It’s unfortunate to see Microsoft (along with Adobe, etc) expanding into Ads. If nothing else, they could really differentiate and join forces with Apple from privacy standpoint to oppose Google, Amazon and Facebook.<p>Instead, “Intellisense with AI now available on VS Code” is Microsoft’s nice way of saying “We harvest the shit out of your data”. Ah, like a true Ad company. Don’t get me started on Windows 10 telemetry.<p>I really believe that Apple’s bet on privacy will pay off well in the long term. They’re different companies (Apple is selling hardware) but boy they could have gone into Ads with a MASSIVE user base but they chose to limit Ads in the App Store. It would have been huge expansion opportunity but they didn’t pursue it. And it will pay off as privacy awareness spreads and Microsoft could join them as operating system providers.
Satya has done a tremendous job turning around Microsoft. It was headed in the direction of becoming a slowly sinking behemoth under Ballmer, but he's turned it around.<p>Sundar, on the other hand, is just content collecting $$ and showing more ads.
Having read Nadella's book Hit Refresh as soon as it went on sale, Microsoft performance since then doesn't look surprising at all. Having listed what's wrong (with their product focus, company culture etc), and where they plan to head, its' almost like the book informs the reader where puck is going to be (from Satya's POV).<p>It's funny that 15 years back I was so anti MS and pro Google and now I think it's the other way!
As an investor I bought few years ago MSFT stock.
I did it as I saw two things:<p>1. azure<p>2. o365<p>1. because I knew what happened (and was happening) with AWS<p>2. because microsoft moved to subscription model<p>Those two things, connected with third "secret" incredient: BIGGEST user base (corporate) which WILL use those two offerings = success.<p>Satya is/may be great. I bought stock around 2014/2015 because of the above and nothing more.<p>If you have a big userbase you can monetize it really really well.
> There’s a bit of Silicon Valley cred, too, thanks to its acquisitions of LinkedIn, the professional social network, and GitHub, the software code repository.<p>I would have thought open sourcing so much of it's framework, vscode, and typescript would have had a greater impact.
> “I don’t know of any other software company in the history of technology that fell onto hard times and has recovered so well,” says Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix Inc.<p>How about Apple?
Microsoft's core revenue is still due to market lock-in of their proprietary technologies: MS Office and Windows itself. There are other office suites out there, but nothing can gain much market share without complete compatibility for MS Office file formats: docx, pptx, etc. Microsoft produced a version of Office for Macs and that allowed Apple to grow greater than niche, but their market share was always tiny compared to Windows.<p>Outside of Windows and Mac, you're in Open Source land, which is great if you're technically minded and want to tinker and explore, but not much of an option for folks who just want their computers to work with the consumer software and file formats around them. Other than Apple, where are the commercial alternatives to Microsoft?<p>I'd be much more sympathetic to Nardella's renaissance if it meant real consumer choice. The situation is better than it was under Ballmer, but not as good as it could be in a real free marketplace.
Microsoft’s “performance” wasn’t bad by any objective metric during the Ballmer era. If the stock market were rational, MS stock would have been doing a lot better under Balmer than it did.<p>But then again, if the stock market were rational, Lyft would have never been able to go public and Tesla would basically be worthless.
The new Microsoft is good and Nadella is awesome.<p>The one product that really sucks from this Microsoft is Azure. I commented in a thread before Azure is the absolute worst cloud provider amongst the big three after we thoroughly evaluated all three. AWS is the best and GCP is next.<p>But due to management pressure we had to go with Azure.<p>Unfortunately the best product does not always win in the enterprise. (That is why Steve Jobs never wanted to sell directly to enterprises).
Personally, I'm more impressed by the company's President, Brad Smith, who seems to want real change in terms of digital rights. He's the man behind every single "pro user rights" Microsoft announcement you've seen in the past few years.<p>Meanwhile, Nadella is the man behind every single user-hostile and user-tracking feature you've seen introduced in Windows 10 (pretty much).
I think Nadella was driving more of a cultural change within the company. Business wise the path to Azure and the cloud was pretty straightforward and he stuck to it.<p>The question to ask might be, would Ballmer have done something else then focus on cloud? Like focus more energy on phones for instance? That could have led to a different financial result.
I like line about market cap being a useless metric for your own success. It's great on the meta-business side of things, but for real-world things it's hardly relevant.
I'm failing to see what has changed.<p>Point is that they still make the lion share of their revenue from milking PC OEMs and plumpy corporate clients.<p>The fact that they changed tools for doing so, does not change the scheme at large.<p>Their hosting service Azure just took over their AD and sharepoint clients with some extra being the genuine new clientele<p>I'd say that under Nadella, they grew even more recalcitrant, and dependent on their main revenue sources.<p>Ever got a visit from an MS salesperson recently? One that came to us to do AD was almost begging us to switch to AD on Azure.<p>I'd also say that MS became a little bit akin google in that their new product efforts fall into unending cycles of rebrandings, and half-hearted restarts. A lot of oldtimer MS devs I knew say that now they got a genuine fear of every new tech coming from MS almost customarily becoming an abandonware in 2-3 years term.
It's true. It's always hard to figure out exactly how much credit the CEO should get for successes or failures of the company, but since Nadella became CEO Microsoft made a lot of good decisions that really set them up for the future. Office365 is terrific. Azure is cementing itself as the default cloud for enterprises and a solid 2nd or 3rd option outside of the enterprise. Windows 10 is great.
The subscription model is great/easy, but from the tax side I am leaning more towards the purchase model over AWS. I recently saw the Delta Airlines paid no Federal Taxes last year because of accelerated depreciation costs. With AWS, there is no accelerated depreciated, just current expenses. Anywho, I'm off to a new data center ground-breaking ceremony.
The higher the rise, the harder the fall. Great old-timers continue to jump ship in droves, and new people only apply after getting rejected by FANGs of the world. Given the size of the company this will take a while longer to play out, but play out it will, eventually.
A good article, well rounded in nature by giving the pros and cons to Microsoft's rebirth. How it impacts Microsoft internally and externally to the market in general. We need more articles like this on the internet.
Nadellaissance doesn't work at all and its breaking my soul, fuck off pithy headlines.<p>That said, the board has done well picking leadership, Satya's driven a lot of amazing cultural change, and business too.