
Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance - crones
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-02/satya-nadella-remade-microsoft-as-world-s-most-valuable-company
======
spectramax
It’s unfortunate to see Microsoft (along with Adobe, etc) expanding into Ads.
If nothing else, they could really differentiate and join forces with Apple
from privacy standpoint to oppose Google, Amazon and Facebook.

Instead, “Intellisense with AI now available on VS Code” is Microsoft’s nice
way of saying “We harvest the shit out of your data”. Ah, like a true Ad
company. Don’t get me started on Windows 10 telemetry.

I really believe that Apple’s bet on privacy will pay off well in the long
term. They’re different companies (Apple is selling hardware) but boy they
could have gone into Ads with a MASSIVE user base but they chose to limit Ads
in the App Store. It would have been huge expansion opportunity but they
didn’t pursue it. And it will pay off as privacy awareness spreads and
Microsoft could join them as operating system providers.

~~~
johnday
> “Intellisense with AI now available on VS Code” is Microsoft’s nice way of
> saying “We harvest the shit out of your data”.

What? The IntelliCode description says that "Contextual recommendations are
based on practices developed in thousands of high quality, open-source
projects on GitHub each with high star ratings.". I'm not clear on how you
think Microsoft will harvest data from doing this - much less how it is
related to ads.

~~~
jlarocco
> "Contextual recommendations are based on practices developed in thousands of
> high quality, open-source projects on GitHub each with high star ratings."

Wait, what? Is there a way to opt out of that in GitHub? I don't want their AI
to scan my code.

Realistically, since most of my GH code is Common Lisp with few stars, I doubt
it's looking anyway, but I'd like to make sure.

I'm sure it's covered in their TOS, but as a (still) paying GitHub customer I
don't want them to do that with my repos.

~~~
hirsin
Should have nothing to do with github and everything to do with you putting
your code on the internet with a permissive license. Google or Eclipse could
do this too (and I expect they do, since it's the best corpus of code
available).

~~~
phillipcarter
Google does, in a way, with the GitHub data set in BigQuery ->
[https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-
data/#sample_tables](https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-
data/#sample_tables)

------
1024core
Satya has done a tremendous job turning around Microsoft. It was headed in the
direction of becoming a slowly sinking behemoth under Ballmer, but he's turned
it around.

Sundar, on the other hand, is just content collecting $$ and showing more ads.

~~~
maxxxxx
In what way was MS sinking under Ballmer? Maybe they were not exciting but
they were super profitable every year. I think it's more about better PR.

Not everything is golden at MS now either. I am working on creating a platform
for our medical software on Windows 10 and it really makes me want to switch
to Linux or iOS. Windows is a big mess of old and new code and attempts of
sandboxing like iOS but only half-hearted. Keeping up with the semi-annual
channel is also insane. I would much prefer annual or biannual releases that
are actually stable. It's a very developer unfriendly platform now.

~~~
tabs_masterrace
Windows always been a pain to develop for. And every Windows version
redundantly includes "a new api for everything" alongside all the horrible
legacy stuff.

But Microsoft's recent efforts on Linux & macOS, i.e. VSCode, has been
surprisingly good. They do a lot of things, I think Typescript is run by MS as
well.

So that's something that positively changed under Nadella.

~~~
tabtab
I believe this is because MS wants to move away from being an OS provider to
being a service provider. If a service runs on Linux they won't care as long
as its generating revenue for them. Whether this is Nadella's push or obvious
from MS's accountants is hard to say.

~~~
maxxxxx
They may turn into an IBM variation long term. Profitable, stable business.
Not glamorous, but good money.

~~~
bnt
Don’t all companies become IBM at some point?

~~~
maxxxxx
Probably.

~~~
tabtab
So it's kind of like baldness?

------
calvinbhai
Having read Nadella's book Hit Refresh as soon as it went on sale, Microsoft
performance since then doesn't look surprising at all. Having listed what's
wrong (with their product focus, company culture etc), and where they plan to
head, its' almost like the book informs the reader where puck is going to be
(from Satya's POV).

It's funny that 15 years back I was so anti MS and pro Google and now I think
it's the other way!

~~~
maxxxxx
“It's funny that 15 years back I was so anti MS and pro Google and now I think
it's the other way!”

Stay skeptical of all of them. No need to be fan of one of the big techs. In
the end they are all greedy organizations that want to dominate. None of them
should be trusted.

~~~
bovermyer
I'm both wary of and hopeful about Microsoft _and_ Google.

"Trust but verify" and all that.

~~~
spectramax
I’ve always found this phrase an oxymoron.

~~~
bovermyer
Where humans are involved, mistakes will happen. Trusting someone but
verifying their work is a safe and sane pairing.

~~~
stupidcar
How is verifying everything because you don't trust people not to make a
mistake operationally different from verifying everything because you suspect
bad faith? To the supposed trusted party, the result is the same: you not
taking them at their word and instead checking whatever they do. Even if
you're being honest about only verifying to avoid mistakes, you can never
prove it.

This definition of "trust but verify" would be better reduced to "verify",
since it essentially claims that trust is, if not impossible, not practically
applicable in any situation.

~~~
rotrux
@stupidcar we've reached the depth-limit, so I'm responding here.

> In the case of "trust but verify", how does this trust manifest in a
> provable way?

Good point. "provable" is the problem here since we don't know eachother, and
frankly I can't prove you're trustworthy initially; that's why the question
this addresses (namely "trust-or-misstrust?") arises in the first place.
Assuming we don't have dossiers on everyone we're going to meet and work with,
we have to decide on an initial point on the trust-scale you mentioned with
which to begin interaction.

"Trust but verify" is about having faith that people are generally good, and
treating strangers that way while protecting yourself. It indicates balance
between treating strangers like data-points and getting walked all over is
important, and it provides a suggestion about how to approach the situation.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> we've reached the depth-limit, so I'm responding here.

There isn't a depth limit.

~~~
rotrux
> There isn't a depth limit.

Well looks like you're right, but the nonetheless the reply button wasn't
there.

Did I sufficiently address your question?

~~~
thaumasiotes
> Did I sufficiently address your question?

What question are you referring to?

Regardless, I suggest that it is better to reply to the comment you're
replying to than to reply to some other comment, whether you see a reply link
or not. You don't need the reply link to reply to a comment.

------
rdslw
As an investor I bought few years ago MSFT stock. I did it as I saw two
things:

1\. azure

2\. o365

1\. because I knew what happened (and was happening) with AWS

2\. because microsoft moved to subscription model

Those two things, connected with third "secret" incredient: BIGGEST user base
(corporate) which WILL use those two offerings = success.

Satya is/may be great. I bought stock around 2014/2015 because of the above
and nothing more.

If you have a big userbase you can monetize it really really well.

~~~
spectramax
I think your reasoning is a perfect example of Confirmation bias, I do agree
with your points but there is no way to analyze this objectively - market is a
complex system with game theory and all kinds of players doing unpredictable
things, disasters such as password leaks, etc. If results were the opposite,
one can come up with various other reasons to explain their losses.

~~~
cjarrett
Most of the initiatives Satya has gotten credit for were started under
Ballmer. Some of the worst moves I've seen regarding current MSFT internal
culture were direct results of Satya

Source: Me, at MSFT before Ballmer left and still there now.

That doesn't mean Satya's not had a good effect overall. Part of the investor
postives were due to PR differences that Satya made (which are very good), and
his ability to talk about the future of the company is far superior to
Ballmer.

~~~
addicted
Ballmer started a lot.

Ballmer also subjected all of those new initiatives to the Windows/Office
dominance, which is why they all failed.

Nadella's most impactful, and fundamental, contribution was demolishing
Windows's hold over every other department.

~~~
cjarrett
Agreed wholeheartedly.

------
JamesBarney
> There’s a bit of Silicon Valley cred, too, thanks to its acquisitions of
> LinkedIn, the professional social network, and GitHub, the software code
> repository.

I would have thought open sourcing so much of it's framework, vscode, and
typescript would have had a greater impact.

~~~
max76
> I would have thought open sourcing so much of it's framework

I have a pedantic correction here.

Instead of open sourcing the .NET Framework they wrote a new opensource
framework (named .NET core) that is very similar to their closed source
framework. Microsoft is currently supporting and expanding both frameworks.

~~~
majkinetor
FYI, only way forward is core. Microsoft doesn't really invest much in older
net and related (for example PowerShell 5). There may be fixes here and there
but are mostly security.

It defies logic to support 2 frameworks, one of which is WAY BETTER then the
other and x-platform.

~~~
majkinetor
And only few days after this comment, is official:

[https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-
net-5/](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-net-5/)

------
jcoffland
> “I don’t know of any other software company in the history of technology
> that fell onto hard times and has recovered so well,” says Reed Hastings,
> CEO of Netflix Inc.

How about Apple?

~~~
jacques_chester
Historically considered to be a hardware company.

------
loudmax
Microsoft's core revenue is still due to market lock-in of their proprietary
technologies: MS Office and Windows itself. There are other office suites out
there, but nothing can gain much market share without complete compatibility
for MS Office file formats: docx, pptx, etc. Microsoft produced a version of
Office for Macs and that allowed Apple to grow greater than niche, but their
market share was always tiny compared to Windows.

Outside of Windows and Mac, you're in Open Source land, which is great if
you're technically minded and want to tinker and explore, but not much of an
option for folks who just want their computers to work with the consumer
software and file formats around them. Other than Apple, where are the
commercial alternatives to Microsoft?

I'd be much more sympathetic to Nardella's renaissance if it meant real
consumer choice. The situation is better than it was under Ballmer, but not as
good as it could be in a real free marketplace.

~~~
blhack
Excel is actually an amazing product. Google docs is cool, but it’s nothing
compared to excel.

~~~
pier25
Excel is a beast, but for my use case Google Sheets is better since I don't
need the advanced features and it's always available in any browser.

My biggest problem with Google Docs in general is not about features but that
performance is pretty bad.

~~~
shostack
I use Sheets for work and increasingly a bunch of personal stuff. I wish
Google would invest more in customization of visuals and such with charts and
allow for better pivot functionality, but otherwise it is pretty solid.

I can't see myself ever paying for Excel for personal use at this point.

------
scarface74
Microsoft’s “performance” wasn’t bad by any objective metric during the
Ballmer era. If the stock market were rational, MS stock would have been doing
a lot better under Balmer than it did.

But then again, if the stock market were rational, Lyft would have never been
able to go public and Tesla would basically be worthless.

~~~
jillesvangurp
MS was basically making money no matter what given the highly lucrative office
+ windows franchise that Bill Gates left behind. I wouldn't credit Balmer with
that too much he just basically kept on milking that. The problem by the time
he left was that there was increasingly less to squeeze.

Shareholders tend to look forward rather than backward and it was getting very
clear that windows and office were increasingly less critical to users and
that there were some serious revenue issues around that going forward. Windows
on the server was basically getting less relevant by the day. Windows desktop
was feeling a lot of pressure from Apple and increasingly Google. Office sales
were suffering when companies started using alternative office tools from e.g.
Google. Windows Phone was not working that great either and struggled to gain
market share on Apple and Google. The Nokia acquisition that Balmer pushed
through was sort of the nail in the coffin here. That was an expensive failure
and that is 100% on Balmer.

The keyword in those strategies was windows. Under Balmer it absolutely had to
be windows everywhere. Server, desktop, mobile, IOT, and all the rest. It
wasn't working. That's why Balmer 'left' (i.e. was pretty much fired but in a
nice face saving way).

Nadella killed that windows everything strategy and turned things around.
Office is now liberated from Windows and making a lot of money for MS again.
Cloud is growing more important as well, courtesy of mostly non windows
software running on Linux in Azure. Meanwhile windows on the desktop seems
pretty cool now that MS has added Linux integration, a non MS browser, and a
few other things that make it a lot more attractive for developers and users
and now that they are no longer forced to be in this windows everything walled
garden. Even mobile is doing great for MS now that they can focus on treating
IOS and Android as first class citizens.

~~~
scarface74
If you just look at the time between 2000-2007, the first half of Ballmer’s
tenure. The stock wasn’t doing well, but revenues were steadily increasing.
During this time:

\- Apple was still on PowerPC processors until 2006 and weren’t really any
threat to Microsoft.

\- GSuite didn’t even launch until 2006 and even today, it’s really not that
much competition to MS Office. It has less than a tenth of the revenue and
only a few Fortune 500 companies ([https://www.reuters.com/article/us-
alphabet-gsuite-idUSKBN1F...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-
gsuite-idUSKBN1FL3ZX))

\- The iPhone didn’t come out until 2007 and really didn’t start gaining
market share until 2010. Even today, Google’s “winning” with Android has only
netted it less than $30 billion in profit since inception
([https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-
generate...](https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-
generated-31-billion-revenue-google-oracle))

\- Microsoft adding WSL only matters to a few techies.

\- Even the Nokia acquisition happened later during his tenure.

~~~
jillesvangurp
Balmer missed the boat on all of this because he was out of touch. Android and
Iphone indeed happened around the 2006-2008 time frame after having been
rumored since about 2003-2006. They both were the logical conclusion from OSS
and Linux emerging in the late nineties as a viable platform for development
on embedded hardware. The difference between Balmer and Jobs is what they did
in the nineties. Jobs ran a startup that produced the software that he later
brought back to Apple that indeed also became the basis for the iphone. That's
a decade plus of vision, R&D, etc. coming together. Balmer's vision meanwhile
was Windows everywhere throughout this. When Jobs went on stage with the
iphone, Balmer had nothing meaningful whatsoever to show. The little MS had
was quickly forgotten. Once the iphone launched, Windows CE was dead as a door
nail.

Windows Phone was a nice effort but years late and bogged down in a continued
windows everywhere strategy and aggravated by lousy execution combined with
institutional arrogance. They initially launched it as a windows CE shell with
severe limitations. Then they alienated their OEMs and users with a highly
disruptive and backwards incompatible move to windows NT. Finally, they topped
it up with the Nokia acquisition. Nokia had committed early to windows phone
which because of the prolonged uncertainty around this platform proved to be a
major disaster. I used to work at Nokia, I've seen them fuck this up close. It
wasn't pretty and Balmer was right at the center of it. MS ultimately acquired
it and then proved it did not know how to fix it either. I still believe they
could have pulled it off but not with the leadership (or lack thereof) that
they had.

Balmer missed the boat utterly and completely, misread the market signals, and
came up empty handed. The doomed Nokia acquisition was the proverbial nail in
his coffin: the last in a decade long series of expensive failures.

The Google thing a few years ago was an existential threat to MS. Google was
pushing users to chrome books running google office in a chrome browser on
cheap hardware that ran Linux. The existential threat was two fold: no windows
and no office. Nadella turned that around by making office 365 something that
runs well everywhere, including on Chrome OS. The recent reverse takeover of
Chromium by making that the centerpiece of Edge, sort of solidifies this. Up
until then MS strategy was charging loads of money for windows on expensive
laptops. Small form factor laptops became a thing during the mid 2000s and one
key problem with those was that the windows license was substantial cost
factor. It sort of made putting linux on hardware like that inevitable. It's
the same problem they had on mobile. Expensive windows licenses for cheap
phones did not make sense. That's why Android happened.

WSL indeed only matters to techies. But if techies pull their nose up for your
platform, you have a long term problem because techies are the people that
produce the things that make your platform long term viable. Five years ago,
no self respecting engineer deploying on Linux would bother much with a
windows machine. It was just too painful. Nothing worked and a typical README
for developer tools on e.g. Github would be heavily mac/linux centric. Things
like node.js, git, etc. barely even worked on it or only with a lot of
workarounds and kludges. It was a big reason for Azure flopping in the market
because MS sold windows in the cloud when the market was moving away from
Windows. Nadella turned that around by embracing OSS, linux, and turning
Balmer's mantra of "developers, developers, developers" into something that
actually meant something to developers again. VS Studio Code and typescript
now dominating the node.js and javascript ecosystem is quite a contrast with
half a decade ago.

~~~
scarface74
Microsoft not only saw mobile coming, Windows Mobile (CE/Pocket PC) was out
years before Android and iOS and was decently popular as a smart phone OS. HTC
made dozens of models under its own brand and for other manufacturers.

 _But if techies pull their nose up for your platform, you have a long term
problem because techies are the people that produce the things that make your
platform long term viable._

Techies don’t matter. The people that were making Windows viable were
Microsoft themselves with Office, other major software vendors, and the dark
matter developers writing bespoke software that never saw the light of day
outside of internal use. There is a reason that VB6 still shows up in Stack
Overflow rankings almost 20 years after MS abandoned it.

What were developers going to do? Ignore 90% of the market and wait for the
year of Linux on the desktop?

IIS was used plenty for corporate Intranets and many low bandwidth sites. The
dark matter developers who develop for the enterprise and go home at night and
don’t post on HN or before that Slashdot are everywhere.

~~~
jillesvangurp
MS saw it coming, enjoyed some brief success with OEMs like htc around 2004,
and then Android and IOS steamrolled over it by the 2008-2010 time frame.
Sitting ducks basically.

I worked at Nokia back in the day. Nokia knew this as well (I read the
internal mailing lists, this was debated and speculated on heavily) and they
did not act in time either.

2005 was in retrospect the key moment to act. Neither Nokia nor MS managed to
do the right things. Apple and Google did. This was not exactly a secret
except it did not translate into meaningful action.

Worse, Nokia actually shut down several projects that in retrospect could have
saved their ass when it was handed to them by Apple in 2007 with the iphone
launch. E.g. S90 (touch UI for S60) was killed in favor of S60 (no touch
whatsoever until 2008) in 2005. Then in 2007 they went "oh fuck" and tried to
bring it back on S60 ultimately resulting in a prematurely launched device
that was everything the iphone wasn't (slow, ugly, unstable, etc.). Subsequent
attempts to fix it yielded no results. Bringing in windows phone years later
was an act of desperation.

Likewise Debian linux on tablets and phones was a thing in 2005 already. E.g.
the N700 and N800 tablets shipped with it long before the ipad or iphone were
a thing. Google ff-ing prototyped Android on these devices even before they
shipped their nexus phone. Also, the chrome browser that made Android so
successful? Guess what, Nokia had a webkit port for S60 in 2005 already.
Google literally built Android/Chrome ecosystem on top of R&D done by Nokia
(kernel drivers and optimizations, browsers, and other low level linux stuff).

I'm pretty sure MS has similar stories of death by management. Balmer was the
key person in charge at MS throughout this.

2005 is also the same year that AJAX browser apps started displacing desktop
UIs at a no doubt alarming rate for MS.

By the time MS was trying to push windows phone, their windows only
development stack was a huge part of their problem. They needed developers to
write apps for windows phone; especially developers already successful on IOS
and Android. Only problem: all the IOS developers were on Macs (because
Apple). And many of the Android developers were too (because they were pretty
awesome). A windows laptop was a really hard sell to developers at the time
because, well, they kind of sucked. Google was actively trying to compete with
MS and still best friends with Apple so, the two of them created a developer
friendly ecosystem outside of the MS bubble.

Because their developer ecosystem sucked, windows phone lacked apps, and
therefore it flopped. Techies matter if you are a tech company trying to
create and push new tech. If you are milking cobol, vb6, or some other ancient
crap: fire all the techies. Basically, that's what IBM and Oracle did. Techies
used to love IBM stuff. Not any more. Lets not talk about just how much they
loathe Oracle at this point.

So techies not only matter but losing them cost Balmer his job and regaining
their trust is a huge part of Nadella's current success.

~~~
scarface74
_2005 is also the same year that AJAX browser apps started displacing desktop
UIs at a no doubt alarming rate for MS._

Microsoft created AJAX - it was originally and ActiveX extension that only
worked in IE.

Even today, GSuite is not that popular among big corps.

 _By the time MS was trying to push windows phone, their windows only
development stack was a huge part of their problem. They needed developers to
write apps for windows phone; especially developers already successful on IOS
and Android. Only problem: all the IOS developers were on Macs (because
Apple). And many of the Android developers were too (because they were pretty
awesome). A windows laptop was a really hard sell to developers at the time
because, well, they kind of sucked. Google was actively trying to compete with
MS and still best friends with Apple so, the two of them created a developer
friendly ecosystem outside of the MS bubble._

Developers go where the money is. It’s not the tiny Indy developers that are
making most of the money on mobile. Windows Phone didn’t fail to get apps
because developers didn’t want to program on Windows. They didn’t see any
money in it. Heck even MS Office was available for iOS before Windows.

------
victor106
The new Microsoft is good and Nadella is awesome.

The one product that really sucks from this Microsoft is Azure. I commented in
a thread before Azure is the absolute worst cloud provider amongst the big
three after we thoroughly evaluated all three. AWS is the best and GCP is
next.

But due to management pressure we had to go with Azure.

Unfortunately the best product does not always win in the enterprise. (That is
why Steve Jobs never wanted to sell directly to enterprises).

~~~
TomMarius
Could you please go more in depth? What is so good about Amazon and what is
wrong about Azure? Thank you!

The thing is that it seems to be the opposite when you're looking at it as a
non-technical manager.

~~~
victor106
We had about 70 pages of solid analysis done on this that I unfortunately
can’t share but some of the highlights:-

1\. Terrible UI 2\. Unclear Documentation 3\. Frequent service outages. 4\.
Scalability issues, they were unable to scale a server in prod past 1000
connections where as in AWS/GCP they were able to 10x that with similar server
specs. Something to do with how server defaults were set 5\. Severe
performance degradation and network exhaustion.

To be fair there were some positives but nothing exceptional.

But end of the day it kind of doesn't matter as Azure is going to be used in
enterprises just because they have the legacy MSFT sales force that is tight
with managements high up in the org. No wonder MSFT hit $1T.

Its such a shame for our industry though. Engineering teams at other cloud
providers sweat and toil to get things right for their customers whereas MSFT
uses other means to beat them. Hopefully they can at least fix things after
they get in. But we know the chance of that happening is slim.

~~~
nojvek
It’s just not Azure. Microsoft has a cultural problem of treating designers as
second class citizens. Only some teams get the value of good design and UX.

------
mtgx
Personally, I'm more impressed by the company's President, Brad Smith, who
seems to want real change in terms of digital rights. He's the man behind
every single "pro user rights" Microsoft announcement you've seen in the past
few years.

Meanwhile, Nadella is the man behind every single user-hostile and user-
tracking feature you've seen introduced in Windows 10 (pretty much).

------
kerng
I think Nadella was driving more of a cultural change within the company.
Business wise the path to Azure and the cloud was pretty straightforward and
he stuck to it.

The question to ask might be, would Ballmer have done something else then
focus on cloud? Like focus more energy on phones for instance? That could have
led to a different financial result.

------
oneplane
I like line about market cap being a useless metric for your own success. It's
great on the meta-business side of things, but for real-world things it's
hardly relevant.

------
baybal2
I'm failing to see what has changed.

Point is that they still make the lion share of their revenue from milking PC
OEMs and plumpy corporate clients.

The fact that they changed tools for doing so, does not change the scheme at
large.

Their hosting service Azure just took over their AD and sharepoint clients
with some extra being the genuine new clientele

I'd say that under Nadella, they grew even more recalcitrant, and dependent on
their main revenue sources.

Ever got a visit from an MS salesperson recently? One that came to us to do AD
was almost begging us to switch to AD on Azure.

I'd also say that MS became a little bit akin google in that their new product
efforts fall into unending cycles of rebrandings, and half-hearted restarts. A
lot of oldtimer MS devs I knew say that now they got a genuine fear of every
new tech coming from MS almost customarily becoming an abandonware in 2-3
years term.

~~~
maxxxxx
“A lot of oldtimer MS devs I knew say that now they got a genuine fear of
every new tech coming from MS almost customarily becoming an abandonware in
2-3 years term.”

That’s how I have been feeling from around the time WPF came out...

And they reinforce that fear regularly.

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
UWP feels like it’s going to be abandonware.

------
sgustard
Is it time to add Microsoft to FAANG?

~~~
qlm
It probably should have always been there. I feel like the only reason Netflix
is included in that acronym is to stop it from looking a bit like a homophobic
slur.

------
macspoofing
It's true. It's always hard to figure out exactly how much credit the CEO
should get for successes or failures of the company, but since Nadella became
CEO Microsoft made a lot of good decisions that really set them up for the
future. Office365 is terrific. Azure is cementing itself as the default cloud
for enterprises and a solid 2nd or 3rd option outside of the enterprise.
Windows 10 is great.

------
jgalt212
The subscription model is great/easy, but from the tax side I am leaning more
towards the purchase model over AWS. I recently saw the Delta Airlines paid no
Federal Taxes last year because of accelerated depreciation costs. With AWS,
there is no accelerated depreciated, just current expenses. Anywho, I'm off to
a new data center ground-breaking ceremony.

------
m0zg
The higher the rise, the harder the fall. Great old-timers continue to jump
ship in droves, and new people only apply after getting rejected by FANGs of
the world. Given the size of the company this will take a while longer to play
out, but play out it will, eventually.

------
morsmodr
A good article, well rounded in nature by giving the pros and cons to
Microsoft's rebirth. How it impacts Microsoft internally and externally to the
market in general. We need more articles like this on the internet.

------
tus87
Is that a word for poor quality control?

------
gwern
Are CEOs underpaid or overpaid?

------
notananthem
Nadellaissance doesn't work at all and its breaking my soul, fuck off pithy
headlines.

That said, the board has done well picking leadership, Satya's driven a lot of
amazing cultural change, and business too.

~~~
glenneroo
> Nadellaissance doesn't work at all and its breaking my soul, fuck off pithy
> headlines.

Care to explain? Do you work there? "doesn't work at all" meaning he's lazy?

~~~
rconti
I think parent means the contrived term "Nadallaissance" as a headline
gimmick.

~~~
OscarDC
To be fair, it looks really weird as a word to a French speaker. It reads
almost like "adolescence" which roughly means "teenage years". I guess to an
English speaker it sounds more like "Renaissance" but even that I'm not sure.

~~~
crispinb
To an English speaker it looks more like "wanker"

------
thrower123
What a great difference between him and Ballmer. I'd not be surprised if they
eat Amazon's lunch on cloud computing in the next few years.

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simonebrunozzi
I would never, ever underestimate Andy Jassy. I consider him on par with Jeff
Bezos, in terms of leadership and execution, if not superior.

source: worked at AWS 2008-2014.

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partiallypro
Here is AWS's core weakness going forward...they compete with their own cloud
customers. From video streaming, to online shopping, to groceries, to
logistics...why would I (as a business consumer) want to fund my own
competition? Azure competes with none of its own customers, outside of perhaps
AI. Amazon is AWS's biggest enemy. Azure and GCS are going to catch up on
features, and customers are going to start fleeing when they realize they are
helping to fund their own demise and biggest competitor. Then there will be
margin pressure. The next 10 years in the cloud are going to be
interesting...and while people seem to think the Cloud already has huge
adoption, it's just beginning; and I think Microsoft more than any other will
be the biggest benefactor.

~~~
scarface74
GCP may catch up on “features” but with Google’s horrible reputation for both
poor customer support, and abandoning products, any decision maker should have
second thoughts on choosing GCP over AWS or Azure.

~~~
partiallypro
I don't disagree, I think Google will suffer in the Cloud game because of
their reputation to 180 and kill products. But I do think they will continue
to gain ground in both customers and features. As I said though, Azure will
likely benefit the most. The main reason Google will remain in the race...imo
is because there is still a deeply seeded hatred of Microsoft amount a big
enough part of the community.

~~~
scarface74
Decision makers spending five and six figures per month on infrastructure
don’t generally make decision based on “hatred” of a company.

Decision makers more often than not make choices based on some variant of “No
one ever got fired for buying $x” and $x rarely equals “anything made by
Google.”

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naringas
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