Not to mention the only big tech that seems to have a coherent AI strategy at the moment.
AAPL: 18.79 -> 170.77 (9.08x)
MSFT: 38.31 -> 338.11 (8.82x)
AMZN: 18.10 -> 133.09 (7.35x)
META: 68.46 -> 301.27 (4.40x)
GOOG: 30.28 -> 125.30 (4.14x)Satya reverted the course spectacularly - and most importantly, he did NOT miss the "once-in-a-lifetime" opportunity which he had. Unlike Billg (who missed the dawn of the Internet) and the chair-throwing dude (who fumbled Mobile), Satya is making sure Microsoft does NOT miss AI. Which is even more impressive as Google was kind of expected to be the winner initially, given the whole company's focus , mission statement ("to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful") and a considerable (at the time) lead, if not a moat.
I dare to compare his turnaround to Jobs'. Sure, MSFT wasn't weeks away from insolvency when he took over, and some of their current successes were indeed started before his tenure, but just look at where Windows 8 was going.
*Edit: Just as a clarification: Not an employee, I actually dislike them profoundly and would never join them. I'm not sure this move is the best outcome for mankind - but credit where credit's due, they were shrewd, smart and right on time. Hats off.
The guy was born in the cloud compute division.
The board saw cloud compute was gonna be big. They made him the king. Good bet. The whole company went all in on cloud. Now they print more money than before.
Marketing person lol. He's an engineer. The guy literally gets back into VS code sometimes to stay in touch.
Bill missing the whole web stuff was more about their lawsuit because regulators believed that only through the browser on Windows people could access the internet. Which was a wrong prediction.
And Ballmer...Yeah. He fumbled hard with mobile. And thanks to the board stopping from buying Yahoo. Would be another AT&T merger fiasco.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ff8RCKwUcAEkWk_?format=jpg&name=...
If you look at the charts with revenue streams - Microsoft is the most diversified in that regard, because basically each and every branch of Microsoft produces the similar amount of revenue.
With Xbox getting Activision it lifts up More Personal Computing to the level, comparable to other streams (and even higher than Windows).
Windows got massively worse during his tenure in literally everything that can get worse including half-legal snooping on all users including Enterprise ones (I stand by the statement that this is idiotic long term strategy driven by childish emotions like FOMO - no way he didn't have a direct say in this).
Office is certainly PITA and getting worse in my experience, but that can be corporate modifications/restrictions I am exposed to.
Teams was, is and probably forever will be pathetic, buggy, slow and just a bad joke compared to some competition with 1% of their budget.
These are core extremely visible products and for most of mankind 100% of the surface with MS. There is not even an attempt for corrections, direction is set and rest are details.
With billg missing the dawn of the Internet, I didn't mean the IE integration fiasco and the resulting lawsuit - that's actually the part they got more or less right (in their own perverted 3E approach, not according to my moral compass), but too late to become dominant. They first wasted time trying to create their own MSN walled garden a la Compuserve .
To Ballmer's credit he did start Azure, although it doesn't feel it was a serious enough effort, until he was replaced. But between Vista, Windows 8, Windows Mobile, Nokia, Skype, Zune, Kin, etc etc... it's no wonder it's been called Microsoft's lost decade.
And despite the shittiness, even that 5% is doing great because their audience is now billions of mostly computer-illiterate people, who don't even have an opinion on the technical merits, the performance, the bugginess, the snooping, the feature gap, etc etc etc.
The opinion of few million geeks who are mostly not using Windows anyway (or whose only contacts with anything Microsoft are due to their employers' choice of platform) doesn't ultimately matter much, Microsoft knows it, and they have no reason to change direction despite our frustration. Some better privacy law could nudge them, anything short of a legal directive won't go far.