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Comment by mvkel | Hacker News Reader

Be careful what you wish for.

Satya Nadella is by most accounts the best person to lead Microsoft, currently the largest software company in the world.

"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste," said Steve Jobs. That largely remains true.

Jobs called the computer "a bicycle for the mind." It immediately evokes a sense of freedom, magic, and fun.

Satya Nadella calls AI "a cognitive amplifier," which sounds like some kind of cool Excel formula.

Without taste being reinjected into Apple, it will remain uninspired and uninspiring, no matter who leads.

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I often wonder why Satya Nadella is so venerated on HN compared to say, Cook or Pichai. As innovators, MS lags way behind both Google and Apple. I can't think of one bleeding edge product released during Satya's tenure. Say what you will about Apple and Google, they still consistently put out products that make you sit up and pay attention. What has MS been doing other than squeezing the MS Office and Azure cash cows?

For example he made the back then very-very brave decision to completely getting rid of Windows as the leading Microsoft brand. He had a very clear vision for Microsoft and the industry even if the outcome is not super exciting products for you and me. He’s not squeezing Azure - he was the person who made Azure into what it is now.

So he changed Microsoft fundamentally - a very difficult thing for such a large company.

I don’t see Pichai changing Google so fundamentally. I admire Cook though.

My point was more that MS hasn't had an industry changing product in a while. Google became joint-SOTA in AI and seems poised to take the crown with the next Gemini, and also in self-driving cars and quantum computing. They've kept their cash cows going while also being up to date on the tech that might upend their business model, so in a way they've cracked the innovator's dilemma which is definitely not an easy thing to do. A lot of HNers even wrote them off after ChatGPT and the disastrous Bard. Apple has a successful mass product in Airpods, a moonshot in Vision Pro and the insane Apple Silicon which they executed over more than a decade.

Nadella did well in the last decade to consolidate the MS stack (Teams, Azure, Office) and to invest in OpenAI when he realized MS's internal efforts wouldn't yield the expected output. He has protected their turf and made some strategic acquisitions like Linkedin and Github to keep their lead in enterprise software. From the POV of Wall Street performance and stock returns, he is a definitely a great CEO but so are Cook, Pichai even Ellison.

> I don’t see Pichai changing Google so fundamentally. I admire Cook though.

Well he did change Google fundamentally. Imagine being so dense you're fumbling to a competitor built on a technology that you innovated .

That being said, I'm still long Google because they're the tortoise. And this is one of those races where slow and steady might actually win. And while I was a strong critic of Pichai on a lot of fronts (just check my past comments!), he still must be given due credit for his measured approach and for navigating Google through some of the roughest regulatory environments, and for leaving Google relatively unscathed.

Nadella is obviously a very smart and successful business leader. He achieved his goals and transformed Microsoft into a very successful, healthy company. This is why I personally think he isn’t just a bland idiot like for example Steve Ballmer.

However, it’s clear that Nadella’s goals are everything but noble. He doesn’t care about the product, and he really doesn’t care about the customer. He only cares about number go up.

Ballmer doesn't strike me as an idiot and definitely not bland. He's one of the more colorful tech personalities. MS's almost unassailable lead in enterprise could be attributed to him and the pivot to cloud could not have happened without this. But he definitely fumbled hard on mobile (Windows Phone), Surface (IIRC the initial ARM laptop was a major flop and had a close to 1B+ writeoff) and the disaster that was the Nokia acquisition. I'd say he left at the right time, just as it was becoming clear that MS's bets on Windows Phone and hardware in general weren't paying off.

That's a pretty massive fumble. He was effectively trying to convert Microsoft into a hardware company; Satya marked the return to pure software, and Microsoft is now the biggest SaaS company in the world.

Rather than think of it as a pivot to hardware, I looked at it as MS trying to corner their share in the consumer market. Mobile and Social were the hot things back then and mobile threatened MS's dominance of the OS market. MS ultimately failed but they still owned the enterprise market and continue to keep their lead in desktop market share.

Nadella plays on level easy.

Too many companies are dependent on MS products so it doesn’t matter how bad it gets.

MS rather disables features instead of fixing security issues and now puts AI in everything in a desperate attempt to force the users to use it.

I assumed he was a product guy until I heard him on Dwarkesh's podcast. He does seem to really only get fired up about numbers going up, and customers are a vehicle for that.

I'm just incredibly disappointed with how Windows has ended up

As the CEO of Microsoft, he must use Windows, right? Unless he has a Mac

Like how can he use that ad-riddled mess every day and think it's fine, knowing he could make it so much better?

Other commenters are raking Apple over the coals for bad experiences with MacOS. By the same token, Windows 11 is beyond awful. It's a complete buggy mess, never mind the secure boot restrictions.

VSCode revolutionized the IDE

One should not forget that Mr Cook was handpicked by Jobs himself. So if Apple is lacking taste or leadership, it is partly Jobs' own making

yes but he was desperate (dying) when he made the choice

His dying was also part of his lack of taste, since he went with alternative medicine rather than actual medicine

Is it not rather the opposite? His striving for unconventional "taste" (as opposed to boring convention) was probably a factor in him seeking "alternative" medicine.

in some sense i think it shows having taste. sometimes taste can be dangerous. you can only have a taste for say rock climbing equipment, by rock climbing, which exposes you to danger.

I thought that quote came from Bill Atkinson.

Hmm. Jobs used the bicycle metaphor extensively in this advert-interview thing: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1050/0*SgDLtymZpgcXEA7...

Which (squinting) was printed in the WSJ in 1980: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1148/1*wXZ9t85eJnREeDw...

But "bicycle for the mind" might be John Sculley, 1986: https://archive.org/details/apple-retro-books-collection/App...

Unless of course Jobs said it earlier.

It's from a video interview with him in 1980:

“I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species… The condor came in at the top. Humans came in about a third of the way down. But when a human rides a bicycle, we blow the condor away. That’s what a computer is for me: a bicycle for the mind.”

Sure that wasn't 1990?

> Jobs called the computer "a bicycle for the mind." It immediately evokes a sense of freedom, magic, and fun.

The funniest part to me: I can't imagine Jobs on a bicycle. Perhaps when he was a small kid, but as far as I know he was notoriously on the jerky side of strongly motorized vehicles.

Which could perfectly align with his vision of the iPod and iPhone as powerful, but closed and restrictive and expensive ecosystems, replacing computers.

> no matter who leads

Then only the next CEO will have a chance to reinject taste into Apple, so it needs to happen at the same time.

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