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Bamafan

Long story, short:

1. Realize the world is moving beyond Windows

2. Cede mobile OS to Android/iOS, that battle is lost.

3. Realize, next great revenue stream is the Cloud (Azure).

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To me it was more interesting to get a glimpse of Satya Nadellas thought process:

> "as a CEO you need to create that continuous balance between the multiple constituents [that] is the real job"

and

> "Ultimately, if we don’t want to have a race to the bottom, we need to have some laws and regulations that govern how participants in the marketplace can make sure we don’t do things that have unintended consequences."

and more.

One might argue that thinking like this can be obtained in a two-day management course, or an afternoon with the corporate head of PR - still, many leaders don't even seem to understand the benefit of putting such into words, let alone use it as guiding principles.

>still, many leaders don't even seem to understand the benefit of putting such into words, let alone use it as guiding principles.

What you're looking at is a second-generation CEO. Nadellas was bred through the executive training program of an established organization, having received many two-day management courses, and he knows that an afternoon with the PR group is a good idea. This is in contrast to Gates and Balmer, which were first-generation "founder" CEOs.

The problem is they are no longer best-of-breed for any of their markets, except maybe Office.

Microsoft doesn't break out Azure revenue, but by all accounts it's quite small compared to AWS.

And Office is very much under threat. If you work with young people you'll notice they tend to prefer G Suite apps over Office - most likely because Google has done a great job getting their software into schools.

Did you know that most enterprises who had "tried" gSuite actually switched back to Office? Office is very much not under threat. By many estimates, Office revenue is over 20X that of gSuite and growing. I agree with you that a lot of young people grow up with gSuite because Google has done a fantastic job getting gSuite into schools and colleges. But when these young people go into corporate America (which is a lot bigger than just Silicon Valley), they quickly have reality handed to them, which is that most real work is done in Office.

https://www.cbronline.com/news/g-suite-vs-office-365 https://www.geekwire.com/2018/google-says-recording-1b-per-q...

Uh, Azure revenue, by many accounts, is greater than AWS:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/10/29/1-microsof...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/04/27/microsoft-...

And sorry, G Suite is a joke compared to desktop Office for serious work. It doesn't matter what the youngin's prefer, what matters is what gets (or facilitates getting) real work done in the enterprise, which generally revolves around Excel and PowerPoint in some fashion.

Microsoft includes a bunch of non-Azure products under their cloud revenue. And they do it to confuse people and falsely claim they're outpacing AWS, which as you just proved, works.

Why shouldn't Office365 be counted in cloud revenue? "Cloud Revenue" doesn't exclusive mean IaaS or PaaS.

Because SaaS isn't cloud computing. SaaS is essentially a fully available software application that you don't run on your own machines.

There's similarities, but key differences that you can easily look up to better understand. Hence part of why most aren't huge fans of including O365 to claim Azure's bigger than AWS.

If the claim is that Azure is generating more revenue than AWS, then yes I would say that is misleading.

If the claim is that Microsoft's cloud revenue is bigger than Amazon's, I would assume that includes Office365. Office365 isn't just Word and Excel on the desktop, it's Outlook, Dynamics CRM, Sharepoint, Teams, etc.

Do you think Amazon subtracts their own massive utilization of AWS out from their numbers? Not likely.

How is buying your own product GAAP? None of the cloud providers can claim their usage of their own products as revenue, it is a cost.

Do you think it’s a major fraction?

I doubt it, but that’s just speculation without anything to back it up.

So any concrete data would be interesting.

Because most of the revenue is from businesses buying it to install Office on their computers and not using any of the online services.

Whether or not a company is taking full advantage of Outlook, Flow, Sharepoint Online, etc doesn't really matter in terms of revenue. If a company is paying for cloud products, that counts towards Microsoft's cloud revenue.

Even if the bulk of the Office365 ecals they're selling are for the lowest tier offering that still includes Outlook and Onedrive which a lot of organizations use fairly heavily.

Exactly! Microsoft is exploiting the “cloud” buzzword when including Office 365. I’m sure old baby boomer investors/advisors/managers couldn’t tell the difference. They want to be in the “growing cloud space”. Office 365 is just a continuation of the monopoly Excel and Word have on the business software market

I agree with you but it makes sense to include Office 365. Amazon offers mail hosting and office software in AWS as well.

Edit: Okay they only offer document storage you still need to edit your documents with MS Office.

I'm pretty skeptical of your claim there. I'm happy to admit I'm wrong if that's truly the case, but let's see some reputable references that backs that up first. I haven't been able to find anything that substantiates that claim.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-is-adding-commercial...

> G Suite is a joke compared to desktop Office

If there is one area where I've been consistently wrong, it is betting on "powerful/serious tools" rather than simple, ubiquitous things that handle most of what people need. 'Simpler' tends to win vs 'better'.

Simply put, different markets. Students are now using Google Docs, and Sheets works well enough to plan out your holidays.

For someone that spits reports or jangle number all days, G-suite is a poorly thought-out joke.

A simple exemple: it's impossible to make custom styles in Docs. You can just redefine existing styles. And you can only apply one of these styles per paragraph (you can however, manually bold or change the font of some span within the paragraph... but not apply a premade style on a span of text smaller than a paragraph).

Even if the basic issues are fixed, Office is a powerhouse of features for power users, who'll keep paying good money for it, because it's well worth it.

Yes, so you make spreadsheets for the old gen and your boss and you use G-sheets among your peers.

Now if google provides a decent convert to excell converter- they win over time.

My only uses of G Suite are for tracking expenses and one page letters, stuff that even Lotus 123 and Word 2.0 would be too advanced, and I have used them when they were modern.

For anything more serious I drop down into Office.

Or, if corporations like Microsoft did before, bribe the govn't to enforce the use of their products in schools and gvon't institutions, like they did in the '90s and early '00s.

An example: https://www.zoliblog.com/2008/05/19/steve-ballmer-receives-t...

> A Hungarian Government bid, worth $25B Hungarian Forints, roughly $157M was allegedly skewed towards MS

I clearly remember in the late 90s, when all the computer literacy exams were phrased explicitly to use Exel, Word, Explorer. The official European computer competency test (ECDL) until 2013 was explicit about Microsoft products as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Computer_Driving_Lice...

It is hard to convince people like me, who grew up in such level of corruption, that the people who were working for Microsoft as a high-level executive that time, they are not relying on public money any more.

G Suite is all fine for internal communications, but grossly incompetent for making a presentation for anything where aesthetics is for concern. Same for text documents.

That seems more like an entrenched opinion that you've continually looked to reaffirm instead of opening your perspective.

First, serious work & powerpoint? Really? Yeah in an enterprise organization that's largely stuck doing what they've been doing because it's worked - sure, but that's not a technology issue, it's a culture issue.

For example, Google Sheets covers 80-90% of the use cases for Excel. But that's not what you should be comparing. A lot of what folks use spreadsheets for to do complicated calculations, have built lengthy, stitched together macros to automate processes, etc. would be much better in many cases to consider a completely alternate approach.

i.e a data warehouse, hey use a service like BigQuery that requires minimal adminstration and requires users to really only have SQL knowledge.

In order to effectively work across a large organization across different functions, product lines, etc., you have to remove every point of friction that prevents collaboration, etc. Desktop Office is great for individual work, but in today's dynamics, it really seems like you put a ceiling on productivity by sticking to it.

Business users are not going to learn SQL. They're not going to move all their data into the cloud, setup access, manage resources and spend money to run queries that take a few seconds on their laptop. They're not going to use 20 different services to break out scratch work, analysis, charting, and BI from what runs in a single portable file that they can manage and backup and extend in unlimited ways from meeting to meeting.

There are billion dollar businesses that run on Excel, and many workers in all kinds of industries live in it all day because nothing else comes close. Those macros and automations are what empower them to get things done and drive business forward instead of worrying about the "right way" to do something.

This perspective that they're all naive and should use better tools just fails to understand how people actually work, and explains why G-Suite as it is today will never beat Excel.

And Excel is getting cool big data features and Tableau like capabilities.

> continually looked to reaffirm

Huh? I don't recall continually posting about how G Suite sucks. Pretty sure this is the first time?

> Desktop Office is great for individual work, but in today's dynamics, it really seems like you put a ceiling on productivity by sticking to it.

Desktop Office is basically O365 today, and it's pretty much constant collaboration where I work. Not sure how that doesn't meet today's dynamics?

I used Excel for several years, mostly doing development work for financial services companies. I now work at a small/medium-size tech company that uses Google Sheets. Sheets is fine for most of the things we need to do, but our needs are modest. Sheets' overall functionality pales in comparison to Excel, and it often feels laggy even on a good network.

The finance companies I mention above also had data warehouses, but that's a completely different use case and not what Excel is used for. It would not work as a replacement even if everyone knew SQL.

An example would be a PowerPoint presentation showing a diagram linked to an Excel file using SQL Server as a datasource.

Dunno if something similar can't be done in Googles office suite as well though.

It can, google data studio more or less is this

I wouldn't call G Suite a "joke", but I have to second the sentiment. For example, Google Slide still doesn't let you adjust the size of the arrowhead of a connecting line: it's tied to the line width.

And this is one of countless random things I could do with PowerPoint 15 years ago, when I was drawing slides for a freaking CS conference.

You ever tried actually using Azure `services`? What a joke! On the surface they try to have feature parity with their AWS analogues, scratch the surface any that illusion quickly evaporates. Nowhere close. As for O365 - old mode, still nowhere close to GSuite for new ways of working.

Yes, they work perfectly fine, if not extremely well, for nearly all of the cloud work I've done, which has been extensive.

Azure Active Directory leaves a lot to be desired.

Seem like a phenomenal miscalculation to not have this built out as a cloud service already.

It would help keep more small companies in a Windows ecosystem and bring them into office 365.

The version they have today seems to offer 10% of the on premise solution.

What is this new ways of working? Corporate heavily uses Office across all industries.

"Cloud" revenue likely includes O365. (Sorry I couldn't find a source for it. But I have definitely read this.)

There is a gigantic market for basic office work that can be done in the Google apps, the Apple apps or the OpenOffice apps just as well as in Microsoft Office. Nobody cares if you think that isn’t ‘real’ work and if Microsoft thinks it's safe because they have the only product for ‘real work’ they are in for a rude awakening. They aren’t however, they have their own online suite that can’t do ‘real work’ either but works good enough for a lot of people.

How is G Suite a joke? It can definitely do some heavy lifting and a lot of enterprises are using it. Granted I've worked at a lot of places and most use office, but the ones that have used G Suite have way more collaboration. Its easier to share, collaborate, and not have files get lost in the shuffle. I much prefer it, plus I love using Sites vs Sharepoint.

PowerPoint for real work? Please.

I'll give you Excel.

Every slide deck ever that a director or VP has used to justify their budget for all that great Excel work. Every pitch deck to win a deal. Every teacher or professor that gives a presentation with PowerPoint. I hate endless slides, but fact is millions of people build and present them every day.

How exactly is all of that not real work?

Well point one I think it's a shit way to disseminate information. Point two and more seriously, the alternatives aren't much worse in PowerPoint's case.

I don't disagree with you at all. But that is real work that millions of people get paid to spend millions of man-hours on. Specifically with PowerPoint. That's all I'm saying.

The question is what counts as "real work". Certainly work done with Google's office suite counts as well, considering that Google and many other companies run their businesses using it.

Most alternatives are much better than PowerPoint. Which isn’t surprising because it’s hard to be worse than ‘20 bullets on a slide’ PowerPoint.

> The problem is they are no longer best-of-breed for any of their markets

Operating systems? I personally love Windows 10 (now its more mature), and Windows Server 2019 is embracing containers.

On cloud, AWS is very entrenched, but Microsoft can capture a lot of the enterprise market. I've worked extensively with Azure, and I think it's a fantastic product. TBH, I'm not sure there is a "best of breed" cloud provider - they each have their strengths and weaknesses, and there is plenty of room in the market for all the big players as well as smaller, specialised ones.

Are we talking about the same windows 10 that blows-up every November to add nonsuch features?

The same! Windows 10 seemed like it started out stable enough, but it’s been getting flakier by the year for me. I’m now keeping a log of things that go wrong with it, just for fun. Every once in a while I look at the list and ask myself, how on earth did they screw up start menu search?![0]

[0] https://m.windowscentral.com/how-fix-taskbar-search-not-work... Had to have a work PC reimaged to fix this. True story.

Enterprises that are on Win10 are likely to use LTSB anyway, rendering this moot.

There are ways for us "end-users" to get a hold of LTSC. First download the demo from microsoft then go to ebay to buy a key from some shady guy for 14$. Seems to work for me :P

Windows operating systems are just a gigantic bloated and underperforming mess.

Server 2019 is no exception.

At the company I work for IT ops deliver VMs as a service. The windows ones have huge disk footprint and take at least 3 times as long to deliver. Moreover dsc is not featureful enough compared with ansible. So it's also a pain to script/automate for. The failure rate is higher. And let's not forget the need to put antivirus on them.

Lots and lots of reasons to escape from that platform, I could go on for a while.

Unless you are deploying Solaris into production, how are those kernels handling asynchronous loads.

Still plain old select(), poll() and AIO?

Yes, and they are plenty fast. The API could be more elegant, but it works fine. Mysql for example uses io_submit. So do oracle, sybase. It's just a matter of developer comfort. They work around it for us. Deployment-wise, linux runs circles around windows.

Having worked in several Java/.NET shops not everyone on our IT would agree with that, specially how easy it is to manage cluster deployments with AD.

Office and windows go hand in hand though. Windows is a clear winner over ChromeOS. For comparing it to MacOS its debatable what is qualitatively better, both systems are full of tradeoffs.

Personally I lean towards MacOS because homebrew and terminal.app are pretty good. Updates are pretty unobtrusive and wifi is easy to manage. I'm not sure that these are hard hitting features for most users.

> Windows is a clear winner over ChromeOS

Could you expand on this statement?

ChromeOS is a North America market phenomenon, hardly used anywhere else.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...

Those are desktop numbers. Virtually all ChromeOS devices are laptops!

:) These days "desktop" = non-mobile = non-smartphone/non-tablet.

Laptops are desktops!

If you have better numbers for ChromeOS world domination, care to share them with us?

G Suite is very appealing over MS Office with the collaboration and version history features until you experience waiting MINUTES for spreadsheets to update. If Google moved some of the processing from the user's browser to their servers then, I believe, more people would make the switch.

Office on the web also has the same collaboration features now, and has had for years. Google's real time collaboration is slightly better, but I've worked in organizations that use Office and organizations that use Google. gSuite offline mode makes for many unproductive business flights (ie it simply does not work properly). Large spreadsheets choke up Sheets as you mention.

>And Office is very much under threat. If you work with young people you'll notice they tend to prefer G Suite apps over Office - most likely because Google has done a great job getting their software into schools.

It is not. Many are switching to Office 365, those who tried GSuite in Enterprise are moving back.

Young people may prefer GSuite, but then they learn the whole world is built on Excel. Eyes opening for every generation of people coming into work how multi billions dollar of revenue dependant on Excel and no one wants to touch it with a ten foot pole.

There were once kids were using Snapchat and said only old people use WhatsApp. I laughed and replied yeah you are right. Then they left their fantasy youth and join the real world, look at what they use for business? WhatsApp ( Or WeChat in China ).

Office is a huge market.

I live in India, and after years of 'ahem' using office, I started paying for their 4000 Rs (50 USD) per year subscription for 5 PCs, 3 or 5 Tablets/Mobiles pack.

It's awesome.

> except maybe Office.

Not really. But an awful lot of shops rely on their Excel macros. Changing the office suit would mean to re-develop a huge amount of infrastructure.

Regarding #1, eventually I expect Microsoft to release their own Linux distribution and keep Windows as a GUI.

I would not be surprised if their failed project Astoria was reused to run android apps on that.

Speaking as an OS engineer who's worked on both kernels a lot, Windows is way better under the hood for low-latency, responsive end user stuff than linux

Then again, WinMo 7 was way faster and more responsive than Android at the time, and look how that turned out..

The PREEMPT_RT patchset (sometimes confusingly referred to as RT-Linux) is slated to improve the kernel quite a bit wrt. "low-latency" and "responsive" workloads.

I'm not sure why this is such a problem in Linux, where latency is really not such a big problem in Darwin/MacOS/iOS.

Architected for throughput instead of latency.

> Speaking as an OS engineer who's worked on both kernels a lot, Windows is way better under the hood for low-latency, responsive end user stuff than linux

Still it's probably a lot cheaper to fix some latency issues on linux that to maintain your whole kernel. The main issue with linux is the GPL for drivers, a long with kernel API instability.

> The main issue with linux is the GPL for drivers

That's the main benefit with Linux. OEM drivers on MS Windows are a shit show, even on Windows 10.

I don't believe you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCHED_DEADLINE

One costs a lot to maintain, another doesn't.

Windows is a pretty good kernel, GNU/Windows (aka WSL) effectively feels like Linux, with some drawbacks mainly NTFS being very slow (which Microsoft are aware of and working on - see https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/873#issuecomment-425...).

Yeah I remember reading this particular comment when it was new.

It mostly feels like “ok guys this is the best we get out of this” to me though. If they do not go with a different approach, the filesystem will always be an issue with WSL.

I planned ditching my mac in favor of WSL. Due to MBP hardware issues and the fact that a git status would take 10x time drove me away.

I wish it was good enough though.

I keep a Debian VM around with Samba exporting my ~/src directory to the Windows host. That way it’s possible to avoid file system issues while still being able to use editors and other tools (Adobe CC apps in my case).

git status maybe 10x slower on WSL than native Linux - I wonder how much slower it is than macOS - in my brief use macOS filesystem never felt anywhere near Linux fast to me.

Never been bothered by it in practice but good question. The newish filesystem (apfs) feels faster in daily use so your experience might be outdated by now.

Anyone tried ext3 or 4 on Windows?

They already have their Linux distribution, it just doesn't run on the desktop.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/azure-sphere/

However on what concerns the desktop, I am betting more on GNU/Windows.

Why would it need to be Linux? I love linux, but mostly because it works well and is open source. I'd love for a big tech company to put their weight behind SEL4. That would go a long way for Microsoft: formally proven security, tiny footprint, good performance, etc. It's something that has massive potential for super computers all the way down to IOT. It just needs a proper ecosystem behind it.

Or maybe buy QNX off of Blackberry and make it open source again. That would also be nice.

I think as long as Microsoft holds onto Windows tightly the better bet in the future will always be a Linux or UNIX-like OS. Like many other things, the thing that works more like evolutionary systems tend to prevail. Linux might be the dominant race of the UNIX ancestry tree at the moment, but it may not retain that dominance and the thing that will overtake it will probably come from the same UNIX evolutionary roots, e.g. the BSD side where FreeBSD, Darwin, MacOS and iOS came from or the other Linux side branches like Android and Chrome, or somewhere less unexpected. The only way Windows tree OSes will prevail over this is if they allow more branches to evolve, even open source parts of it. User interfaces tend to do better if owned by an organisation with a concentrated purpose and commercial vision, but the stuff under the bonnet seems to do a lot better from being more open and evolutionary.

Looking at the embedded market OSes, everyone is pretty keen in moving away from Linux into RTOS, mbed, NuttX, Tizen IoT, RIOT, eventually Fuchsia, ....

Who knows which ones will survive, however they all have two things in common, they aren't GPL based and just enough POSIX to keep C and C++ happy. Additionally some of them do have stable ABI for drivers.

Linux's long term victory might be constrained to the server room, and even there it is debatable, given the increase in managed runtimes for micro-services, which could even be running bare metal for what I care.

Perhaps Google Fuchsia[0]?

I hope not.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia

Because of the market share and ecosystem.

As you said, it works well and it's open source. But that's not enough, as they could then chose BSD. But Linux is what's used by most, not BSD.

Given Microsoft new strategy to just adopt what everyone else is using, they will eventually use the Linux kernel.

Microsoft already has a lot invested in Linux support. They're not going to switch to something with a fraction of the community and ecosystem even if it has a lot of good qualities.

It would be make me so happy to see WINE supported as the first-class way of running Windows software.

I would fully expect them to buy Codeweavers should they do that.

Win32 binaries running on Wine is one of the best option for desktop software.

It's funny how it is like the polar opposite of UWP, but it just work and I guess that matters more than technical beauty.

I would be surprised if that was the approach Microsoft took, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a supported way of running Windows Apps emerge.

This could be used as a way to maintain backward compatibility in Windows as it evolves in the future.

Valve (Steam) are doing this.

At the rate things are going, may be Microsoft will even open up their Windows kernel, leaving many of the Windows user land and UI proprietary.

I just hope one day they add regular expressions to Excel.

WSL came out of Project Astoria.

Yeah, those help. But it was ultimately recognizing which pie was shrinking and which pie is growing - and is still growing.

MS is a software company. Now that they've remembered that, it's producing results.

Microsoft takes earnest shots at hardware, it might not always work out but I appreciate the effort.

Long live the Zune!

I love my microsoft natural ergonomic keyboard 4000

The Phone OS is still my favourite UI and was incredibly unique when first introduced. Live tiles in an era of pages of icons was way ahead of it's time. The phone hardware was/is great too; the lack of apps destroyed them though

My secondary phone is still a Lumia.

I like my Microsoft mice too.

I'm super loyal to the Microsoft Basic mouse. It lasts forever whereas all the Logitech M100's that I've purchased (and I've purchased a lot of them) don't last more than 6 months. Sad!

+1, had a Microsoft Mouse 5000 for the last ~5 years. Good for larger hands, love the smooth scrolling having got used to it. Needs the odd teardown to remove fluff from the optical wheel sensor, I can live with that fine :)

Surface book 2!

Yeah, those products don't pan out, but ya have to believe they're learning something of value in the process.

Actually, most of Microsoft is still a huge sales organization. Any technical role that is part of a subsidiary and isn’t in support is under sales, and they have been relentlessly driving Azure because that’s their top priority.

I'm not really seeing software, more services including Azure and online versions of apps and even Windows as a subscription. I'm sure there's lots of consulting in there too.

Microsoft doesn't do consulting but has an enormous partner ecosystem.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-CA/enterprise/services?activeta... we kinda do? Microsoft Consulting Services is directly from us, though the extensive partner ecosystem is also important for smaller customers.

Well, there is Microsoft Consulting Services, so it isn’t quite such a simple picture. But it is true that they haven’t gone down the IBM path.

It's a drop in the ocean though, I'm aware there's is a little of that but if you look at revenues you can say that without being too wrong. The in-house stuff is mostly a function designed to enable customers better more than a way to squeeze money out of it. It doesn't even crack the billion dollars (it's around 300M last time I checked).

But yeah, I should have known that given the crowd on hacker news I should have protected my statement from the "actually..." crowd.

They do. Usually to very large corporate customers.

Compare this to Steve Jobs second turn at Apple, in the same short format:

1. Realize Windows has won the PC war.

2. Improve the Mac by calling Next the Mac. Grow the Mac's market share year after year.

3. Concentrate on the next big thing. Ipod, Iphone, Ipad, etc

What does that give us? The question why Microsoft is unable to integrate their mobile OS strategically into their Cloud, in order to grow both.

(The Mac's growth is also due to iPod and the iOS devices.)

Mobile is driven by consumer sales, not OEM or corporate.

Like Blackberry used to be?

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