Either that or bringing Steve Jobs back to Apple via NeXT.
I haven't been following MSFT closely for a while. What are some of the major decisions that Nadella has made to help create this great success over the past 6-7 years?
I haven't been following MSFT closely for a while. What are some of the major decisions that Nadella has made to help create this great success over the past 6-7 years?
Some examples:
He ditched Windows Phone in favor of Android.
Microsoft had built amazing Office apps for iOS but Ballmer refused to allow their release. Nadella green lit them immediately.
He deemphasized Windows releases. Windows 10 was supposed to be the "last" version (no idea what happened after that tbh).
Everything Microsoft has released in the last few years has been cross-platform and cross-browser. This seems obvious now but would have been unthinkable a decade ago.
He doubled/tripled down on Azure.
Internally, he ended inter-division silos and forced teams to cooperate. Lots of old school execs were booted because they refused to give up control of their "kingdom". Engineering teams were also encouraged to use Linux and other non-MSFT tools and to open source their products. Culturally it was big to have an engineer at the helm again rather than a pure business type.
1. Github acquisition: With already dev-tooling play they have, there is a clear strategy here. I think this will serve them well.
2. LinkedIn acquisition: Not sure how it is faring.
3. Friendly relations with open source projects: It improved developer mindshare
- VS Code as gateway drug
- Linux as first class integration
--
I would like to see
- Office on Ubuntu
- Open version of Active Directory
office 365 for large complex excel sheets with bloomberg terminal plugin - nope
MS just tries to embrace, extend and extinguish ubuntu(linux)
They are basically IBM in the 1970s/80s. I give them 20-30 more years and they will become irrelevant.
Linux doesn't need Microsoft help to be extinguished, the GPL haters will take care of that.
I don't see how this was a success. They stopped spending money on creating a new platform, but that's it.
Now the same friends admit that there is a lot improvement in this regard since Satya came on-board.
[1] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/500e2d14e4b042...
I think it's not so much major decisions that Nadella did right (although he did, with cloud, open source etc.), but small decisions, day in day out for years, to transform the absolute behemoth that Microsoft was into what it is today. Both technologically and culturally. Very few companies of that size have been able to successfully steer their ship in a new direction while not suffering immensly in the process.
Still, Balmer was driving the company off a cliff with his brutish orthodoxy. Nadella transformed the company based on new assumptions about positioning in the modern digital economy, not the desktop days.
It's honestly that simple.
The thing I probably find most impressive is that they have been able to do so well as a business while basically losing mobile--which I'm not sure I would have thought was possible.
That one move by a board directly caused the biggest positive shift in a corporation's fortunes I can think of.