Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem | Hacker News Reader

Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem

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133 pointstype0129 comments

Bit too much Ballmer bashing. He made plenty of mistakes so he's an easy target for the ignoranti, but the adoption of open source, the move to the cloud, the writing of Android and iOS apps etc all started under Ballmer.

Ballmer also cleaned up the anti-trust mess and -- while his hands were somewhat tied by a dozen years of constant DoJ supervision -- tripled Microsoft's sales and doubled its profits. This was despite competition from free Linux and OpenOffice, whose fans used to tell me that Microsoft would be out of business within five years....

Ballmer's biggest mistake was the review system at Microsoft.

- Managers spent easily a quarter of their year on reviews

- Employees often competed against one another (have a great idea? Okay, but That Guy down the hall found out about it and did a half-assed implementation and got a great annual review, and you got slammed for not accomplishing enough. Or maybe your idea simply got sabotaged in some closed-door meetings. Customers? What are those?)

- Sorry, we know all the people on your team are good, but you have to fire five of them. And . . . don't bother picking them, HR already did that without your input.

In 11 years I went through four changes in how reviews were done, and things got steadily worse with each iteration. I hear things are better now; it wouldn't be hard. There was a ton of bad attrition, of really good people who got fed up with things and quit.

In a Q&A session I asked Lisa Brummel, the then head of HR, what she was doing about bad attrition, about good employees who were leaving because of the review system and politics. She wouldn't even admit that the problem existed.

The board should have fired Ballmer five years earlier; on the other hand, they might have wound up with Kevin Turner running things, OMFG. Microsoft Kremlinology is a thing.

Sorry, we know all the people on your team are good, but you have to fire five of them. And . . . don't bother picking them, HR already did that without your input.

Ha, this happened to me. I found out I was getting laid off before my boss and boss' boss did.

I remember this article: https://hal2020.com/2013/07/09/on-org-structures-goals-and-m...

Under Ballmer's watch the revenue tripled. It could have been pure dumb luck. Even with all that Satya is doing it hasn't really showed any results on revenues and profits. Sun did a lot of great things for open source and they pretty much floundered.

Nit: It's "On Ballmer's watch" (an old naval expression).

It's more the case that Gates left plenty of low hanging fruit to pick.

Almost the entire revenue growth was in repricing stuff that was widely adopted because it was cheap, and a few short lived "innovations" that people are already abandoning everywhere.

You really think that repricing stuff gets you from roughly $20 billion to $70 billion in the PC market?

Right- Office and Windows began talking to each other in 2011, when the consent decree ended. The silo structure at Microsoft was almost required by the government.

Microsoft's biggest problem is undue intrusion on liberties that customers have come to expect on x86 computers.

Under Ballmer and Gates this didn't happen, so consequently I liked their time much more than that of Satya. All the goodwill and other benefits that comes from open sourcing various components doesn't outweigh the privacy intrusions and lost trust that came with Windows 10, at least for me. Ballmer was loud and had his antics, Gates had his ruthless market drive that some despise, but I trusted closed source under them much more because of the claim not to abuse their customers was was hedged by the reputation the company, now that this trust is lost I can't trust Microsoft and that's Satya's legacy.

>At Microsoft, those resources are so disconnected from engineering that they seem to rely on whitepapers and customers to learn about their own products.

This is so true. My company was being courted by Azure folks so we got some premium access and it was always laughable and frustrating how much more I knew about their cloud architecture than they did. I remember finally being able to talk to the head of network engineering, who was able to talk me through the finer points of how their load balancers worked (we were bumping up against some limitations). That 5 minute conversation was worth more than all their white papers (which were incorrect and contradictory at times) combined. I think I asked her why they didn't publish this information. She didn't say anything.

We had an escalation to "the expert" on an Azure product one time and the guy's response to one of my questions was literally "I don't know, that isn't in the PowerPoint I brought."

Azure is the worst. I think their strategy is to throw money at addon providers (and other customers) until something sticks. The issue is that their API is so horrible that unless you use .NET and use their official client libraries it's way too much work. I remember one time we published our addon on production and it had a different behavior than staging...

This isn't all true, is it?

I replied to one of those "Welcome to Azure" emails and mentioned I had some questions about integrating the Key Vault with a bunch of their other offerings. Someone from MS reached out to me and setup a meeting with a developer from one of the (many) Azure team. And this guy knew his shite, and was very helpful (still have notes from that meeting on my desk, many months later).

I was a solo developer, with a startup idea, no revenue, no company. And I got help ASAP. I thought it was awesome.

I'm sure my experience doesn't reflect the whole picture, but i think that's true all around.

I'm sure that for basic functionality it's true, but we were stretching their load balancers so I needed some deets on what was going on.

I've always said sales (and marketing) was Microsoft's biggest problem. The are finally starting to be cool again as the engineers take over.

The silo between Windows and development (Azure, .net etc) needs to come down fully to fix Sinofsky's mess too.

We're still left with a desktop OS UI with huge animated icons designed for a phone even though they've now given up on the phone market anyway. They gave up too easily just as Windows phone was starting to overcome that screw up and become popular with some non techy users as it really is the most user friendly.

Very well said on the Windows phone.I have used three windows phones before switching to Android and I think the UI for simpler things like dialer ,messages or emails was better on windows phone.Especially email was so good ,it used to work a charm even on 2G.I have used built in clients and other options on Android and nothing beats the basic email client on windows phone.May be it was not feature rich for gmail but usability was better .Many of my colleagues is of the same opinion who switched from windows phone to Android.All Microsoft had to do was fix the developer ecosystem but looks like the platform is abandoned. An alternative other than Android or iOS would have been better

But those are just apps, not the OS and there are any number of replacement dialler, messaging and email apps for Android - are you suggesting that NONE of them are as good as the Windows Phone default apps?

I have tried at least 3 most popular dialer in play store and none of that was as good or simple as windows phone's.I did find T9 search good but searching through the recent call list or finding a linked contact was felt better on windows phone.My biggest gripe is about the email clients.I am still looking for one which is very simple to use and has a simple UI.I find even Microsoft outlook offering is bloated or not simple as windows phone's.

WP does integration rather nicely, especially of multiple email and social media accounts. People prefer WP because they aren't interchangeable parts but a coherent whole.

And you don't have to spend ages trying apps and giving random developers access to your phone in order to achieve this. And app-less WP is much nicer to use than an stock Android, which in turn is much nicer than all the vendor or carrier mutilated Androids.

>replacement dialler, messaging and email apps for Android

It's a smartphone; communication is its entire raison d'être. Those things ought to be awesome right out of the box and, on Android, they're definitely not.

Here's another user who considered some MS phone at least the two last times I switched but ended up on Xperia and later S7 because water resistance. (This felt important because of field work and kids at home.)

I got a Lumia to get into the whole WinRT model when it got introduced and also because C++ is a first class language on WP.

The whole WinRT/.NET model of WP, and the respective tooling is miles ahead of what Google has managed to pull out of Android.

Even the upcoming Android N with Android Studio takes lots of more resources than VS, doesn't provide a proper experience for NDK users and there isn't a Support Library release that isn't followed up by a quick fix release.

I really don't understand where the skilled developers that master the Google interview process end up working, surely not on Android.

However the WP in small form factors is dead, with the latest promise drop of the 512 MB WP 8.1 devices not getting the WP 10 upgrade they lost the last faithful ones that still believed.

Where it might thrive is as tablet OS, but lets see.

All they (the sales & marketing again) had to do was give devs time before opening their mouths and giving the impression that they are no longer pushing it, just as Sinofsky did with .Net and WPF.

Windows phone apps were the most profitable to write unless you had a blockbuster as your app was actually likely to be found in the app store but why bother when they kill it with what can only be called anti-marketing

> The are finally starting to be cool again as the engineers take over.

That doesn't necessarily lead to a successful company.

As a proud engineer myself, I'm not arrogant enough to believe that my kind are the most important in any company. Google has terrible product direction, customer support, and communication, for example.

I'm not saying it's necessarily cause and effect but when the people developing the products are enthusiastic and proud of the product it certainly helps.

Sure it helps, but it's certainly not necessary or even sufficient. The industrial landscape is littered with great products poorly marketed that failed, and poor products greatly marketed that succeeded.

We used Windows phones at my last place. I would say that the biggest problem for corporate users is the confusion between Azure AD accounts and Microsoft accounts (we didn't manage the phones in any way). It was really hard to explain to users why they had to register a new account at Microsoft when they already logged in to Office 365 daily.

I have at least three different Microsoft accounts, between individual, MSDN, and Office365 variants. All of them use the same email address. I never know which account I'm going to get logged into, and I've seen some really fun OAuth redirect loops when the cookies get scrambled.

Supposedly, it's possible to link accounts, to resolve some of this clusterage, but it doesn't seem to work, or I haven't sprinkled enough chicken blood about or performed the process in the hour of the wolf under during a blue moon...

Try this: Google "Office 365"

The first result just says "Email". The second result says "Office 365 login"

I'm not an internet dunce, but this is just bad user-experience. Why not have a modern landing page that tells me a bit about the product, it's price and what I can expect from it?

Why is the first result a login page?

I've been using Google Docs almost exclusively for work now. I've ditched Word completely. I was willing to give Office 365 a shot, but the signup process is so infuriatingly out of date that I don't feel like bothering.

Because Microsoft is Microsoft and everybody knows everything about Microsofts products. There is no need to explain anything, right?

How many people don't know what office is at this point?

The standalone Office suite and Office 365 are two entirely different beasts I would say.

The products are pretty much the same. The difference is just the way you pay for it and number of licenses you get.

Oh, you'd like it to be that simple wouldn't you?

Office is both a standalone product and an optional subset of Office 365.

Oh and if your Office 365 license is just standard but you have an individual license for Visio or Publisher then you can have Office installed locally with Office 365 integrate except for those individual licenses that you have install separately and aren't integrated.

And then there's client versioning because licenses could be perpetual, instance, instance or prior.

I could keep going....

All that being said, Microsoft has made efforts with 365 to fix these issues and the abolishing of the Sales Silo can only help matters.

I know Office. I have no idea what Office 365 is, how it looks and how it works.

MS hasn't made it easy for me to understand it either

One of the problems Microsoft has that others don't is brand confusion. They like to ride on their own coat tails so distinct and unique products that are completely unrelated are often called the same thing.

What do you call Microsoft's personal email client? Outlook.

What do you call Microsoft's web based personal email service? Outlook.

What do you call Microsoft's enterprise email client? Outlook.

What do you call Microsoft's web based enterprise email client? Outlook.

Google doesn't have this problem because Gmail is Gmail.

Good lord, the brand confusion.

I work with Microsoft's enterprise instant messaging/unified communications platform. It used to be called Lync, which, whatever, meh, it's a name. When Microsoft acquired Skype, they decided to rename the next iteration of Lync, Skype for Business. Skype and Skype for Business are two completely different products, running on top of different protocols that just barely inter-operate. It's absurd how much confusion this rebranding has caused.

Have you used One Drive yet? There's 2. :)

And there's Office Communicator - was that another name for Lync?

Well, technically speaking the web based ones are called Outlook Web Access. And I don't feel there is confusion. How is it different with Microsoft that Outlook is Outlook, from how with Google Apps Gmail is Gmail? Just like with Outlook there are enterprise versions of Gmail too. Is it feature parity?

If Outlook Web Access worked or even looked at all like Outlook, it would be less confusing. Features and UI are completely different, and switching between the two if needed is a huge pain.

Nope! And thanks because I forgot about OWA! OWA is the self hosted web client for Exchange. That's another completely distinct product unrelated to Outlook 365 or Outlook.com.

Things get confusing when you deal with Skype for Business, too...

Have you used One Drive? What about One Drive for Business? The should bring back A Drive and B Drive.

Is this what's happening with Skype and the upcoming Redstone 2 builds for windows? If i remember right, mobile to pc messaging was pulled from Redstone 1 and will be included in Skype later on.

In our office, one of the best decisions we made is to move to google docs. I had to push it through because most employees were used to working with MS office and emailing docs and excel files to keep everyone in the loop. I know One Drive is a thing and you can do the same thing with MS Office product as you can with google docs. But it wasn't always the case and Google Docs had better usability and easier to understand in our team.

Use my bookmarklet to hide that horrible image of Balmer sticking his tongue out

javascript:(function (){var x = document.getElementsByTagName("img");for (i = 0; i < x.length; i++){x[i].setAttribute("src","");}}());

Seriously, this should almost have a NSFW warning for that image alone. Brrr.

Oh my, that is some Jabba the Hutt + Baron Harkonnen + Aeon Flux level of excrescence. I feel violated just by having seen it.

Hilarious and excellent references. I couldn't agree more. I kind of read it with the left eye shut.

I thought it was interesting to try and diagnose his imbalances via the ancient indian/chinese medical systems: http://healthy-ojas.com/assets/system/ayurveda-tongue-diagno...

Here's one you can use to delete arbitrary elements from a page by clicking on them. It's handy in this age of unfortunate design decisions.

    javascript:for(var%20i=0;%20i<(document.getElementsByTagName('a')).length;%20i++)%20{(document.getElementsByTagName('a')[i]).style.pointerEvents%20=%20'none';}function%20handler(e)%20{e%20=%20e%20||%20window.event;var%20target%20=%20e.target%20||%20e.srcElement;target.style.display%20=%20'none';document.removeEventListener('click',%20handler,%20false);cursor('default');for(var%20i=0;%20i<(document.getElementsByTagName('a')).length;%20i++)%20{(document.getElementsByTagName('a')[i]).style.pointerEvents%20=%20'initial';}}document.addEventListener('click',%20handler,%20false);cursor('crosshair');function%20cursor(cur)%20{%20document.body.style.cursor%20=%20cur;%20}

Or in Firefox, select "Inspect Element" from the right click menu then press delete.

There is one damn thing I would love from Microsoft. And that's to get rid of adverts from their software.

I use Windows 7 and Windows 10 Enterprise. We paid for those licenses. It boggles my mind that anyone at MS would think sticking ads in the Windows Weather App or Skype would be a good idea for paid for software.

This is my least favorite thing. I realize that often when you pay for software you don't truly own it in the legal sense, but I still want to feel like it's mine and ads don't let me do that. For this reason, even though I think it's an interesting idea, I am deeply repulsed by Amazon's discounted "with special offers" Kindles. Somehow, just the fact that those exist erodes my sense of ownership of my "without special offers" Kindle.

I was a Windows user for a long time.

5 years ago I switched to OS X, because I think it's closer to the deployment environment I use as a dev.

However what OS X did ( when they killed the old one - MacOS 9 and rewrote the whole thing on UNIX based kernel ) was the single greatest move, which I think pays off even these days.

This is what I hope should happen with Windows. They should decide on POSIX kernel and completely rewrite most of it. This will put Windows as an option for me.

Suggesting a rewrite of something as important as the NT kernel is ignorant at best.

I think Bash on Windows is a great compromise.

Why is the NT kernel so important? It hasn't touched my life much in about eight years, private or professional. Nokia thought Symbian was very important too.

Why switch from a tested kernel that is technically very nice? Nothing about the kernel prevents proper support of POSIX and it has a lot more drivers and hardware support than any existing kernel.

Your exposure to the kernel in the last 8 years is not representative of 90+% of computer users.

The kernel isn't that import but all the software that depends on it and the win32 libs is. There is lots of software that is w32 only, more then enough to keep windows around for years.

Unless you're OK with breaking compatibility with all existing Windows apps - most of which you have no control over - rewriting the kernel as a POSIX thing is going to look a lot like 'bash on windows' in reverse. You'd have to have some kind of shim layer to translate all the old system calls, so most everyone's existing software is going to be slower and there will be bugs, etc. Including your own, since Windows is a kernel, a ton of drivers, a userland (including basic runtimes), a windowing system, a basic set of productivity tools and games, etc.

I think this would be a total disaster that killed Windows, personally.

> 'bash on windows' in reverse

That would be "wine", which has worked surprisingly well several years.

Wine is fine for getting around an expected limitation, but would you run your workloads on wine in a production datacenter? It would be a disaster.

I'd run my entire development stack on Bash on Windows though. That's what it's there for. It's glorious!

Similarly, my laptop probably wouldn't be able to handle a production workload for any length of time...but it doesn't have to either.

I wonder what companies really have designed new backends for windows for years anymore? Technically you could run many generic things there (databases or JVM), but what would you actually gain? Likely if you have to use windows, you're left in some legacy niche, looking backwards and not into the future.

That's the thing. There are many things that are really important that don't actually touch every single person on the planet.

One of the most widely used OS's ever is called Tron. Does that effect me? Not really. Is it important? I think so. I thought so at least enough to do some reading on the subject. Was it important from a CoSci standpoint? Maybe. NT is important from multiple angles, as well. Also, it's importance doesn't take away importance from the things that may actually touch your life. Such is the nature of things.

There are thousands, probably millions of small business critical pieces of code running on systems all over the world running more than just .NET code. You'll have to emulate or recreate nearly the entire operating system, at which point... what did you accomplish? Businesses are going to compare the cost/benefits of upgrading their OS vs upgrading some old code, and decide it's not worth it.

Perhaps you've been lucky enough to move to more modern systems, but you're in the tech circle. For everyone else, it's not an easy option. Have you ever worked for a fortune 500 company? There are systems that are nearly 20 years old with billions of dollars running through them. Moving that is not a light decision.

I think software is going to the direction of emulation anyway.

At this point you have platforms like Electron, which run in a browser environment. Java software which runs inside JVM. Now there's even linux sub-system inside windows, etc.

I think there is a way to do it the other way around. MS put effort in creating something similar to WINE and make a special "Windows POSIX", which let's say for the next decade is released along with the classic Windows ( Same as NT before ). Where they try to emulate / rewrite the software piece by piece until the stability is reached to switch.

I don't see this as an impossible idea to me. Actually if they did something like this I will be so happy to switch back.

I don't think your kernel of choice is of direct interest here; I'm fairly certain what you're interested in is access to your familiar tools, which the "Bash on Ubuntu on Windows" system would potentially provide.

As for a POSIX sub-system on Windows, well there once existed such a system that was near-compliant, but MS stopped supporting it a few years back. As for Wine, I think cygwin fulfills a similar role.

Anyway, you want your tools. You might even want your familiar filesystem and its hierarchy. I think the primary reason Microsoft deemed it worth it to implement Bash on Ubuntu on Windows was to provide webdevs access to the same tools they had on osx/linux.

All in all, I think a bit of reading on these subjects would help, because I think you're confusing the kernel with the userland.

Note: I'm faily young and inexperienced, and when I heard the "Bash on Ubuntu on Windows" announcement, I didn't really know what the meant. But learning about these bits on wikipedia/various blogs was certainly interesting.

More significantly, the underlying technology beneath Linux on Windows, especially if it can be made a generally available, documented target for development, is a great thing. Not even a compromise, I think it's potentially better than making Windows into yet-another-POSIX kernel.

There's nothing about the NT kernel that needs to be rewritten to implement a POSIX or SUS compliant user-mode subsystem. They once had a Windows Services for UNIX (SFU) subsystem that was POSIX compliant. The new "Bash on Windows", officially called "Windows Subsystem for Linux", appears to be targeting the Linux Standard Base (LSB) and not striving for POSIX or SUS compliance.

LSB is mostly a superset of POSIX. POSIX is a subset of SUS. OSX is SUS compliant, though not POSIX certified. Windows is POSIX certified though not SUS compliant. And no one is LSB certified except a few Linux Distros.

This leaves me wondering exactly what target Microsoft should be aiming for since everyone seems to be playing by their own rules. It's like playing Monopoly with your friend's family who has their own house rules that aren't really like your family's house rules both of which are incompatible with the official rules.

You mention a target as compliance or certification, but I don't think this is a direct concern for the WSL. They want to support specific use-cases, at least at first.

---

"Moving forward we will be investigating new areas of interest while continuing to support the following scenarios:

+ GNU command line tools such as grep, sed, and awk

+ File system and symlink support within the WSL environment

+ Ability to run apt / apt-get for installs, updates, and package testing

+ Basic functionality for languages such as NodeJS/npm, Python, Perl

+ Command line tools such as Vim, Emacs, Git, and SSH"

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/wsl/2016/07/08/bash-on-ubun...

I don't think it's a direct concern either. Though if I had to guess they'd target LSB over any of the others.

I think it's telling that they called it the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" where are their prior Subsystems (SUA/SFU) were for "Unix".

> This is what I hope should happen with Windows. They should decide on POSIX kernel and completely rewrite most of it.

They simply can't afford it, not because they lack the resources but from a strategic point of view. See the other comments talking about compatibility. Windows works for many, many, many people and businesses. It would be a suicide move. People, and even more importantly businesses, don't jump on any hot new thing just because it's available, because change has huge costs in an enterprise context. If Microsoft ever tried to pull the rug from under them, you can be pretty sure that would be the end for them.

> If Microsoft ever tried to pull the rug from under them, you can be pretty sure that would be the end for them.

It is necessary though. Microsoft seems to be preparing for a post-Windows eventuality as well. Doesn't mean they have to write their own operating system.

Edit: it is mostly for azure anyway... I think Microsoft might as well ride Windows as long as it can and give it up.

I agree that they're not likely to do a full abandonment of the Windows stack, it still makes money for them so why mess with a good thing? I think more likely is that as Azure expands they'll try to make more money off of that platform and use Windows (desktop/server) as their supplementary income which in itself is a big gamble IMO.

Azure runs on Windows.

This one's pretty obvious if you've ever written a malloc. Compare VirtualAlloc² with the mess of mmap/madvise/mprotect. I'm not even sure you can get the nice explicit reserve/commit of Windows with pure POSIX APIs.

Then, can you explain why the C library provided by Microsoft in their compilers has such slow 'realloc()' implementation? (e.g. expanding a 10MB allocation to 20MB using realloc())

Microsoft killed the old one and replaced it with new stuff -- Windows New Technology -- long before Apple did. In fact, when Apple was shopping around for a new OS base, Windows NT was one of the options that Apple considered. (Didn't consider it very seriously, Hancock told me, but still, she did consider it.)

Don't forget that Windows is also used as servers, compared to MacOS used primary on desktops.

Other than the tools available (which will become irrelevant since Windows 10 will support the Unix command line in the next big update), why do you think Windows should adopt a POSIX kernel? What difference would it make to the end user?

Long ago Bill Gates always pushed for backwards compatibility. That carries on today. So until Microsoft is completely gone, Windows will always carry with it the cruft of generations past.

Its changing. Win phones, surface, WinRT did a lot of restructuring.

There are lots of flaws with the POSIX models. NT's creater (cutler) fixed a lot of them. Your dismive attitude is probably due to ignorance instead deep knowledge of what the NT kernel is capable of.

Just a few days ago there was post about how NT's IO by default is more performant.

Cutler is a nerd-hero of mine.

Yeah, the NT kernel design is pretty frickin awesome. There is a great book about the run up to NT's release. He took on the job because he thought that writing operating systems would happen fewer and fewer times in the future. I think he actually said that he thought this might be one of the last times a commercial OS would be written from scratch.

The thing about operating systems is that everyone thinks they know everything there is to know, but wow are they off the mark.

Awesome! Glad someone is actually talking sense here :)

The idea that windows=bad across the board is terrible.

Most don't even know what VMS is/was.

Microsoft already had that moment, 20 years ago - moving from the DOS-based 95/98/ME variants to the NT-based 2000/XP branch.

> "They should decide on POSIX kernel and completely rewrite most of it."

What features do you want from POSIX that Windows doesn't already provide?

The point of POSIX is conformity, not extra features. Though I don't see how that fixes Windows either. It can already do many things more than POSIX. In fact most OSs support POSIX for application capture, but certainly don't depend upon it entirely.

So in other words the main benefit of POSIX conformity (with regards to Windows) is application portability, right?

Is the Linux subsystem in Windows 10 not good enough to handle this? What *nix applications do people want to be able to run in Windows that they can't already?

I believe what you're asking for is called the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" that they launched earlier this year.

The NT Kernel originally was POSIX compliant and there was a UNIX user-mode subsystem available called "Windows Services for UNIX". Unfortunately over the years the distinction between the NT Kernel and the Win32 subsystem eroded and Microsoft eventually dropped the Windows Services for UNIX subsystem around 2008.

With Vista however, the MinWin initiative took off to extricate the Win32 Subsystem from the NT Kernel. This was carried forward with 7 and completed for 8. It's because of this separation that they were able to share the same Kernel in Phone, RT, Desktop and Server OSes. It's also how WinRT and UWP apps can run on Phone, RT, Desktop and Server because they do not rely on the Win32 subsystem to operate.

The Windows Subsystem for Linux is Microsoft's new Linux (not UNIX) user-mode subsystem.

But that was an easy call for Mac since no one really cared about OS9, windows on the other hand still cares about supporting old tech since the people who give them a bunch of money a year are still running it.

Yikes! NT kernel is far far far better designed than any * nix¹. POSIX is an API (and not a very good one), not a kernel type anyway. Windows has had a POSIX layer for a while. The NT kernel actually has its own API that both the Win32 and POSIX APIs are implemented on top of.

Why is NT better than * nix (particularly Linux)? Two areas mainly:

- Virtual memory

Linux in particular used to have a very questionable virtual memory implementation³, but I suspect it's been much improved.

NT can demand-page kernel memory; Linux kills processes if the kernel needs memory.

- Async I/O

Here's how platforms do async I/O:

POSIX: You don't.⁴

Linux: Sleep. Wait for the kernel to wake you up when something happens so you can yell “IS ANYONE READY YET? HOW ABOUT NOW?!” at your file descriptors.

FreeBSD: Like Linux, but the API is less stupid.

Windows: Tell the kernel to run a callback when an I/O operation completes.

Personally I'm really excited for ReactOS. Linux is a 1970s kernel design.

---

¹ Well, Solaris and DragonFlyBSD have a lot of good ideas and good implementation.

² https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...

³ https://lwn.net/1999/0121/a/vmreview.html

⁴ Okay okay, you have select(2) and poll(2), but then you're using select and poll.

> Linux in particular used to have a very questionable virtual memory implementation³, but I suspect it's been much improved.

The document you're referencing is written in 1999. I suspect a lot has changed since then.

Also, nobody is using select and poll in Linux these days, epoll is the way to go.

> Linux: Sleep. Wait for the kernel to wake you up when something happens so you can yell “IS ANYONE READY YET? HOW ABOUT NOW?!” at your file descriptors.

> FreeBSD: Like Linux, but the API is less stupid.

Yeah, I covered epoll (and kqueue, which also applies to Solaris and OS X).

They considered that option in late 80s while working on NT kernel and decided not to do that. Instead POSIX services became a standalone subsystem running in user mode.

Writing software(GNU) != Selling software(Microsoft/Oracle) != Selling support(RedHat) != Selling solutions(IBM) != Selling gadgets(Apple) != Selling advertisements(Google/Facebook/Twitter) != Selling consulting(Accenture) != Body shopping(TCS/Infosys/Wipro/HCL/Cognizant)

> He drove smart acquisitions ...

And the author has "LinkedIn" listed?!?!?!?!

Does anyone - aside from some MS staff and the article author - think LinkedIn was a smart buy for MS?

Everyone I know is welcoming the likely fade out of LinkedIn in not-many-years.

Not to mention, the acquisition was announced a month ago. It's not even close to being approved yet by LNKD shareholders or closing. No case could be made that it was smart, since...it hasn't happened yet.

I'm reading this from my linux laptop running firefox. my colleagues use macs. I don't think microsoft is gaining anything. nothing against the guy but perhaps its too little too late.

Microsoft has shifted focus from the laptop to the cloud. And they are most definitely gaining there. You're just measuring the wrong thing.

Microsoft has no product for private cloud. You're sure about the measure?

Microsoft have tons of tools for private cloud? Including the upcoming ability deploy the azure platform to your own machines.

Tons of tools? Dare to mention any? Upcoming ability - any official announcements?

Hyper-V + System Center + Azure Pack? Already available.

Azure Stack? This is coming up. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/overview/azure-stack/

Azure's focus is hybrid.

These tons of tools yet to be released in September 2016 :)

One major one is not yet available. There's still Hyper-V+ System Center, + Azure Pack which makes running your own private cloud relatively easy.

I exclusively run Linux on my laptops and Microsoft is part of my work flow. Their web versions of Word, Excel, and OneDrive are 'good enough' and convenient to have. I never have to worry about working with a customer's Excel spreadsheets as a data source, etc.

Microsoft's cash cow is the Enterprise. They need to focus on Azure/cloud computing if they want to stay relevant.

I recently got a Surface Book. It's the best laptop I've ever seen, by a long way.

Maybe, but I'm worried they've given up on consumer devices, and decided to stick to the enterprise cash cow, in the Oracle-lesser-evil model.

Entirely egotistical of me, I came from an iPhone to a Lumia and I'm not too enthusiastic about going back (although I also use iPads, and like them). I find Android a bit of a swamp, and having only iOS as an alternative is sad.

They're still doing Windows 10 for smartphones and there are other hardware suppliers besides Microsoft. The OS is free, after all.

Whether the Surface phone will make any difference is open to doubt, but it might ;-)

As an Android user, I'd be prepared to have a serious look at one.

Surface Pro and Surface Book are definitely consumer devices. As are Band, and Xbox.

Interesting article, IBM seems the same, Sales and everything else.

Maybe this is a relic of old apex predators that are past their age.

You can throw Cisco, Oracle, HP, and just about any other enterprise company on that list.

So by "becoming Sales and everyone else", they actually got bad at sales. Ironic.

Microsoft caters more to business and OEMs than to anythybody else. Consumer market is largely irrelevant to them.

Why you sell your stuff this way, you need a good salesman.

Yes, Microsoft is "uncool", but it doesn't matter to them

Bashing on NT kernel without knowing what VMS is, and what improvements were made that we all can learn from is terribly ignorant at best.

Sure, Microsoft has had terrible problems, but the true innovations and improvement on kernel design and implementation are truly amazing.

Kernel programmers are underappreciated.

If 'Engineering and everyone else' beats 'Sales and everyone else' (Google vs MS) How about Twitter ? it's of the former type. As an engineer, engineering first company is more appealing. However, we'd end up again with a different silo.

> Microsoft’s Outlook iOS app is probably the best mail client on iOS

I used it about a year ago and it was horrible, many broken features and fairly slow and unresponsive, and also exceptionally poor UX (like office for web).

It also stores your email on their servers to get push messages, which no UI can fix.

Worse than that, it stores your email credentials on their servers, so it can retrieve email on your behalf. Terrible, terrible security. I wouldn't be surprised if the passwords are stored in cleartext in the database.

If you're talking about Gmail accounts for example only the oauth tokens are stored (which you can revoke from your google account config panel). If you're talking about an IMAP account of yours, how are they supposed to log into it without storing your password in clear text?

They're definitely sending more marketing people to post on reddit and Hackernews.

Click bait title?

We'll see what happens when profitability takes a dive.

Clickbait title

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