zlacker

Deservedly or not, Satya Nadella will look like a genius in the aftermath. He has and will continue to leverage this situation to strengthen MSFT's position. Is there word of any other competitors attempting to capitalize here? Trying to poach talent? Anything...

>>soderf+(OP)
After Balmer I couldn’t have imagined such competency from Microsoft.

>>godzil+6l
After Ballmer, competency can only be higher at Microsoft.

>>jq-r+os
Ballmer honestly wasn't that bad. He gave executive backing to Azure and the larger Infra push in general at MSFT.

Search and Business Tools were misses, but they more than made up for it with Cloud, Infra, and Security.

Also, Nadella was Ballmer's pick.

>>alephn+kz
The XBox business started under him as well. IMO he was great at diversifying MSFT, but so-so at driving improvements in its core products at the time (Windows and Office). Perhaps this was just a leadership style thing, and he was hands-off on existing products in a way that Bill Gates wasn't (I think there was even news of Bill Gates sending nasty grams about poor Windows releases after he had officially stepped down).

>>alephn+kz
Sometime, you do the hard work and your successor is the genius...

>>whoist+FE
Look at OS market and Text Editor market today. They aren't growth markets and haven't been since the 2000s at the latest. He made the fight call to ignore their core products in return for more concentration on Infra, B2B SaaS, Security, and (as you mentioned) Entertainment.

Customers are sticky and MSFT had a strong channel sales and enterprise sales org. Who cares if the product is shit if there are enough goodies to maintain inertia.

Spending billions on markets that will grow into 10s or 100s of Billions is a better bet than billions on a stagnant market.

> he was hands-off on existing products in a way that Bill Gates wasn't

Ballmer had an actual Business education, and was able to execute on scaling. I'm sure Bill loves him too now that Ballmer's protege almost 15Xed MSFT stock.

>>julien+qF
And sometimes the company is succeeding in spite of you and the moment you're out the door and people aren't worried about losing their job over arbitrary metrics they can finally show off what they're really capable of.

>>alephn+kz
Also, Nadella last month repudiated his own decision to cancel Windows Phone. Purchasing Nokia was one of the last things Ballmer did.