

Microsoft: Satya Nadella steers Windows giant to recovery - feroz1
http://bbc.com/news/technology-29900969

======
jeswin
IMO Microsoft has made progress, but has clearly not turned the corner.
Nadella made a good start, it just isn't enough.

Let's keep the hate aside and forget MS's past. The biggest problem facing MS
now is the loss of mind share on the Windows platform. The brightest minds
aren't programming on Microsoft platforms if you look at colleges and
conferences worldwide. This cannot be reversed; Open Source products are now
technically superior, the community is very well organized, and it is free.
Interesting research, frameworks, libraries and programming languages spawn on
Open Source before they show up (if ever) on Windows. Windows engines have run
out; though they will keep going for a while.

MS had a great run for over twenty years because the entire world ran on DOS
and then Windows. That gave them enormous influence and power, power to make
mistakes, fail over and over, and yet succeed. The real challenge will be in
adapting to a future in which Windows is irrelevant. The long-term future of
Azure, Windows Phone, Windows Desktop, Windows Server and their overpriced
Office Tools looks bleak to me.

~~~
elorant
_Open Source products are now technically superior_

Name one open source IDE which is superior to Visual Studio. Or an open source
database that is better than SQL Server. Not to mention C# which imho is the
best language out there (arguably .NET though isn’t that good). I won’t argue
that there are aspects of the ecosystem that can’t hold a candle to open
source solutions especially in the administration tools area.

As for community, have you bothered to take a look at MSDN? There is an insane
amount of free information online for their APIs. In terms of documentation MS
is light years ahead of everyone.

Lastly, the “Windows/Microsoft is irrelevant” argument is very prevalent
amongst our ranks but only there. MS might be irrelevant in our industry but
in the enterprise, where by the way the big bucks are, they’re dominant.

~~~
cabalamat
> Name an open source database that is better than SQL Server.

OK I'll name two: SQLite and MongoDB. I suspect that both of these are better
than SQL Server on criteria I care about: ease of deployment on Linux systems,
lack of issues around licensing.

~~~
sz4kerto
> ease of deployment on Linux systems, lack of issues around licensing

Midnight Commander or Emacs is better than SQL Server if those are the
criteria you care about.

------
swalsh
I have this theory, a companies culture is essential to being successful in a
particular market... but that same culture also is the reason why it is not
able to excel in another seemingly related area. The hard part, is that they
seemingly are capable of participating in that market as it transitions, but
they are probably not optimized for this new market, and in this winner takes
the majority way of technology, they will get beat 100% of the time. Let's
consider the history of companies, and technology.

When computers were large, and only government and fortune 500's could afford
them IBM was a dominate force. When they got cheaper/more common. They still
participated, but Microsoft came to dominate this new particular market. As
Bill gates himself said, the hardware was now a commodity (but not for IBM's
customers) it was the software that was valuable. It took a different company
culture to rule that market.

In mobile, hardware has not been successfully made into a commodity. Apple as
a mobile company looked more like IBM as a mainframe company. So far they've
done a great job at sticking to their niche. They excel at making consumer
friendly hardware devices, with supporting software.

Google obviously has mastered building free cloud services for consumers,
however they seem to fail in every endeavor that's different. They struggle to
understand people as people, and really haven't developed a company culture to
build great products for them.

I think Microsoft is making progress on reducing the scope of sub optimal
market's they are attacking, and is currently in the process of defining a
culture to attack this new narrower scope. They may just be successful.

~~~
wozniacki
Why is that American tech companies fail at the conglomerate-ization of their
various units?

Has any American tech company been able to successfully pull off, making
markedly different products aimed at very different consumers and still corner
a large market share in those areas?

Companies abroad don't seem to have this problem. It is not very uncommon to
find the same brand selling sewing machines and precision optics and a whole
host of other products, in the same market, without much brand dilution.

Is there something uniquely limiting about the American market that prevents
an Intel or HP from making medical imaging equipment, drill bits for the
petroleum exploration and a slew of other things, leveraging the same brand
but in self-composed business units?

Critics have even called for Microsoft to be broken up in to two - consumer
and enterprise - divisions. But why?

Samsung sells everything from rice cookers to acoustic equipment.

Yamaha sells everything from motorbikes to soundbars.

If push comes to shove, why not just have multiple CEOs for the same
Microsoft, like a Deutsche Bank? [1]

[1]
[https://www.db.com/ir/en/content/management_board.htm](https://www.db.com/ir/en/content/management_board.htm)

~~~
tixocloud
The following is my 2 cents based on opinion from what I've learned in
business school.

The American way is about focusing on your core competencies and what you're
good at. Banks outsource their IT services, real estate and etc to free up
capital to focus on their banking services. This is what they've taught at my
particular business school and this is how business "should" be done. It's
just not efficient to spread yourself into other markets.

Asian businesses sometimes form large conglomerates because of the lack of
infrastructure in place in emerging economies. There aren't many smaller
companies that can make rice cookers. There aren't many entrepreneurs that
will want to make innovative rice cookers. Access to capital and VC money, I
would assume, is really tough in Asia. Samsung makes chips but there's no
buyer for those electronic chips so they start to make products that use those
chips and handle every aspect of the supply chain all the way to the end-
consumer. You'll see that in North America, many companies are broken up to
focus on just 1 part of the chain. Other parts of the chain may be less
profitable and often gets divested or spun off. Shareholder pressure sometimes
dictate that.

~~~
wozniacki
Hmm. Interesting.

Historically, was there ever a period when American companies - tech or not -
ever dabbled in this sort of thing, I describe? Or they simply haven't
experimented in conglomerates, even prior to the WWs.

I am trying to see if this was a measure, reactive to some historic event or
if American makers from day one, have always preferred specialization in
vertically siloed businesses.

Increasingly, software companies like Amazon (with Kindle, Fire phone, Fire
TV, Echo etc) are finding that they are having to foray into things like
hardware which they are ill-suited for, even if ideally they'd very much like
to remain software companies.

These new developments are interesting to watch.

------
skc
Microsoft has been "dying" for as long as I can remember.

The truth, however, is that they have continued to be a very healthy and well
run business for far, far longer than any of their peers can ever claim.

The "Microsoft is in crisis" meme has always been popular but has never even
remotely come close to being true.

~~~
mattmanser
I don't know, I remember Lotus seemingly collapsing overnight.

One minute it was playing catchup all the time, but still a major player in
office software, the next, it was just gone.

~~~
simonh
The same pretty much happened to Nokia and Blackberry. Those were all one
trick ponies though. MS is a huge company with numerous product ranges
operating in many different markets. Many of those businesses are doing very
well, and have been for a decade or more. If any one of their Office,
exchange, SQL Server, Azure, Windows desktop, etc businesses almost completely
failed the others would largely be fine.

They can't afford to be complacent of course. They need to be able to crack
new markets and execute effectively on their current products. Their failure
in mobile and two botched updates to Windows are very worrying. But Satya was
instrumental in building their Azure business, a very successful new revenue
generating product in a space not generally seen as an MS strength.

------
FlyingSnake
I've said this earlier and as an iOS developer, I am excited for the new
Microsoft. Some of the best minds in programming (ScottGu, SHanselmann, etc)
are behind this new face of MS and they're well know for their contribution to
opens source.

I think this is a win-win-win situation for Developers, Enterprises and
Microsoft.

------
josefresco
I'm struck by how the tech media deems every other Windows release a
"disaster" that Microsoft has to recover from, yet Windows marches on and each
version is actually quite stable and usable.

From the article "In desktop, the upcoming Windows 10 promises to fix the
damage wrought by Windows 8, appealing to both desktop users, as well as the
"corridor warrior" tablet devotees."

I have run every Windows OS since 3.1 and used all of the "duds" exclusively
(as did almost the entire PC world).

I'm currently using Windows 8 and if you get beyond the "surface outrage"
repeated insistently by the tech media, it's the same Windows that you use
(and love - gasp!) exactly like Windows 7, or Vista, or XP, or 2000 or 98.

We all need to look beyond the "2 hour" blog review which all to commonly
throws an entire product under the bus when the author spent all of a couple
hours using it.

------
latch
I've reached the indifference stage of my relationship with Microsoft. They
just aren't relevant to me. And I don't say that insultingly: tech is a huge
ecosystem and there are more companies that aren't relevant to me than are.
(but I understand they're super relevant to a lot of people. cool.)

Therefore, I feel that I can unemotional say: the patent lawsuits are a
massive issue when it comes to talking about a "new" Microsoft. It's a major
issue for me. Software patents are bad, and as long as they're using them
offensively (and at this point, it would take a very long time before I
trusted them to use them defensively), I'm not sure how justified the
celebration of "open" and "new" is.

~~~
josefresco
Microsoft clearly isn't alone (on both sides) in the software patent fiasco.
I'm curious, what companies approach software patents correctly in your eyes?

~~~
latch
I'll be disappointed if you tell me that I'm wrong, but I'm under the
impression that Google has been stellar with respect to patents.

The only thing I'm aware of is that HTC used Google patents to counter-sue
Apple a while ago, but that seems to fall under the "defensive" usage.

At one point Microsoft was vocal about its patent portfolio being only
defensive. Then mobile happened. I'm not sure if Apple, Samsung and others
also did such an about-face.

~~~
josefresco
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone_patent_wars](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone_patent_wars)

Basically no one company's hands are clean, whether it be "defensive" in
nature or not, patents are a necessary evil.

Some highlights relating to Google which I guess if you were to pick a
favorite, Google comes out decently as most of their patent buys were
defensive.

2011, Jun 30: A consortium of companies made up of Apple, EMC Corporation,
Ericsson, Microsoft, Research In Motion and Sony win against Google[50] in an
auction of over 6,000 Nortel mobile-related telecommunications patents for
$4.5 billion USD.[51][52]

2011, Jul 11-12: Google acquires 1,029 Patents from IBM for an undisclosed
amount.[64][65]

2011, Aug 15: Google announces its intention to buy Motorola Mobility for
$12.5 billion USD. Eighteen of Motorola's patents could potentially be used
for defense or countersuits against Apple and Microsoft, and may influence the
smartphone war. These patents may change the balance of power, and force the
various players to settle their lawsuits.[71][72]

2011, Aug 17: Google acquires 1,023 more patents from IBM for an undisclosed
amount (not revealed until 13 Sep 2011).[75]

2011, Sep 07: HTC countersues Apple using nine patents from Google. The move
is seen as a possible first step for Google giving direct support in lawsuits
involving manufacturers using Android.[81][82][83][84]

2013, December 23: Google initiates legal action against Rockstar Consortium
with a countersuit filed in San Jose, California.[141]

------
xbmcuser
Microsoft is changing under Nadella but you can't tell if it has recovered for
a few years yet. Windows and Office are under attack from multiple fronts.
More people are joining OSX every year. Schools and other institutions are
moving to Chromebooks and Google apps. It might not seem a big deal at the
moment but Microsoft major strength was the they had people locked in and used
to their apps. Now web based games and applications are slowly weaning people
off the Microsoft ecosystem. Effect of it wont show for a few years yet so
Microsoft has a chance to be the part of it. And Nadella's moves so far have
shown that they see it happening and have started positioning it for it. But
its to soon to tell if they have recovered or not.

------
pearjuice
Recovery of what exactly? Just because a bunch of mid-twenties think Microsoft
isn't hip anymore doesn't mean Microsoft is somehow slowly collapsing. They
are still making billions in profits, their stock is climbing and all of their
platforms are rising in popularity.

~~~
adventured
To be specific, their sales have never stopped climbing, and their profits are
sitting near all-time highs ($22 billion in profit last fiscal year).

The only reason this is a popular topic right now, is because the stock is at
$50, thanks to the stock market bubble. The CEO had absolutely nothing to do
with that. That's purely multiple expansion, not earnings growth. Apple is
currently enjoying the same exact multiple expansion, which has pushed its
stock back up despite zero earnings growth since fiscal 2012.

~~~
hnnewguy
> _That 's purely multiple expansion, not earnings growth._

Where do you see "multiple expansion" and "no earnings growth"?

MSFT:

    
    
      Year  ~P/E    EPS
    
      2010  20.24  $2.10
    
      2011  12.09  $2.69
    
      2012  9.70   $2.00
    
      2013  14.50  $2.58
    
      2014  13.94  $2.69

------
marcofloriano
Microsoft is behind in the game. It´s starting (only now) to focus on cloud
and mobile. It´s like they are chasing the big players. But they should be
leading the changes in the industry. IMO it´s a natural consequence of the
past decade's focus: personal computers. To be the top player at 1999 on this
high demand market, they had to focus. And now they need to reinvent their
entire business. It´s hard, but hey have some advantages: good people (as this
new CEO) and money, tons of it.

~~~
josefresco
Azure was launched 2010, and if you don't count Windows Mobile, Windows Phone
was also launched in 2010. You could argue that one or both were not
"significant efforts" but they certainly didn't start this year.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
I remember ballmer saying something about "we're all in" for cloud just after
I started. Also, I started in 2007 and windows mobile was definitely a thing,
if not the right thing. Cloud and mobile have been priorities for awhile.

------
higherpurpose
This seems like a very premature post. Microsoft still hasn't tackled mobile,
and the latest reports show Windows Phone to be declining at a fast rate. Its
market share in China is now less than at launch.

~~~
bejuizb123
China is an insanely complicated marketplace (No offense meant). You cannot
judge a company or predict its downfall, just by failing at China. I think its
still a market that needs a lot of studying. Lots of companies have failed
there, and changed their strategy. US marketplace is the backbone for all of
these companies.

~~~
higherpurpose
The losses are happening all over, not just China. In China they've seen the
biggest loss though, at a time when Apple for example is doing very well, and
of course Android has like 90 percent market share in China already. The
Chinese market has _rejected_ Windows Phone.

