her tenure; I love my Ryzen 3900 machine. She would make a strong contender for best tech CEO of the 2010s, in my opinion. Another strong contender would be Jensen Huang of NVIDIA.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoYou need to define the measurable criteria during the evaluation time period Then you can sample across CEOs and then measure Nadella based on that Do you have such criteria and data?
- AzzieElbab 3y agoStill waiting for an MS product that I would use voluntarily. Excel is good, VS-Code is OK. Not using either one atm
- suby 3y agoYou say that Windows is a Kraken, but it's been on a downward slide in my mind. I don't think Nadella gets enough flak for what is happening to Windows and Microsoft's attitude towards respecting users / privacy in general. Some examples that I've seen posted to HN over the past few months * Microsoft Edge leaks browser history to Bing - https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/25/23697532/microsoft-edge-browser-url-leak-bing-privacy https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/25/23697532/microsoft-edge-b... * More ads in Windows 11 start menu - https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/17/microsoft_windows_start_ads/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/17/microsoft_windows_sta... * Absolute junk shoved into the Windows UI - https://thomasbandt.com/the-day-windows-died https://thomasbandt.com/the-day-windows-died? https://birchtree.me/blog/the-windows-11-trash-party/ https://birchtree.me/blog/the-windows-11-trash-party/ https://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-keeps-feeding-tabloid-news https://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-keeps-feeding-tabl... Windows is in a boiling frog situation. It's been slowly accumulating dark patterns and anti-features like mandatory online-only accounts, while at the same time losing quality of life features like the ability to move your taskbar or to not combine apps in the taskbar. I should be using Windows today. I grew up on Windows, I learned to program on Windows, I had a very difficult and bumpy transition in getting off of Windows. But I had to leave their ecosystem because they have absolutely no respect for the user, and at this point I do not trust them. I want to reiterate that these are recent things, I'm not mad at them for what they did in the 90's here. They aren't treating Windows as a serious tool for getting shit done, they're treating it as a data-mine and advertising opportunity.
- felixg3 3y agoI‘m not sure if Microsoft ever cared about user privacy, being a major player in mass surveillance and data processing for the US government. Instead of selling out our data to a nation state, they are now engaging in surveillance capitalism, too. If you care about privacy, there is only one option, and that’s Desktop Linux, albeit less than ideal in many use cases.
- pchangr 3y agoI think that given the declining share of profit coming from windows, it wouldn’t be surprising for me if it just gets worse.
- CivBase 3y agoWhat exactly is the metric for "best" here? I consider MS's record under Nadella to be a mixed bag. Azure is probably Nadella's biggest success, but it's hard to come up with any other significant market in which MS has excelled under Nadella where they were not previously dominant. From a user perspective, many MS products I use have improved and many have changed in ways I would consider to be detrimental. VS Code is probably the only new MS product that I've started using regularly - and I'd only consider it to be a minor improvement over Sublime Text for my use cases.
- Teslazar 3y agoNvidia's CEO Jensen Huang has an impressive track record. They are positioned incredibly well right now with the AI boom and demand for their AI technology which they've been developing for many years.
- drcongo 3y agoHi Satya, thanks for posing this interesting question.
- DueDilligence 3y ago[dead]
- 1letterunixname 3y agoBalmer was the worst, so anyone is better.
- raincom 3y agoTech Bullmarket masks failures of all tech CEOs.