
How Satya Nadella revived Microsoft - ghosh
http://www.afr.com/brand/boss/how-satya-nadella-revived-microsoft-in-just-three-years-20161220-gtf1i7?&utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=nc&eid=socialn:twi-14omn0055-optim-nnn:nonpaid-27/06/2014-social_traffic-all-organicpost-nnn-afr-o&campaign_code=nocode&promote_channel=social_twitter
======
d--b
People at Microsoft said the wind of change was blowing long before Nadella
took the job. They timed the announcement of Nadella to coincide with
deliveries of new products / open platforms. The whole thing was to change the
image of Microsoft: New products + new face = new Microsoft.

It's not like Nadella fired every one and started afresh.

~~~
jonknee
> It's not like Nadella fired every one and started afresh.

He announced huge layoffs (18,000 people) almost as soon as he took over. A
lot of Nokia people, but also 5,500 people not related to mobile and 1,400 of
them at HQ. A year later he made another huge cut of 7,800 people.

~~~
simonh
More evidence for d--b's point. Firing 18k people at Microsoft's scale isn't
even close to burning it down and starting from scratch. It's also not
something a newly minted CEO would be able to get past the board on such short
notice. It must have been planned in advance. Whatever you say about Balmer,
someone at MSFT knew how to flawlessly execute a masterful transition plan. I
though Apple did a good job, but MSFT nailed it.

~~~
piaste
> Firing 18k people at Microsoft's scale isn't even close to burning it down
> and starting from scratch.

Eh... According to Wikipedia, MS had 114k employees total as of mid-2016.
Given that, I'd say a 18k layoff definitely counts as a big deal.

~~~
mbesto
> It's not like Nadella fired _every one_ and started afresh.

~~~
acchow
HN is frustratingly pedantic sometimes.

"It's not like Nadella fired every one and started afresh." is a
colloquialism. d--b was basically saying "it's not like Nadella did a major
overhaul.

With which jonknee disagrees, citing a layoff of 18,000. To which simonh
claims is not a major overhaul since Microsoft is nebulously enormous. To
which piaste disagrees, as 18k was actually 15.7% of the company.

You can all continue to debate whether or not 15.7% is a major overhaul,
whether the actual people they fired were significant, etc...

But you quoting a colloquialism and asking us all to take it literally is not
helpful to the discussion, or the culture of HN.

~~~
mbesto
> HN is frustratingly pedantic sometimes.

I don't disagree, but the parent was being just as pedantic as I was. Perhaps
my snark was an attempt to end the petty discussion (apparently, improperly
so). Read these two statements in the context of the discussion:

> burning it down and starting from scratch.

> started afresh

15.7% _is_ a major overhaul, but IMO in no way insinuates "burning something
down" or "starting afresh". Do you think either of those statements is
consistent with a 15% cut in workforce?

PS - 12,500 of those 18,000 came from Nokia[0].

> _with 12,500 of those coming out of the streamlining of Microsoft’s acquired
> Nokia assets._

[0] - [https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/17/microsoft-to-cut-
workforce...](https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/17/microsoft-to-cut-workforce-
by-18000-this-year-moving-now-to-cut-first-13000/)

------
yaseer
Although I think Nadella has made some good changes to company culture,
there's a lot more variables that influence a company's performance than the
CEO, just as there's a lot more variables that influence a country's Economic
performance than a ruling party.

The piece does that all-too-common simplification of providing a single cause
to explain the fluctuation is MSFT's fortunes, a form of cognitive bias I
believe. We like simple stories for complex phenomena.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_the_single_cause](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_the_single_cause)

~~~
rev_null
What if the lesson is not that Nadella is a great CEO, but that Ballmer was
actually terrible?

~~~
exabrial
Agree, 100%... One more variable I think it's also a combination of timing
too. For example: Tim Cook is busy destroying Apple's product lineup forcing a
lot of people to reconsider Microsoft.

~~~
marricks
Comments like this are a dime a dozen on Reddit and Hacker News but Apple is
doing fine.

Higher MacBook Pro sales, highest ever iPhone sales. Services doing well...

I'd say their biggest problem is MBP pricing is high and a stagnate desktop
line.

MBP pricing is typical for a redesign, not even high if you include inflation.
They'll likely go down with time as they have in the past.

And desktops... Well hopefully there's something this year...

~~~
aklemm
But they're stuck with two distinct platforms: iOS (touch) and macOS (non-
touch) while the hardware the world wants is not so binary. Basically, that we
can't touch the screens of the high cost workstations and laptops where we do
our creative work, kind of brings down the whole ecosystem.

~~~
slrz
I consider this to be one of their better decisions. With workstation and
laptops, you already have higher-precision input devices available that also
are less prone to causing fatigue.

For some specialty application I can see the usefulness of digitizer pen input
like some Thinkpad X series models (e.g. X220T). But fat-finger touch? What
for?

~~~
aklemm
For big movements (getting a window out of the way, viewing media, etc.),
anything collaborative, and for anytime the machine is being used in an
awkward position (so when not seated comfortably focused on inputting).

~~~
sedachv
Who is advocating for this besides you? Current Apple displays are some of the
worst computer displays ever when it comes to fingerprints and grime - they
would have to get rid of glass. I have been using an X60 for about five years
and have literally used the stylus twice, just to see that it works. My wife
is a commercial artist and uses Wacom tablets. If she had wanted a drawable
display she would have found some way to trick me into paying for a Cintiq by
now. The collaborative thing is a non-market - the last time I used a digital
whiteboard was in 2006.

I can see a giant tablet with a desktop stand and keyboard becoming the new PC
as a more plausible scenario than the iMac/OS X getting a touch UI.

~~~
aklemm
My apologies. I wasn't aware of you and your wife and that you guys had this
all figured out.

------
mark_l_watson
I really like the direction Microsoft is going in, especially Surface devices,
the very nice Office 355 service, and Azure. The one area where I think they
have failed horribly is in the phone market.

The lack of having a solid phone that interacts with their other devices, and
has a rich app/developer ecosystem cost them my business recently:

I am in my 60s, and comfortably semi-retired. After decades of being a Linux-
as-much-as-possible enthusiast, I now want my interaction with my devices to
be as easy and workable as possible. The time I still spend writing and
software development should be as efficient as possible, in the deep work
sense I want to spend just a few hours a day producing things hopefully useful
to society, as effectively as possible.

Recently I spent a month evaluation of staying with Apple or getting a Surface
Pro. I stuck with getting a new MacBook and with my iPad Pro because of the
availability of the iPhone (I am still on Android, but will switch soon), with
nothing comproble from Microsoft.

Whatever it takes, I think Microsoft should get back in the phone business
with a winning product.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
They're pretty aware of this. But breaking a duopoly like this requires more
than just a "great phone". Microsoft has had and does have "great phones", but
without the app ecosystem to back them, it doesn't matter that the phones are
great.

The Windows Phone might run faster, have a longer battery life, and just work
better than the comparable Android flagship, but since you can get freaking
Pokémon GO on the Android, people will buy the latter.

Microsoft is basically waiting for a chance at a paradigm shift in what it
means to have a smartphone, so that they can release something you can get
nowhere else. In the meantime, they're kinda just treading water and keeping
their mobile OS workable and modern.

~~~
ddito
I think it's more that the port of Windows to phones was so broken that they
saw that there is no way they will get the platform into a stable state in the
next year. It..just..so..broken.

I had a lumia 950 and with the crashes, lack of apps and UX horror I bought a
OnePlus after 2 months amd never regreted it.

I heard that Windows Phone 7 was nice and everything went downhill with WP8
but I wouldnt know personally

~~~
samuell
WP10 is great these days. Switched from Android a few months back, to a Lumia
650, and will never go back to the bloated, resource heavy battery eater which
is Android.

Fewer apps, turns out to be a pro, I've found. I'm realizing how much less
distracted I am without every app and its dog installed. Also I'm realizing
how well most things work via the web anyway (such as youtube), without
requiring me to be logged in and sending rich tracking data to Google all the
time.

------
jernfrost
Refreshing to see somebody who is not an asshole succeed. Too many people seem
to have concluded that success can only be achieved by being some variation of
asshole whether it is Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Steve Balmer or Larry Ellison.

Mind you I am a huge fan of Steve Jobs, despite the fact that I think he also
was kind of an asshole. People are complicated I don't think Steve succeeded
because he was an asshole but due to the other qualities he had not related to
being an asshole.

And people of course change. Bill Gates seems like a much nicer man today than
he was when he ran Microsoft. I guess much the same happened with Steve Jobs.
He was a better person in his older years than in his younger.

~~~
v3gas
How is (or was?) Bill Gates an asshole?

~~~
gozur88
You need to read the "fuck counter" story. I woldn't work for someone like
this:

>"Bill doesn’t really want to review your spec, he just wants to make sure
you’ve got it under control. His standard M.O. is to ask harder and harder
questions until you admit that you don’t know, and then he can yell at you for
being unprepared."

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-
rev...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/)

~~~
paulddraper
This hardly makes Bill Gates look like an asshole

> He had my spec in his hand!

> I noticed that there were comments in the margins of my spec. He had read
> the first page!

> He had read the first page of my spec and written little notes in the
> margin!

> Considering that we only got him the spec about 24 hours earlier, he must
> have read it the night before.

> He was asking questions. I couldn’t stop noticing that he was flipping
> through the spec and THERE WERE NOTES IN ALL THE MARGINS. ON EVERY PAGE OF
> THE SPEC. HE HAD READ THE WHOLE GODDAMNED THING AND WRITTEN NOTES IN THE
> MARGINS.

> He Read The Whole Thing! [OMG SQUEEE!]

I've talked to people who met Bill in person and by all accounts be was smart,
driven, pretty nerdy, and reasonable.

------
seunosewa
Somehow, they managed to give Satya the credit for things that, by their own
admission, started under his predecessor, such as Office for iPad, the One
Microsoft initiative, and the rebound in Microsoft's stock price. They didn't
let the facts get in the way of their heartwarming story.

~~~
3adawi
this is the case for most articles about 'reformers', always selling a story
rather than the truth

~~~
scholia
People like stories. They don't like details. This is why we have HN ;-)

------
johnnycarcin
I can't speak to the product side because up until a year ago I hardly used
any MSFT products but I can say that the culture that has been brought by
Satya, and likely his reports, is one of the reasons I joined MSFT after being
a longtime hater.

When I was approached to come work for MSFT I said "no" right away. The person
recruiting me said "just listen to our pitch and then you can say 'no' if you
want". After hearing Satya talk about where he wants the company to go and
what it'll take to get there I had a 180 degree switch on how I felt about
MSFT. I talked with some other old-timers who were there to see if things
really had changed and they all told me that it was a slow progression but
things were certainly changing for the better.

Now it's totally possible that they all are just good at selling to people but
it was enough to get me to join and 95% of the time I'm glad I did.

~~~
ditados
You aren't at a subsidiary, obviously. As the tide shifts to pushing Azure,
the sales people are going ballistic and circle customers like sharks, with
insane targets.

I joined a short while ago and deeply regret it, since all we do is sales.
Even OSS is treated as a pure sales play.

~~~
johnnycarcin
I actually think we are in the same roles (CSA) :).

I have seen the same thing you are talking about and it is certainly one of
the shitty parts of the job. Luckily I've done enough with the sales group
around me that they are starting to understand that you don't sell Azure like
you would O365 or whatever. There are still days where I walk away thinking
that I must be on a different planet but the time I get to spend working with
customers and building cool shit makes up for all of the bs.

------
intended
>Nadella, meanwhile, is keen to stress that the goodwill and positive
headlines the company is receiving is only of temporary importance. The main
responsibility is ensuring Microsoft remains on the right path in the long-
term.

Key point. I'm very happy with Microsoft, and have been since they first
announced the surface line and the various other moves they've made to make a
single OS.

But They've crossed the threshold of the "holy crap? MSFT did that?" And they
are in the "well, this needs to work a whole lot better for me to stick
around."

The fact that the CEO is aware of this already is a good sign. Looking forward
to the surface event this year.

------
camdenlock
Having spent my youth childishly ranting against the evils of M$, and now
coming to terms with the fact that I sincerely use VS Code because it's great,
I can't shake the frequent uncanny feeling that I'm stuck in an episode of
Sliders.

~~~
ino
DOS 6.22 + WIN 3.11 were great.

Windows 7 was great.

Windows 10 is not. Having a good cross platform code editor surely isn't going
to make me use Windows 10.

~~~
bsaul
Dos + win 3.11 was an absolute crap. Had a mac at the time and i couldn't
understand how people could cope with that horror. Anything, from atari to
amiga to mac was obviously better. Windows started to be usable starting
windows 95. Before that, it was mainly a hack.

~~~
scholia
Windows 3.x was wonderful if you had DOS, which was almost everyone did. DOS,
WordStar (or Word Perfect) and Lotus 1-2-3.

It was really cheap [1], and it ran on top of DOS, so you didn't lose anything
you already had. The big advantage was access to a GUI and new graphical
applications. If you didn't like it, you didn't have to run it, but it was
always more useful than the old-style character-based DOS front-ends.

The alternatives to Windows 3.x involved paying up to 20x more for a different
operating system, installing it, and possibly losing what you already had, OR
dumping your whole expensive system and buying another expensive system,
buying expensive new apps, and relearning everything.

Worse, you'd be buying another expensive system while losing access to Lotus
1-2-3 (on which your commercial life probably depended).

The real alternatives weren't the 68000-based Amiga/Atari/Mac etc, they were
DesQview and DR GEM.

Not sure why DesQview failed. However, Apple did Microsoft a huge favor by
suing Digital Research and effectively killing GEM (except on the Atari ST).

[1] From my faulty memory, it was something like $40 when business
applications cost $200 to $600. OS/2 cost around $500 and Sun was charging
$950 for Unix.

~~~
yuhong
This is a good time to mention the OS/2 2.0 fiasco, which went so badly it is
one of my favorite topics.

~~~
scholia
Mine too ;-)

------
bcg1
They credit Nadella with increasing the stock price... but MSFT performance is
basically the same as the overall NASDAQ composite (of course I'm sure MSFT
itself is a large portion of that index) as well as the larger S&P 500 index.

[http://stockcharts.com/freecharts/perf.php?$COMPQ,MSFT,$SPX&...](http://stockcharts.com/freecharts/perf.php?$COMPQ,MSFT,$SPX&n=4556&O=011000)

~~~
awa
you dont see it behind by 30+% in 2013 to nasdaq and now meeting it to equal
now.

See:
[http://stockcharts.com/freecharts/perf.php?$COMPQ,MSFT,$SPX&...](http://stockcharts.com/freecharts/perf.php?$COMPQ,MSFT,$SPX&n=3006&O=011000)

.

------
awinder
I think Microsoft has done a great job of transforming to being very brand-
conscious and these stories are both a recognition of that from the press, and
a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy (they talk about how different they are,
the press does, then they point to the press and dress up their UX, it's very
self-feeding in a way). That said -- I can't say I've experienced great
technical changes in the products from microsoft that I do use, at least yet.
Windows 10 is still windows underneath, and I've run into some real rough
patches on windows 10 on my tower setup. Xbox controllers are still breaking
down after several months. Their Cloud offering just blows my mind in a bad
way in almost every interaction I've had the displeasure of experiencing.

So I read articles like this and look at the rebranding and really have a hard
time deciding whether I want to point to these things as at least having a
good direction, and showing that they understand that they need to care about
these things. But then I'm dismayed at the execution. Does anyone else have
the same thing going on?

------
starik36
I am not sure how he "revived" Microsoft.

1\. They've completely dropped the Phone market under him. As in gave up.

2\. They are not in the personal assistant game at all. Alexa & Google have
that market all to themselves.

3\. The educational market is steadily switching to Chromebooks. The new
generation of kids will likely not even know how to use MS Office.

4\. On the back end, they've made .NET work on Mac and Linux. This is great
for me, since I don't have to worry about Windows Server licenses, but doesn't
this eat into their large cash cow?

5\. SQL Server - the other cash cow, is great, but free alternatives will
start affecting the bottom line.

6\. Windows 10 rollout stalled very much short of their stated goal of being
on 1 billion devices.

~~~
hunterwerlla
1\. The phone line that was losing a ton of money

2\. This is being worked on, there is cortana for cars, pc's and phones, so it
would make sense for it to expand to even more devices in the future.

3\. This is the point of windows 10 cloud, which recently leaked.

4\. Windows is really not the cash cow of Microsoft, getting more people into
the ecosystem is better for buisiness.

5\. Free alternatives have existed forever, alternatives that you could argue
are the same or better, recently SQL Server was ported to linux which actually
should shore up its market share, and even possibly increase it.

6\. True but does this actually matter that much?

~~~
starik36
You are kind of proving my point that Microsoft, in fact, was not "revived" by
Nadella.

2\. Maybe it is being worked on and maybe it'll even be great. The problem is
that people don't replace personal assistants every 2 years. They lost the
first mover advantage.

4\. Windows for enterprises, specifically server versions are cash cows. I
fail to see the value (to Microsoft) of a developer getting into the .NET
ecosystem if they intend to run your code on Linux.

5\. It's true that free alternatives have always been around. But now, they
are reasonably good. And more importantly, good enough.

6\. Yes, it does. It's actually one of the few places where they could
monetize people getting into their ecosystem.

------
anjc
Ehh. All the credit being given to Nadella are initiatives that Ballmer not
only started, but has to push against the will of the board to pursue.

I had major hope for Microsoft in the last few years, and I'm starting to see
Nadella's MS slowly unravelling all of the good progress. I just can not
believe that Windows Phone adoption got as high as 15% in Europe and then
under Nadella they immediately dropped it like it was dirt. The hardware and
software was superior in every way to every alternative, and this deprecation
has made many of their other successful manoeuvres pointless.

It's mindboggling to me that they're crediting Nadella with Surface and
Hololens, in particular.

~~~
ghaff
Leaders generally get an outsized share of blame and an outsized share of
credit for results that become apparent on their watch. I agree that Microsoft
didn't suddenly turn 180 degrees the day Nadella took charge.

As for the phone though? Microsoft lost that one a long time ago. They
can/should continue to milk other client cash cows and continue with other
businesses like Xbox that are peripheral but they're well-established in. But
phone would require an all-in push and it's hard to see how that would make
sense for Microsoft as a distant #3.

Focusing on Azure doesn't preclude them doing something like that of course;
Microsoft's a big company. But I can't fault them from deciding that they
largely missed mobile and moving on. (I'm unconvinced Surface and Hololens
will amount to anything significant either but I don't really see those as a
focus.)

~~~
anjc
Oh Phones are gone. Finito. But they weren't a few years ago. They were taking
a sharp incline with the 9xx range of Lumias in Europe, and they only declined
when Microsoft whipped all Lumias from stores and released nothing for a year,
the 950 range, which they stopped supporting before they'd even stopped
selling it. W10M is effectively still in beta and there are no phones to use
it now.

But in the meantime they'd been pushing Continuum, W10/Phone integration, UWP,
Xbox/Phone integration and so on. So removing phones tarnished a large chunk
of their product line imo. Same for the Band. There's no competitor to it,
still, and it's also gone. Same for Kinect. Same for Onedrive subscriptions,
etc etc.

This is what worries me about Nadella's MS and it's the same thing that
worries me about Cook's Apple...treating the product line like commodities
without acknowledging the importance of the ecosystem.

Having said that, as you say, they're a big company. My perspective is solely
from that of a devices user.

~~~
pjmlp
> Oh Phones are gone. Finito.

They are doing ok with hybrid tablets though. Here in Germany it started to be
more common to see hybrid tablets with W10 than Android on the retail stores.

So I still have some (tiny) hope of them succeeding with phablets with SIM
card on them.

In any case, I am more willing to just adopt one of my Lumias when my S3 dies,
than sponsoring OEMs that never update their devices.

~~~
ghaff
People I know with Surface Pros really like them. I'd consider one myself
except that

\- They're too pricey for a casual "I'll give it a try"

\- I don't otherwise use Microsoft anything any longer

\- For travel, I'm pretty much sold on Chromebooks which are easier to type on
with no table and just my lap.

But arguably Microsoft has done a better job of bringing together laptops and
tablets for creation of typical business content than anyone.

~~~
pjmlp
Here in Europe I see Surfaces at every retail store, while Chromebooks tend to
only be available online, sometimes I do spot one on the stores.

However I don't like them, personally I think they could have been a better
proposal if Google had decided to leverage Dart, and offer a Smalltalk
environment on them. Even if that required some kind of developer mode.

As it is, my trusty Eee PC 1215B is what I use for travelling.

~~~
ghaff
I suspect a lot more marketing/co-marketing dollars go into the Surface from
Microsoft than go into Chromebooks from Google and the device manufacturers.

My sense is that education is the only market where Chromebooks have been
pushed at all aggressively. Like many things Google does, it's not clear that
they have a really fleshed out strategy for the Chromebook.

They're also not really targeted for doing local development though people do
use them in various somewhat unnatural ways.

Although they can't do everything I can do on my MacBook, they're often
suitable for my needs when traveling and I appreciate the small size of the
Asus Flip.

~~~
scholia
The Chromebook is pretty much failing outside the US education market, where
there were non-technical reasons behind its success. Also, schools don't buy
them retail.

The OEM trend is to design for Windows 10 and then offer a version of the same
hardware as a Chromebook. This is a tough sale as people expect Chromebooks to
be cheaper but they are not.

[They are not cheaper for two reasons. (1) OEMs pay very little for Windows 10
and they get a lot of that back by bundling crapware. (2) The Chromebook adds
costs in hardware qualification and drivers etc, plus stockkeeping,
distribution and advertising costs. The advertising cost is significant
because Microsoft provides 'advertising support' for ads that promote Windows,
but not Chromebooks.]

EDIT

Chromebooks were cheaper, back in the days when Windows laptops had 4GB of RAM
and hard drives. Today, cheap Windows laptops have 2GB of RAM and 32GB or 64GB
eMMC cards, so the Chromebook's price advantage has gone or even been
reversed.

In any case, schools can easily set up Windows machines so that kids can ONLY
run a browser and nothing else. See Windows 10 Education AppLocker.

------
igravious
Well, if that isn't that a comically spooky infographic:

[https://data.afr.com/2017/01jan/microsoft-ceo-
hype/index.htm...](https://data.afr.com/2017/01jan/microsoft-ceo-
hype/index.html?initialWidth=620&childId=microsoft)

~~~
nmeofthestate
Yeah, I'm a bit confused - it seems like MS has just continued to do what they
had already started doing before Nadella took over. For example, their cloud
computing offering was released in 2010.

~~~
GCA10
But bear in mind that anyone can have a cloud-computing initiative. Hewlett
Packard Enterprises has one. Executing well and building momentum in the face
of AWS is the hard part. If Microsoft is making headway, that's interesting.

------
kermittd
Is everyone a cynic online?

~~~
simplehuman
I have a great theory here. If you agree entirely mostly with the article,
there is nothing to comment. Or you have to write something boring. But if you
want to comment and get karma, you have to write something spicy. And thus the
comments are all cynical and contrarian.

------
woofdogwoof
It really helps when you have a monopoly, for both operating systems and
Office applications, and more cash than most countries in the world.

------
z0d
Shocked to see Windows 10 being depicted as an advancement in some of the
comments along with that office 365 service. Yeah the Halcyon days of PC ate
definitely gone by looking at these cringrworthy points.

M$ clearly have made their point with continuous eternal Beta program and
sheeple insider ring, UWP and WDDM2.0, Gimmicky stuff cough _DX12_ _gamemode_
cough.

Destroyed the PC, Mr Nadella should be praised for all this...

------
Entangled
Revived?

I haven't touched a ms product in over a decade. And by god I won't until the
end of my miserable days in this world.

