Satya has done a tremendous job turning around Microsoft. It was headed in the direction of becoming a slowly sinking behemoth under Ballmer, but he's turned it around.
Sundar, on the other hand, is just content collecting $$ and showing more ads.
Sundar, on the other hand, is just content collecting $$ and showing more ads.
Not everything is golden at MS now either. I am working on creating a platform for our medical software on Windows 10 and it really makes me want to switch to Linux or iOS. Windows is a big mess of old and new code and attempts of sandboxing like iOS but only half-hearted. Keeping up with the semi-annual channel is also insane. I would much prefer annual or biannual releases that are actually stable. It's a very developer unfriendly platform now.
But Microsoft's recent efforts on Linux & macOS, i.e. VSCode, has been surprisingly good. They do a lot of things, I think Typescript is run by MS as well.
So that's something that positively changed under Nadella.
In a relative way.
If you are going to talk about operating systems, iOS and Android/Linux blew by Windows on his watch despite Microsoft's big head start in the smartphone space. I think that's directly the result of Microsoft not being exciting.
If it weren't for Android, how many fewer people would be using Chrome as their daily mobile browser? How can we quantify the data slurped up and clicks generated on google.com by those added chrome instances? What about YouTube impressions? How many fewer people would be using Google maps daily? How much less location data would Google possess without living in people's pockets?
How did they measure the value of the Google play services ubiquity?
Have these things plus the app store really only generated 21 billion?
Considering why the number was revealed, Google had every incentive in the world to understate as much as they could get away with. Plus, how is $21 billion profit not a great thing for them? The revenue number was north of $30 billion.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-generate...
If it weren't for Android, how many fewer people would be using Chrome as their daily mobile browser?
Chrome doesn’t make them any money besides Google.com being the default search engine. Pre-Chrome, Google already had an overwhelming share of the search engine market.
What about YouTube impressions?
The same with YouTube. My old Blackberry phone came with a YouTube app as did the iPhone before there was even an App Store. Would Apple have been so fast to not bundle Youtube or Google Maps if it weren’t for Android?
Have these things plus the app store really only generated 21 billion?
I would hope that Oracle’s high priced lawyers would have taken all that into account.
Ballmer brewed the culture to be like that.
It's not like that at MSFT anymore.
Still better than trying to keep up to date on the NodeJS or frontend development world though :-P
Office 365 was a classic Microsoft bundled cost play -- you have this big investment in your EA around the Microsoft ecosystem and you basically pay to put email in the cloud, and get Sharepoint and Skype for free. They then made deals on EA renewal to convert "on-prem" Office licenses to subscriptions to lock you in.
In subsequent renewals, Microsoft uses Azure gift cards like a "tax credit" to drive behavior without a competitive process. They're essentially applying the Office 365 playbook to Windows Server/Active Directory/SQL Server and eventually Windows Client. Example: You pay for Azure AD by getting ATP for "free".
It's not taking away from Satya, his genius is dressing up the classic Microsoft hard-nosed deal playbook and making it friendlier in key ways, and cutting the cord on legacy. (Which is a risk, as it's an opportunity for AWS, Google, Oracle, etc to sell) But ultimately, the strategy existed and was executed before with Ballmer, but with less charisma and humanity.
Sure, Ballmer had failures too - Windows Phone and Zune didn't take off. But you can't win every time.
EDIT: Sorry, was lazy and abbreviated Windows Phone to WP.
I disagree with this too. I've been looking into .NET Core since it's been open sourced. And I'd consider Azure. But I certainly won't be using windows (for server stuff) unless I'm forced to.