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Comment by FlyingSnake | Hacker News Reader

This is epic. Peter Thiel was right about creative Monopoly.

The new Microsoft under Satya Nadella has totally changed the direction of Microsoft in just a few months. They had one of the best and rock solid development platforms and research division, and loyal customers. The new Azure cloud (Online + On Premise) along with the opening of .Net will change the playing field.

I'm sure this is a great new for us developers. The change to work on one of the best runtimes, on a platform of our choice and on one of the best programming environments.

Great job Microsoft!

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>The new Microsoft under Satya Nadella has totally changed the direction of Microsoft in just a few months. They had one of the best and rock solid development platforms and research division, and loyal customers.

While you might be right about having a new leader and creating change, but this is not something that happened in the last few months. This has been building up for years. I think it started with IronPython and IronRuby, then other things started popping up too.

ASP.NET vnext has been on github for a while now.

You're right though about this all being really great news.

IronPython and IronRuby never really had corporate backing - and the few resources devoted to them had been moved away fairly quickly.

Thus their fate today.

The difference, this time, seems to be high-level policy and a complete change of direction of the entire developer division.

I'd pin more of this on Scott Guthrie and Scott Hanselman, really. They have been championing this kind of behavior for years within MS.

But it's Nadela who allowed that vision to move forward.

A vision this large cannot move forward without buy-in from key executives, and it is unlikely for the execution to take 9-months. Therefore, like other comments have postulated, the work had to have begun long before Nadella took over as CEO.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that this announcement was made under Ballmer. How many of you would trust this announcement/take it at face value? Even going by this thread, there is a deep distrust of Microsoft's moves, and that is despite all the positive press that Satya has received for creating a more "open" Microsoft.

IMO, the biggest change that Satya's moves have resulted in is a change in the "perception" of Microsoft's intentions. The non-Microsoft community trusts his intentions, and by association his actions, more than they did Ballmer's. I don't blame this lack of trust, heck I subscribe to it. But attributing all of these decisions to just Satya shows a lack of appreciation for how decisions of this magnitude are made at a company like Microsoft.

And his being an executive at a corporate giant made this a very unorthodox and risky move. Having a great idea and a sound methodology is one thing; betting the future of one of the largest technology companies in the world on it is entirely different.

Not really if you understand how large corporations work. I think Nadella being a former dev and understanding the importance of it has a lot to do with it.

In large corporations, initiatives like these do not originate from the top. You're right that Nadella was probably more receptive to this than his predecessor, but a lot of the heavy lifting for this had already been done by some very dedicated teams within MS over the course of years.

> Peter Thiel was right about creative Monopoly.

This is coming after a decade of Microsoft losing ground on the server side to Linux and on the consumer side to Apple. If anything, it shows the positive effects of keeping a large firm out of a monopolistic position.

Could somebody please shed some light on this? I'm having a hard time digesting Thiel's book, and I see this development as a perfect example of competition being positive.

Actually this doesn't have to do with Satya. This has been brewing for years. It is at best naive to think this was done in a few months.

No one thinks that the development of this stuff happened entirely because Nadella is CEO. They think it was allowed to finally be released and promoted because Nadella is CEO.

Huge corporations have a huge number of things brewing at any given time, most of which don't make it to market. Executive decisions are a big reason why or why not. And Ballmer was repeatedly and emphatically on record that MS software should revolve around Windows.

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