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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

During Ballmer's tenure, the Office division spent a lot of resources building apps for iOS. Ballmer saw a demo, realized that they were better than the Office apps available on Microsoft's own phones and tablets, and so blocked the release. The company sat on the apps for multiple years. When Nadella came on, one of his first decisions as CEO was to release them to the public.

This single incident perfectly demonstrates Ballmer's failures and Nadella's new vision. Had he remained at the helm Microsoft would have continued to stagnate and sink with the likes of IBM, Cisco and HP rather than stay on top of technological shifts and become the biggest company in the world.

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Meh, I don't see how Nadella's "vision" is praiseworthy either:

* their flagship OS is more and more a spyware platform

* Windows Server is pretty much a rarity these days outside of large corporate deployments. Anybody has seen MS SQL recently?

* Azure seems to have reached its peak mind share, mostly pushed by free credits

* Their gaming division mainly lives on Game Pass, while XBox is further and further away from Playstation and now there's Valve eating their lunch

* Windows on ARM, even Windows branded laptops or 2-in-1s are a niche within a niche

* What is a cell phone again?

* Edge's philosophy is "as evil and spyware as Google, but worse". In fact, Microsoft as a whole is trying to badly emulate the peak evil Google of 2015+

Ballmer made some enormous blunders and a lot of his indecision proved costly. Nadella pushed proudly forward in destroying the Microsoft name all to make a quick buck. I'll give you VSCode and Github to be good ideas, though the latter is just an acquisition, not a bonafide good product built in house.

Not that I personally use it, but Azure seems pretty relevant and Microsoft's financials seem pretty decent. I'll give you that Microsoft on the client-side does seem like a legacy installed base--albeit a big one. But client-side growth is pretty much a niche these days outside of mobile and, yes, Microsoft lost that.

However, generally, I could name a number of companies that descended into legacy irrelevance (not a few of which were acquired by Broadcom) but I wouldn't put Microsoft into that category at this point.

“The metaverse is not just transforming how we see the world. It’s changing how all of us actively participate in it”

"The age of AI transformation"

“There isn’t a single industry that isn’t being transformed,” “We collectively have the opportunity to lead in this transformation.”

"All of these three things, web3, blockchain and the metaverse, are all going to happen."

Visionary Nadella here folks . Everything is transformative to this guy.

And the fractured developer ecosystem with multiple UI frameworks (WPF, WinUI, MAUI, Blazor) all being understaffed, while actual Microsoft products are being developed in React Native.

>During Ballmer's tenure, the Office division spent a lot of resources building apps for iOS. Ballmer saw a demo, realized that they were better than the Office apps available on Microsoft's own phones and tablets, and so blocked the release.

Is there a source for this?

ok it was obviously a bad move in hindsight, but at that point in time, was it not a gutsy high risk move to try give windows phone a small advantage? its obvious once you cancel winphone, but canceling winphone was a big concession

Stop celebrating the guy who brought spyware and ads to windows

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