
Why Nadella's Second Year as Microsoft CEO Will Be a Lot Harder - william_stranix
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-04/why-nadella-s-second-year-as-microsoft-ceo-will-be-a-lot-harder
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weavie
"He has changed the way engineering teams are structured, largely eliminating
testers to speed software releases,... "

What could possibly go wrong?

Ok.. the sentence continues :

"and adding data scientists and designers to the engineering teams to ensure
all features are informed by rigorous testing and good design principles. "

I don't quite understand, how can data scientists help to catch bugs?
Automated testing?

~~~
drzaiusapelord
This is probably why so many of the Windows Updates this year broke critical
things, especially for enterprise. I feel Nadella is taking a "cheaper,
faster" approach which is fine and dandy in the otherwise non-critical mobile
space (mobile users are used to being treated like crap and having buggy
releases) but in enterprise there's simply a higher standard of quality.

I'm not sure what this means for MS. At our shop we now have to overly-test
all patches and then wait a minimum of 30 days to see what happens. This has
saved our bacon several times under Nadella's MS when before we only had to do
pretty casual testing of patches. This also means a lot of shops are no longer
rushing to get security patches in because of his negligence and corner
cutting. That means a less secure internet for all.

I really wish someone would step in and show Nadella that MS shouldnt just be
an Apple-lite and that catering to enterprise should be MS's main goal,
especially considering that's where almost all its revenue comes from. I'm
sure playing Steve Jobs-lite is fun for Nadella, but its about time he grew up
and started running with the big dogs. Frankly, I'm sick of the focus on
mobile and other popular technology taking away from the core competencies
that made some of these companies great. The recent actions and changes on OSX
are disheartening as well. Or how the steam behind the Chromebook is more or
less dead as Android eats the world.

Buying and updating an MS product shouldn't be a gamble. They're supposed to
be the conservative and stable big brother to the industry. Ironically, its
only now under new leadership that we have so much more incentive to move to
FOSS products. Its the same amount of headaches, except with FOSS I have no
licensing worries. Under Gates and Balmer, the commercial MS products were
less headaches and delivered a fair amount of value. Now just installing an
Exchange rollup is asking for a complete reimaging. We don't even bother with
service packs anymore. Might as well roll out a new image with that cooked in.
The fail rate on those is unacceptably high.

edit: why the downvotes? this echoes the sentiment at places like
stackexchange and /r/sysadmin. testing at MS has gone to hell and everyone
knows it. burying my comment does nothing to stop that reality. Its well known
Nadella personally redid the QA and testing parts of MS and those outcomes
have only gotten worse.

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pixl97
>Buying and updating an MS product shouldn't be a gamble. They're supposed to
be the conservative and stable big brother to the industry

You can tell who's young around here. In the distant past you could have put
IBM or Novel in that same blank 20 years ago. It wasn't till around the
release of server 2003 that anybody thought that.

Next, every product is a gamble these days. If you're connected to the net,
you're at risk. Before exploits may have taken weeks or months to fully
circulate, now 0-days are very common and other vendors release the exploit
information they have on your products in 90 days or less.

>Now just installing an Exchange rollup is asking for a complete reimaging

Again, I'm not sure when Exchange didn't explode in the past either.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
My personal experience is that MS has been solid since Windows 2000. I have
limited experience with the NT4 products but I remember those being just fine
as well (i maintained two NT4 servers for my employer and used to host images
for fark photoshop contests on one- shh).

Exchange has been SUPER solid. Its only 2010/2013 that we're seeing so many
issues with what should be a trivial update process.

I think there's a real drop in quality lately. Heck, in the XP days we never
bothered to test security updates. They all came in same day via WSUS.
Nowadays? No way.

~~~
hga
NT was even more solid before then, at least after the first 3.1 version which
I don't think I did more than kick the tires of. The drop in quality really
started after SP1 of NT 3.51, the 3rd major version.

Didn't Exchange have problems in the early part of this century, or earlier,
with its database being easy to bork and slow to restore?

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josefresco
"He's hit all the low-hanging fruit -- that said, these things were not easy
to do"

I don't think low hanging fruit means what Brad thinks it does.

~~~
colechristensen
The lowest fruit can be 8 feet off the ground ;)

~~~
josefresco
Low hanging != lowest hanging - But we're splitting hairs here, no worries-
just thought it was funny typical analyst speak.

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ZanyProgrammer
The obvious thing left out is that Nadella's second year involves the release
of Windows 10.

~~~
ZenoArrow
Exactly. The second year is going to be a sales high just because of Windows
10, they'd have to try pretty hard to mess that up.

~~~
deciplex
> they'd have to try pretty hard to mess that up

I agree, but I also think Microsoft stands ready to meet that challenge, if
recent history is anything to go by.

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api
As things are going, I'm really pleased. This is the first time I've been
excited about Microsoft since the middle 1990s.

~~~
widowlark
Agreed. I feel for the first time that Microsoft is bringing something unique
and even innovative to the tech industry

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DonCarlitos
Nadella has surpassed expectations to date, he has a plan, and is implementing
it in a rigorous and competent manner. I expect the next year will be a good
one for the "ruffians from Redmond." And I just can't stress enough how
important it was for Balmer to yield when he did. Steeped in the past and his
old ways, he wasn't the new leadership the firm required. Nadella is just
that.

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perseusprime
I feel there is good and bad. I am glad he moved to a more data driven and
agile culture. He is also empowering engineers in his organization. The bad is
that they all suffer from the windows mindset and spend a great deal of time
building for windows. With all the patents they own they literally own android
and yet they are not willing to allow android apps on windows phone or surface
pro 3. It feels like a slow march towards irrelevance.

~~~
untog
It's not really a case of "allowing" Android apps. It would take a monumental
engineering effort.

~~~
shmerl
It wouldn't have been so monumental if instead of locking everything into
Direct3D they'd used OpenGL instead. Here their own lock-in mentality will
eventually bite them hard. If MS will outgrow their dinosaur lock-in approach,
they can start supporting GL-Next on all of their platforms when it will come
out.

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cwyers
When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

Windows runs OpenGL just fine (look at anything iD Software puts out). It
doesn't run Google's custom Java VM, it doesn't offer AOSP APIs and it doesn't
offer Google Play Services. THOSE are the obstacles to running Android apps on
Windows, not your obsession with OpenGL vs DirectX.

~~~
shmerl
Is there OpenGL on their mobile platforms? It can run just fine in theory
there, but it's not available. Applications are not limited to Java, and often
rely on the graphics system a lot and there can be as well native code.

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aravan
MS $2.5B acquisition to attract youths?

~~~
revscat
The Mojang acquisition was likely a very smart move. I remember the day it
happened was the same day that Apple announced the Apple Watch. While I was
aware of the Watch, my kids were completely unaware of it, but both they and
their friends were _very_ aware that Microsoft had purchased Mojang. They were
very concerned about it and it was the topic of much conversation that night.

If MS is able to utilize the popularity of Minecraft in the <18 set to their
advantage...

