How Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella did what Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates couldn't

Yahoo ^ | 1/30/2016 | Matt Weinberger

[Scutter]

On Thursday, February 4, Satya Nadella will celebrate his second anniversary as the CEO of Microsoft.

It's been an eventful couple of years.

Microsoft has grown its crucial cloud business, released Windows 10 to a much better reception than its loathed predecessor, launched a bunch of great apps for iPhone and Android, and generally made people like it a lot more.

But the real victory of Satya Nadella — the truly monumental shift — has been within the company. Under Nadella, Microsoft is pointed in one direction for first time in modern memory.

[Scutter]

He really has made a big difference. I am still skeptical about his decisions in the phone space, and I didn’t like the way he made the layoffs drag on for so long (one and done!), but overall he’s been a huge net positive.

[Scutter]

Fair point.

[Scutter]

OSX is great too. Wish I had the money to own both,

[tje]

The demographic. Are they all H1Bs? I’ve been on the MS campus many times and never saw such a lack of diversity. But it’s been many, many years since I’ve been there.

[Mastador1]

I fail to understand these people that seem to make it their pesonal mission in life to show up and tell everyone that their choice in X is so much better than your choice.

There are two subjects on FR that are guaranteed to get that response, Apple Vs. Microsoft and Trump Vs. Cruz.

[Mastador1]

I fail to understand these people that seem to make it their pesonal mission in life to show up and tell everyone that their choice in X is so much better than your choice.

There are two subjects on FR that are guaranteed to get that response, Apple Vs. Microsoft and Trump Vs. Cruz.

[Scutter]

I noticed it after your post (went back and looked). The photo is not representative at all. I suspect it’s either from some special Indian event or could just be that the Indians at MS love the guy and are proud of him.

The biggest change in demographic make-up at Microsoft seems to be the growth of Chinese hires. not too long ago I had a guy come by my office to ask me to review some text. I said, “ok, but why me?”. His answer was that I was the only native english speaker on the floor.

Many of these people go through the long process to become citizens, and generally these are the cream of the crop from their country of origin. Of all the countries represented by MS employees, I identify with the Russian ex-pats the best; most of the Russians seem to be very conservative - strong supporters of the second ammendment, distrustful of government, etc. I think it is because they have seen firsthand where Bernie’s policies lead, and that’s why they left Russia.

[The Duke]

I l-o-v-e my Netrunner Linux! :)

[AnotherUnixGeek]

Windows XP was the greatest OS in the history of mankind.

Not to get into an OS Holy War, but the greatest OS in the history of mankind was 4.3 BSD Unix.

[Scutter]

I have to admit that I am not familiar with Netrunner. Care to elaborate?

[nascarnation]

I was impressed the Win 7 >> 10 conversion on my laptop was completely seamless.
Someone on another forum told me since Ballmer left, customer service is no longer just a topic for sarcastic jokes at MS.

[Up Yours Marxists]

So does this one.

[AnotherUnixGeek]

The demographic. Are they all H1Bs? I’ve been on the MS campus many times and never saw such a lack of diversity. But it’s been many, many years since I’ve been there.

Probably none of them are H1Bs - that picture was almost certainly taken at the Microsoft Development Center in Hyderabad, India - it's Microsoft's largest development center outside of Redmond HQ.

[r_barton]

The real reason Microsoft is pimping Windows 10 so much and wants to kill of Windows 7 is the Microsoft Store. Windows 10 has the Microsoft Store. Windows 7 doesn’t.

The Apple Store and Google Play Store make a lot of money for those companies through their IOS and Android phones.

Microsoft’s Windows phone is a complete flop. So Microsoft has to fall back on Windows 10 for the Microsoft Store. They have nothing else. They have to kill off Windows 7 in order to up sell with Windows 10 and the Microsoft Store.

[r_barton]

[Scutter]

I was impressed the Win 7 >> 10 conversion on my laptop was completely seamless.

I love Windows 10, but I usually do a clean install. I did the upgrade on this desktop, and it went fine. However, I tried to upgrade my son's laptop, which had a badly bloatware laden Windows 7 on it and a badly fragmented hard drive. I eventually just got tired of waiting for things, and did a clean install. But that was more to due with the bad state of his Windows 7 than anything to do with Windows 10 - never even got to Windows 10 install in fact.

Someone on another forum told me since Ballmer left, customer service is no longer just a topic for sarcastic jokes at MS.

I hadn't heard that, but I never thought that customer service at Microsoft was bad. I've actually had several fairly bad experiences with customer service at Apple, both involving their online services, that I know would not have happened at Microsoft (Apple hardware - awesome, Apple online services ... not awesome).

One thing that did change, negatively, regarding customer service. They used to give employees these little cards that were good for a free, full-service, customer service incident. You were encouraged to give them out to someone if you heard they had a bad experience or some problem with Microsoft products. I wish they still gave us those cards, and if they did, I would have given one of mine to a person here who was asking me about an XP issue the other day.

Probably the biggest changes I've noticed at Microsoft since Satya took over are:

• No more demoralizing and counterproductive annual review process. We used to have this process that I've only ever seen used in sales organizations. It basically created a disincentive to help other employees, and enforced a mandatory 10% turnover in engineers, even if you had a team of super-stars.
• The "One Microsoft" thing mentioned in the article. It's not perfect, but generally, I feel that the divisions are much more aligned around common goals then before.
• This might just be coincidence, but I feel that Microsoft's Research org is more directly contributing to product innovations that actually make it to customers.
• There are lots of smaller encouragements for employees, to "do the right thing", to innovate, etc. For example, a component of your annual review includes how you helped other groups and how you helped other employees. Peer review is a big component of the review now. We have almost constant "hack-a-thons" in which employees have a friendly competition to come up with some new product or product idea, and to implement it at least far enough to show a working prototype.
• Participating in open source projects, and even open sourcing Microsoft tech is now actively encouraged.
• Use of "best in class" tools - regardless of whether or not they came from Microsoft - is encouraged. Microsoft Azure has a significant number of its VMs running Linux, and offers a number of services to developers that come from the open source world.
• There's an active strategy to make the best software for ALL platforms, not just Windows. Some great examples of this can be found in the iOS apps that Microsoft makes.
• Microsoft now has a thriving hardware business. There have been some growing pains, but the Surface line or products are just fantastic.
• Microsoft largely divested itself of that huge Nokia mistake that Ballmer made.

[Scutter]

The real reason Microsoft is pimping Windows 10 so much and wants to kill of Windows 7 is the Microsoft Store. Windows 10 has the Microsoft Store. Windows 7 doesn’t.

I don't agree that this is the primary reason, although I am sure it's one factor. The store-based approach for app distribution is used by both Apple/OS-X/iOS and Android for a reason. It is a great way to distribute software and avoids each app vendor having to create their own app distribution and update mechanism. It also allows customers to go one place to find apps, and a common pool of reviews. And most importantly, it provides a shield against malware, bloatware, spyware, and the other crapola that shows up on machines when people just randomly download stuff from heaven-knows-where and blindly install it.

I think the primary reason is that it's expensive to support past versions of products. Every vendor, including Apple, cuts off support for old products at some point. In that regard, Microsoft has gone above and beyond what most vendors do in continuing to support old versions of their OS.

[Scutter]

Microsoft’s Windows phone is a complete flop. So Microsoft has to fall back on Windows 10 for the Microsoft Store. They have nothing else. They have to kill off Windows 7 in order to up sell with Windows 10 and the Microsoft Store.

It's actually a fantastic product, and I know many people that tried it out and prefer it over the alternatives. From a market share perspective, it is indeed a "complete flop".

[r_barton]

My wife loves her Nokia Lumia 635. Worth much more than the $40 it cost. It’s real quality. But it has little or no apps. Because hardly anyone uses one, businesses like banks are not releasing Windows phone apps. The Windows phone is a distant 3rd behind IOS ans Android. The Windows phone is DOA.

[Scutter]

Not to get into an OS Holy War, but the greatest OS in the history of mankind was 4.3 BSD Unix

I think you make a good point, although I'd have a hard time narrowing down to a particular Unix version. I think that BSD Unix was very instrumental in making much of the Internet happen, so it deserves a special place in history.

I also think, in terms of the change it created, for Windows users anyway, that Windows NT was a historical OS. I was doing software development for a Windows 16-bit product at the time that came out, and I remember being floored at how it was impossible to destabilize the OS - no matter what my app did.

And finally, I would say Apple's OS-X should get a special place in history. OS-X brought a new, stable platform to Macs (much like Windows-NT did for PCs). It took a lot of guts for Apple to abandon the old OS, and move to this entirely new thing, but what a great decision that turned out to be.