MS still lacks a industry leading 21st century consumer device and Nadella has not been able to change that but his bets on cloud computing, embracing of Linux and open source and the rise of VSCode are something to behold.
As an "older-school" dev, I am constantly amazed that I can open a linux prompt on windows or do VSCode work with a local gui on a remote computer or inside a docker container.
Similarly, I'm amazed that I can build truly cross-platform .NET apps using Microsoft's own open-source tools from the Linux command line. (Apparently .NET Core, which both adopted the MIT license, and ushered in true cross-platform support, was announced later in the year that Nadella took over. [1] Not sure whether he had anything to do with it.)
What an about-face from 2000-era Microsoft's embrace-extend-extinguish approach. Remember Visual J++? If you'd told me then I'd be willingly programming on a Microsoft toolchain 20 years later I would not have believed you.
I suggest that it's actually just a better executed embrace.
The XBox division doesn't count?
That said, they have more market share vs Playstation than iOS has over Android.
Xbox also isn’t top dog among the big 3. They’ve really struggled to ship big exclusive system sellers (which is a bummer. I’m a big fan of a lot of Xbox IP), so they certainly aren’t “industry leading”. Doesn’t mean the exclusives they’ve shipped aren’t good. They certainly are, just that their is no Xbox answer to God of War or Last of Us
GamePass is one of the biggest success stories to come out of Xbox and is certainly the dominant game streaming service
Mario has everyone else smoked[1].
[1] A bit out of date but see https://www.statista.com/chart/26122/estimated-lifetime-sale... where in 2021 nintendo were selling more switches in Japan only (their 3rd biggest market) than the worldwide sales of both Xbox and PS5 combined.
Is this a prerequisite to being a great technology company today? Or is this just one vector that some competitors choose to compete on? For example, would we say Apple isn’t a great technology company because it doesn’t have an industry leasing office suite like MS and Google?
And then Microsoft bought Github.
Microsoft needs people to build things on windows, on azure, on their APIs, etc.
Google literally had the GitHub competitor, Google Code, and GitHub was only formed because google neglected Code. Remember how Google would only support mercurial over git?
And of course, Google shut down Code a few years ago.
I have to remind myself while Google hires lots of programmers and does lots of programming, they don’t really need anyone else to program.
Microsoft needs developers.
Windows and Office came before everything. The big change Nadella brought to the table was completely eliminating Windows as a primary goal for the company, and reducing Office’s importance as well.
I'm not knocking Emacs or Vim, they are powerful tools but to be able to show a typical first year student how to edit their code remotely using SSH/Container support in VSCode is comparatively dead simple. All the students I work with now use this strategy, much in the same way they prefer to use jupyter and pandas when they can.
and Olympic champion can jump for 5 meters, but bridges over creeks is nothing uncommon for masses.
and Emacs has been able to edit files transparently on remote hosts ...
Probably Emacs can learn [if they care to be dominating on the market] on technical possibility vs being simple and handy.
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And if we take VSCode Tunnel, things become even brighter for VScode for remote editing.
Bad replies, to bad replies
Oh but they have brought 21st century advertising and bullshit to windows devices!
Apple silicon?
Yes, Apple Silicon is innovation. But is a drop in the bucket. A sense of scale is very important.
A lot of this damage was done under Balmer, but IMHO Nadella has a lot of blame too. Microsoft has gone from domination of computing platforms and making money on every single device sale to competing for scraps in someone else's app store (making that someone else money!) as they sell office apps and such ported to platforms they don't control anymore.
I think there isn't more outrage or unrest about this failure from Microsoft shareholders since Azure and other service growth has kept dollars flowing in and the share price up. But Microsoft is nowhere near their 90s peak of total control over consumer computing.
Lost on mobile hardware and OS but their software (office, outlook, OneDrive) is extremely popular on mobile, no?
Microsoft gave up on trying to create new platforms, the main reasons in my opinion are:
1) Regulations are going to come down hard on platforms
2) User-happiness and developer happiness is reduced if you squeeze, eventually bringing down the platform
3) Dependence, if your platform starts to fail you can't pivot because your business is just completely reliant on owning the platform. You can see how google owning AdSense is screwing them over now
4) Dutch disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
Microsoft seems to have figured out that owning a platform is not a long-term recipe for success. If anything it is like being an oil-rich country, eventually the only thing you can do is exporting oil. Probably because they went through it with Windows and Office
So the definition of success depends on what you think success is, Microsoft just changed what success means for big tech companies, providing an alternative route. We will see if they can stick with it or if they will try to build platform-moats again (it is very tempting to do so when you find one)
The government is stopping this kind of thing, anti trust, monopolies and all that. It is only getting worse for these platform owners
Parent comment is still valid. Microsoft dominates enterprise office tools across all platforms, including mobile.
So they’ll likely make more money off mobile than Google will.
Although they don’t build any phones or mobile OSes, they are making a ton of money off mobile (without paying the App Store percentages to Apple or Google).
Dude. There are gonna still be servers, network infra, etc.
Some examples that I've seen posted to HN over the past few months
* Microsoft Edge leaks browser history to Bing - https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/25/23697532/microsoft-edge-b...
* More ads in Windows 11 start menu - https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/17/microsoft_windows_sta...
* Absolute junk shoved into the Windows UI - https://thomasbandt.com/the-day-windows-died? https://birchtree.me/blog/the-windows-11-trash-party/ https://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-keeps-feeding-tabl...
Windows is in a boiling frog situation. It's been slowly accumulating dark patterns and anti-features like mandatory online-only accounts, while at the same time losing quality of life features like the ability to move your taskbar or to not combine apps in the taskbar.
I should be using Windows today. I grew up on Windows, I learned to program on Windows, I had a very difficult and bumpy transition in getting off of Windows. But I had to leave their ecosystem because they have absolutely no respect for the user, and at this point I do not trust them. I want to reiterate that these are recent things, I'm not mad at them for what they did in the 90's here.
They aren't treating Windows as a serious tool for getting shit done, they're treating it as a data-mine and advertising opportunity.
If you care about privacy, there is only one option, and that’s Desktop Linux, albeit less than ideal in many use cases.
In my mind, he’s the worst ceo of the last decade
If you don't like the product, you're free to not buy it, and use something else. There are many alternatives.
At my job, I can't not use Linux. If I refuse to use Linux, I get fired, because all our work is done on that. Your job is exactly the same: they chose, for whatever reasons, to use Windows for their IT infrastructure. You chose to take that job. If not using Windows was important to you, you would have asked about this before taking the job, and declined, and looked for a job that uses the OS you prefer. There's tons of jobs out there that require using either Linux or Mac. There might even be a few still using z/OS.
Part of working at a real job is using whatever tools they require you to use. I don't care much for Confluence, but I use it because my company requires it.
Is that so?
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#most-popular-technolog...
What a nonsensical, unverifiable statement. Stack Overflow is for better or worse a statistically valid sample of programmers from around the world.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headline...
Windows 11 is a laughing stock to many and it isn't exactly flying off the shelves.
Microsoft is a hot mess and Nadella is a trader the same way Pichai is at Google.
Same for Tim Cook.
Look back at news articles for the past year and watch how fast Nadella pivoted from "the metaverse" to GPT.
Stock buybacks make CEOs look impressive if you don't know about stock buybacks.
https://money.usnews.com/investing/articles/s-p-500-stocks-w...
They are, they had flat UI and dark mode years before anyone else. I imagine iOS and Android will get live tiles one of these days, too.
I consider MS's record under Nadella to be a mixed bag. Azure is probably Nadella's biggest success, but it's hard to come up with any other significant market in which MS has excelled under Nadella where they were not previously dominant.
From a user perspective, many MS products I use have improved and many have changed in ways I would consider to be detrimental. VS Code is probably the only new MS product that I've started using regularly - and I'd only consider it to be a minor improvement over Sublime Text for my use cases.
So let me summarise - clearly not, because they don't make a consumer/device (aka phone). Only phone companies can have a best CEO. Then again Apple doesn't have a successful cloud platform, Google doesn't make cars, Amazon's rockets aren't very useful, SpaceX doesn't make a phone, Tesla -is- a phone (the best "mobile" phone ever?). What about social media, ad-platform, AI?
Clearly deciding it based on product is absurd.
Equally we could debate the merits of owning an OS, or an Office platform, or a streaming service.
We could base it on innovation, stock price and growth, market cap, employee numbers, cash in the bank, acquisitions, willingness to kill projects, ability to smoke weed. We could define it as having laid off no-one ever.
All of which is to say, there's no "best" to begin with. There are thousands of companies,of every scale, which have done well by some metric, which have survived rocky roads, which have provided value to society, to customers, to employees.
My hat is off to all if them. Their success keeps food on the table, and roofs over heads.
Asking which is best, without define criteria is hopeless because clearly all companies have strengths and weaknesses. We might as well puck which sport is "best". (Where the right answer is golf because, um, that's what I like. And because more 80+ year-olds do golf than everything else combined. They're experienced enough to know.)
Microsoft was still growing under Ballmer. Windows was far away from “dying”.
Then you can sample across CEOs and then measure Nadella based on that
Do you have such criteria and data?
She made it relevant again.
