Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

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He moved the company away from a Windows-centric strategy to focus on platform-agnostic cloud and subscriptions.

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.

To add:

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

Yup. You can compare them with Ballmer's big acquisitions – Nokia, Yammer, Skype, aQuantive. Almost all of them were completely written off.

- Using MS office pricing to push corporate to MS Cloud.

- VS Code as gateway drug

- Linux as first class integration

--

I would like to see

- Office on Ubuntu

- Open version of Active Directory

You already have Office on Ubuntu via Office 365 and WSL.

visio? - nope

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.

The bank accounts of IBM and Microsoft show how irrelevant they are in 2021, maybe they should stop doing their irrelevant Linux kernel contributions.

Linux doesn't need Microsoft help to be extinguished, the GPL haters will take care of that.

> He ditched Windows Phone in favor of Android

I don't see how this was a success. They stopped spending money on creating a new platform, but that's it.

Still wondering the chance of an Open Source Windows Kernel. Similar to what Apple is doing with Darwin.

Darwin is useless, all the good stuff is on the upper layers.

Yes and I agree that is why I only mention kernel. I dont think MS or Apple will open source their most valuable layer. But I also think Open Source NT Kernel could be a little more useful.

Apparently the silos are back, given the whole .NET vs UWP/C++ politics.

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