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Comment by jljljl | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how many of these major changes were decided on while Ballmer was still in charge, and simply didn't take effect until Nadella's turn at CEO began.

I also wonder how many of them were strategically delayed until a new CEO was in office, to really underline the regime change nature of his promotion.

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so I was at microsoft until recently and I can say that almost everything on this list had nothing to do with the CEO change outside of him being on the earnings call and the exec changes.

at a company as large as microsoft and after the billg era of constant product reviews, most of these decisions were never "ballmer" decisions, they were made by the folks who run their divisions. e.g. changes to windows for the start menu in 8.1 update were made over a year ago and by folks working for terry myerson, not ballmer and definitely not nadella.

I have my own personal wishlist: http://hal2020.com/2014/03/03/satya-shuffles-his-leadership/...

What do you think?

hal berenson is super smart and I think says it best in his reply to your comment[1].

microsoft, just like google and apple and redhat and linkedin and facebook, is a company - it is there to make money for shareholders. what they do to make money and how they do it can be very different and cause disagreements. but I think people don't always think of that when considering tech endeavors, particularly when there is any entry in a market that is free.

[1] http://hal2020.com/2014/03/03/satya-shuffles-his-leadership/...

Well, at least some of this stuff was unethical, for example OOXML.

This wishlist was partly inspired by this comment BTW: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7281319

Probably all of them. Making this many changes in 3 months in a company the size of Microsoft seems unbelievable. Especially considering how anti-OSS they've been in the past.

It might also be that Ballmer knew he was going to be stepping down soon and decided to let Nadella's initiatives get a head start.

At the very least, it was smart of Microsoft to make the leadership change on the cusp of these new developments. If successful, they can point to Nadella being the catalyst. If unsuccessful, they can point to it being the last gasps of a dying regime.

Excellent comment. Reminds me an idea from Soccernomics (a great book on soccer by economists who happen to love football), that a club manager is mainly a PR person and goes on to statistically prove that he has almost nothing to do with the teams performance (except very rare exceptional cases). While it certainly doesn't 100% apply for CEOs but there is something in common.

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