Lesson: Microsoft is willing to improve their proprietary offerings using leveraging free software others built. This is the main reason for FOSS uptake everywhere and makes great business sense for them. They also make a killing in patent royalties on the Android ecosystem. If anything, Nadella is focusing Microsoft more on the dollar than prior politics.
It's the same Microsoft, though, far as I can tell with many of the same tricks. All the spyware and schemes in their recent products confirms that. They shouldn't be trusted. People need to move away from their tech wherever possible. Except maybe the stuff like this that's built on tech someone can inspect, fork and/or clone.
On the other hand, that wasn't public like this. But it's a far cry from the two tries required to replace Hotmail's front end Apache FreeBSD servers with IIS? NT a decade or so earlier. Or the much more recent Danger Hiptop/Sidekick NetBSD + Java + sane servers -> Windows CE + Exchange that in probably the largest part doomed their $1 billion Kin effort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin which took only weeks to fail hard once it hit the market.
Holy crap, I didn't even know about the Skype event! Thanks for the link. Probably the best and funniest endorsement grsecurity ever had haha. However, I've enjoyed for years calling them on running Hotmail on FreeBSD and what it took them to replace the reliable AS/400 running their business with Windows servers. Funny shit.
Kin situation is another I didn't know about. Just wow. Most companies would have to work to screw up that bad. Microsoft is clearly a natural. Can't wait to see how much mockery (or praise) I have to offer at end of Nadella's reign. Honestly, though, I hope he transforms it operationally like Lipner's SDL did for security. Microsoft Research, in particular, has tons of potential that could inspire new stuff just to compete with whatever they offer. And then we buy the competing, hopefully-OSS stuff. ;)
Baller's consistent ability to create material losses no doubt had a large part in his downfall, see also e.g. the Xbox 360 hardware. And Intel is claiming that Windows desktop screwups are in part costing it a billion dollars in 1Q15, people aren't upgrading from XP.
Nadella I'm very uncertain about. To the extent he can terminate with extreme prejudice stack ranking and the poison it has suffused throughout Microsoft, he'll have much more people capital, including much less internal sabotage (part of why Kin failed). And he's completely changed how QA is done, although I don't know if for the better. On the other hand, he doesn't ... "feel" like the sort of person who can sufficiently directly change the culture for the better.
We'll see.
Ah, here's a bigger question: can Nedella change the perception of Microsoft's trustworthiness? That was bad under Gates, became catastrophic and frankly insane under Ballmer, and after so many have been burned by Microsoft has got to have an incalculable cost.
That last point is important. Even ignoring security, NSA, etc. there's the simple point of being a reliable partner. Microsoft has been almost random with how they're deciding on API's, desktop appearance, and so on. Then, without consistency from there. The amount they've fought with users over the damned start menu is probably the perfect case. The kludge I set up for a relative on Win 8 was ridiculous and whole experience reminded me why I'm on Linux (& Win7 previously).
Hopefully he turns that around. That alone might help a lot.
It's the same Microsoft, though, far as I can tell with many of the same tricks. All the spyware and schemes in their recent products confirms that. They shouldn't be trusted. People need to move away from their tech wherever possible. Except maybe the stuff like this that's built on tech someone can inspect, fork and/or clone.