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.<p>It's not like Nadella fired every one and started afresh.
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.<p>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.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_the_single_cause" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_the_single_cause</a>
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.<p>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:<p>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.<p>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.<p>Whatever it takes, I think Microsoft should get back in the phone business with a winning product.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
>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.<p>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.<p>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."<p>The fact that the CEO is aware of this already is a good sign. Looking forward to the surface event this year.
Having spent my youth childishly ranting against the evils of M$, and now coming to terms with the fact that I sincerely use VS Code because it's great, I can't shake the frequent uncanny feeling that I'm stuck in an episode of Sliders.
They credit Nadella with increasing the stock price... but MSFT performance is basically the same as the overall NASDAQ composite (of course I'm sure MSFT itself is a large portion of that index) as well as the larger S&P 500 index.<p><a href="http://stockcharts.com/freecharts/perf.php?$COMPQ,MSFT,$SPX&n=4556&O=011000" rel="nofollow">http://stockcharts.com/freecharts/perf.php?$COMPQ,MSFT,$SPX&...</a>
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.<p>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?
I am not sure how he "revived" Microsoft.<p>1. They've completely dropped the Phone market under him. As in gave up.<p>2. They are not in the personal assistant game at all. Alexa & Google have that market all to themselves.<p>3. The educational market is steadily switching to Chromebooks. The new generation of kids will likely not even know how to use MS Office.<p>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?<p>5. SQL Server - the other cash cow, is great, but free alternatives will start affecting the bottom line.<p>6. Windows 10 rollout stalled very much short of their stated goal of being on 1 billion devices.
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.<p>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.<p>It's mindboggling to me that they're crediting Nadella with Surface and Hololens, in particular.
Well, if that isn't that a comically spooky infographic:<p><a href="https://data.afr.com/2017/01jan/microsoft-ceo-hype/index.html?initialWidth=620&childId=microsoft" rel="nofollow">https://data.afr.com/2017/01jan/microsoft-ceo-hype/index.htm...</a>
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.<p>M$ clearly have made their point with continuous eternal Beta program and sheeple insider ring, UWP and WDDM2.0, Gimmicky stuff cough <i>DX12</i> <i>gamemode</i> cough.<p>Destroyed the PC, Mr Nadella should be praised for all this...