xfax

Ah, finally - MBA getting some credit on HN ;).

Monkey that triples shareholder value in a multi-billion dollar company? I'll take two please.

Where can I get such a monkey?

Sensationalist title much?

From TFA: "Analysts were expecting a $5.3 billion profit for the quarter, but that was canceled out by an even bigger loss on a five-year-old acquisition."

No, analysts were not expecting a $5.3B profit before the report; if they were they should probably not be in their jobs anymore. The after-hours price of MSFT shows that this news was already priced in and the loss was actually smaller that what was expected.

Geez.

Microsoft has a development center in Copenhagen. I believe they develop the Dynamics CRM product there. Here's a list of open engineering positions as of today:

https://careers.microsoft.com/search.aspx#&&p4=DK...

Good luck!

Shareholders and long term investors (aka those who care most about management) look for long term stable growth in core businesses. Yes, you can argue that their performance compared to competitors has been dismal but MSFT is still a solid investment and has seen double digit growth rates for over 10 years - this is incredibly hard for a company this size. Most will argue that this good management.

For example, look at their revenue growth quarter-over-quarter:

http://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT/revenue_growth#series=type...

Also, GOOG and AAPL don't pay dividends (yet), which is a very good proxy for shareholder value:

http://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT/dividend_yield#series=type...

I'm not saying MSFT can't do better; OP asked why Ballmer is tolerated and I wanted to point out that there are plenty of reasons why.

Yup. It also has the nice effect of inflating the P/E ratio for Microsoft, at least temporarily.

This is why.

http://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT/revenues#series=type:compa...

I think you forgot an important feature of PHP: it just works.

I can pretty much create and "deploy" a PHP web app within minutes of getting a run-of-the-mill hosting service.

Why are we, as a community, having these "epiphanies" about how to start and run a successful business? The functions and skill-set may have changed, but the core principles that drive an entrepreneurial undertaking have not. For over a hundred years.

Sometimes it seems like we believe that we are paving new ground, when all it is is that we never bother to learn from those who have traveled this road before.

A "hustler", as the article defines, should be the function of everyone in a startup, even us "hackers" (if we can come down from the pedestal).

I suppose Wired covered this because the general sentiment these days is that everyone needs to learn programming since it is pretty much the only way to be productive in the future.

It might be because people on HN are beacons of productivity who find that these atrocious projects take away from the reams of value that could be created otherwise by working on the product.

This is why they don't read news sites during the work day. Oh wait ...

Yes, it is. It says so on the second sentence in TFA.

Kudos to you and the team for caring about the culture.

People tend to forget that the company culture - shared interests and activities being a big part of it - plays a huge part in shaping the quality of the product/service. In addition, it helps build a sense of identity and pride among employees, which is especially important for a fast growing company.

Taking some time off to work on a project like this might actually provide huge returns which are not immediately apparent.

As someone who is currently reading SICP, this is a great complement. Thanks for putting it together.

I recently posted a similar question to HN and just found this thread. Incredible suggestions.

Here are mine: http://farhan.org/?p=22

The Emperor of All Maladies was a great book. Even with all the weight it carried dealing with such a serious topic, I could hardly put it down.

If you don't mind me asking, what did you use to create the plugin? Just simply VS or did you use a framework?

Good to see the hacking culture alive and well!

There's always friction between ambition and happiness.

A lot of us are ambitious people, driven by the need to out-perform ourselves and build something better. It is then natural to think that you will be better off once you reach that goal compared to how you are right now. The important thing to realize is that more than the goal itself, it's the journey that we tend to enjoy. Once you realize this, having ambitions and seeing a clear path to reaching them is itself joyous.

Off-topic, but this really stuck out for me:

I’d set this bar at 50-70% net profit margin. We can aim high because there is no additional cost for each new customer once we reach profitability.

That's a common misconception. You are indeed spending money on getting each additional customer, you are just not accounting for it correctly. It's easy to consider all marketing/advertising/sales/customer service expenses as fixed costs, when indeed these costs go up with each additional customer you on-board.

Also, even if you reach the 50-70% profit margins, how sustainable would that be? The simple law of efficient markets dictates that you will have competitors who will be willing to undercut you. There is no relatively stable company out there that is able to make such margins unless they have constructed entry barriers around themselves (patents, laws etc.).

We tried this with https://twodeg.net.

TwoDeg (for Two Degrees) is a proof-of-concept (just for fun, not profit) social network that allows you to create ad-hoc channels (akin to circles) to communicate and share within smaller groups. We took the private-by-default approach as well. Moreover, we make the reach/extent of every post clear to the user by listing the people who can see it.

We used a combination of symmetric key and public/private key encryption in JavaScript to encrypt the information in the browser (I know the whole argument about how insecure that is - this is just proof-of-concept). Only you or your friends (or the people you share a post with) have the keys to decrypt the information. We, as the service provider, just move around encrypted data.

We don't have data export functionality, but that is something we could easily add.

Exactly. Kudos on building a fairly complex application over the weekend, but the journey has just begun. 'Build it and they will come' does not apply (usually) for revenue generating businesses with real customers.

To your point about MBA curriculum not having a component on selling - not true.

Here are a few courses at Chicago Booth that are all about selling (for entrepreneurs):

Entrepreneurial Selling by Craig Wortmann Commercializing Innovation by Scott Meadow

And to a certain extent,

Building the New Venture by Waverly Deutsch and Craig Wortmann.

Thanks for the insightful response.

I certainly want to be in a position to bring more than just ideas to the table. I am hoping that with my background of doing things will help in that. But you're right, as a career switcher, I need to build a specific set of skills that I can confidently talk about and deliver. I'll work on that.

I am assuming you get a new static IP when you move datacenters?

I'm seriously considering moving my instance to another data-center. The Fremont facility has seen some disproportionate down-time these past few months.

Just to close the loop, I went with Munin. They have a good number of plugins and ones for MongoDB and Nginx are available as well. A little bit of finagling, but it all seems to be work reasonably well now.

At this point, the project is nothing more than a proof of concept with no expectation of earning any revenue.

Yeah, looks like exactly what I want. But the cheapest option is more expensive than all my infrastructure put together :(.

That gives me an idea. What if there was a paid service which would analyze such public information about you and tell you exactly what your "profile" looks like, or at least appears to others. Sometimes we don't realize how we project ourselves and this would definitely be useful to understand the implications of our actions.