By design, Nadella is getting credit by design for 'overnight changes' many years in the making. Windows 10 reflects the strategic decisions embodied in Vista. Ballmer owned enough stock that along with Gates' backing Microsoft could produce a largely incompatible new version of the Windows OS and Wall Street could like it or lump it. Gates and Ballmer have been divesting Microsoft shares and the new company is beholden to the "What did you do this quarter?" analyst's mindset. Before he left, Ballmer set the course and ensured there was a tick tock product development cycle.
Ballmer wasn't an idiot. It's not as if he didn't see the changing landscape. He left the company in a position to shape the future.
Indeed, Nadella is an opensource guy that had the chance to grow during Ballmer. While Microsoft (during Ballmer) had a slow change (going more opensource) from the bottom-to-top, there has been a faster change now from top-to-bottom. I remember Scott Hanselman, Scott Guthrie and Phil Haack (now at Github) during Ballmer as opensource contributors.
Ballmer allowed opensource during his leadership, but employees would be more "targetted" when it's not the right direction and it hasn't has "intermediate"/"fast" results... It's a much slower progress.
I believe Nadella has a lot of thanks for the change that Microsoft made before he stepped up and "received" the fame. There was a short release afterwards of his stepup with a Office version for iOS and Android, you just don't do that within the month.
Some things he did within the first 12 months:
- Bought Nokia ( they already worked very together closely, this was probably been going on for years )
- Office for iOS and Android ( was created during Ballmer, but probably got approval during Nadella)
- Opensource .Net ( opensource started with Asp.Net MVC 2, which wasn't an all-in though, i think of it as a "test" internally)
- Cloudobile - connecting mobile with the cloud ;) ( this is definatly more Nadella's style, coming from Azure)
But it isn't all "that good", a lot of people have been layed off ( approx. 18.000 ). While Ballmer's approach is very "profitable" and "evil", i do believe that Nadella's approach is more in the line of "more penetration", "cheaper prices" ( free version of Office eg.), being more open... It does come at a cost ( i hope no one blames me for mentioning this ). I do suppose those 18.000 people where mostly freelancers, but i'm not sure.
The layoffs come at a cost to the people who lost the jobs, not as much as a cost to Nadella or Microsoft. In fact, layoffs are usually a positive for the company. Of course, I'd also argue that in the longterm, layoffs are a positive for most of the people laid off.
I have been laid off. In the end it was positive for me.
I left a job where I facilitated meetings to discuss major incidents and tracked action items and wrote long form reports. I decided to use this opportunity to instead move to a job I really loved where being laid off sounded far less likely.
I became a software developer. Finally took charge to do something professionally that I'd done for a couple decades as a hobbyist. Huge positive. Completely the right move. Never would have happened if I hadn't been laid off.
That said, I recognize it's not a positive for everyone in that position.
It sounds like you just needed the right motivation to improve your quality of life. I think that is called "tough love" and it doesn't always work for everyone. But I'm glad to hear that you turned what is usually a negative into such a positive!
Nadella did have a few softballs lined up for him, but they were likely no more than a few years old. Don't overestimate what can be done in two years, but don't underestimate what can be done in three. Let's not paint Ballmer as an Ozymandias, though, secretly architecting the salvation of the company for 10 years while on the face it looked like they were teetering toward annihilation.
You're right, he wasn't an idiot; he was a well-educated and successful executive that made strategic decisions informed by 80's and 90's business thought and practice. Half a decade earlier he'd have done wonders. But in emerging technology markets those decisions cost Microsoft its industry superpower status.
In tablets, mobile that cost Microsoft early market dominance and possibly locked the company out of future hopes at regaining their title.
In Web servers, numbers from Netcraft[1] last summer showed that since Windows Server 2008 essentially what had been a healthy uptick turned disastrous for Microsoft's share of active web properties (half way down the page), and over the last 15 years a steady decline in Microsoft's market share in traffic volume handled.
"Microsoft’s most recent growth in hostnames since mid-2013 has, for the most part, been caused by a large number of Chinese linkfarms (泛站群). The sites in question provide advertising for gambling sites, online product listings, and normally make use of affiliate schemes. Yet they are hosted in the USA, on generic TLDs such as .com and .net to bypass China’s TLD and internet content provider (ICP) license requirements. Unusually, each linkfarm makes use of a reasonably large number of domains and IP addresses, presumably making them harder for search engines to evade. This would normally be cost prohibitive for this kind of activity, however hosting and domain packages can be found advertised on auction sites specifically for this purpose, with packages of (random/unspecified) .com domains available for as little as ¥17 (~ £2 / $3) each, guaranteed to remain yours for at least a month. It is not clear why IIS has been chosen for these sites, however it does have a considerably higher market share (for all of our metrics) in China compared to worldwide - for example 59% of domains hosted in China use IIS compared to just 29% worldwide."
Your comment is spot on. People don't look under the covers to realize this kind of change simply cannot happen over night or "because there is a new captain."
More specifically, your "By design" start is common in these kinds of managed transitions: you want the new leader to come in with tail wind.
> Windows 10 reflects the strategic decisions embodied in Vista
Hope you mean "embodied in Windows 8". I still remember the day I replaced my Vista PC with one running Windows 7, and wondering why the OS was booting so fast. I doubt "Vista" was strategic in any way, more incompetent management, but would agree "Windows 8" had strategic considerations behind it.
Vista broke with DOS and 16bit code. It elevated security. It required better hardware. It moved x64 toward the mainstream. The architecture of the OS was brought forward a decade.
Tick.
Windows 7 was a refinement of Vista.
Tock.
Windows 8 was a new interface and a step toward multi platform, e.g. ARM.
Tick.
Windows 10 is a full on multiplatform assault.
Tock.
Running a big company is nontrivial. Microsoft's management has never been incompetent. The company has always been very profitable.
Vista popularized 64-bit Windows, and 16-bit WoW (responsible for running 16 bit Windows programs) never made it to 64-bit Windows. This was true for the earlier Windows XP 64-bit, and it has been true for every 64-bit Windows that followed. So there's always been some confusion on this point, but note: 16-bit WoW exists even today on 32-bit versions of Windows 8. Today you have to enable it explicitly, but it is available.
Also, the NT-based versions of Windows never included DOS. They were never "with" DOS such that they'd need to "break with" DOS. The last Windows that included a version of DOS was Windows ME. The last Windows that included a version of DOS which anyone ever willingly used was Windows 98.
> Windows 10 is a full on multiplatform assault.
It's a pretty modest number of platforms compared to all those supported by NT in the late nineties. Although it will probably end up running on a lot more devices...
Vista had some big changes in it, but shipped with lots of issues and had horrible driver support at the beginning. A while back I set up a laptop for aged relative with Vista plus all the service packs and fixes, and it was really fast and smooth. Very surprising.
When Vista shipped, the problem with drivers was that many manufacturers chose not to update drivers for most legacy hardware to the new, more secure driver model. The other standard complaint was with its security popups. Part of that was rough edges on the user experience design, part was just that people weren't used to thinking about security on their machines...that's changed over the past few years. And of course a lot of the complaints were because Vista was a change.
Also it's not that system was throwing UAC prompts on users, applications did. Ever since XP there were rules around what files go where, how installers should behave, etc. but people chose to ignore them (because they could). When Vista started enforcing certain things, elevation dialogs happened. What made MS in the days past (app ecosystem) broke it when quality started to matter.
Yes. People who are quick to criticize Ballmer and praise Nadella do not realize that even though Ballmer was mostly into cruise control he indeed let people like Nadella lead other important efforts. None of these products seem like "overnight changes".
The problem that Ballmer made in Windows 8 and Windows RT was in making the GUI for desktops and mobile devices the same.
Steve Jobs on the other hand already learned in 2002 that the desktop GUI won't work on a mobile device and set out to create a new GUI for mobile devices that led to the iPhone and iPad that was different from the Macintosh GUI. I think Steve Jobs saw the Windows XP based tablets that Microsoft made and their Windows CE smart phones that basically used the desktop GUI and how it just didn't work out.
Microsoft has almost always bet everything on the new Windows version. It doesn't always work out for the best. Some companies still use Windows XP because their business software breaks in Vista and above because of API changes. Microsoft no longer supports XP, but it is still in use around the world.
I think it is more problematic than that. It takes only a few minutes of using Windows 8 on a desktop to realise it was a terrible idea. Like when you right click and the context menu appears at the bottom of the screen. They clearly haven't tried that with a mouse on a 4k monitor.
They reversed most of these moronic design decisions in 8.1 and the 10 preview, but they kept some (hopefully they will be fixed before they release). Like instead of having notifications (like "An update is available", "Restart is needed") appearing discretely at the bottom right of the screen they now take up the entire screen. Since Vista they should know better than their customers are trying to use their OS to do things, to work. Customers are not fascinated with the system and having the system interrupting them all the time is a terrible idea.
Evaluating a user interface in a few minutes makes sense for things which will be used for a few minutes...and for journalists in need of sensational headlines under deadlines. An operating system is complex and used over a long period of time. Using Windows 8 meant I had to learn something. It took a day or two to become effective. A few months to become more effective than I had been under Windows 7, and a while before I really started to get it.
That effort made learning xmonad a breeze because I accepted the idea that I would have to spend time paying the dumb tax. It turned out to be only a morning.
I don't need more than a few seconds to find that the contextual menu at the bottom of the screen was absurd. Being frustrated with it means I would try to avoid using it, go around that problem. The solution Microsoft advocated for desktop: use keyboard shortcuts!
I do not dispute that keyboard shortcuts are faster than any mouse based UI. And I am sure that you became more proficient having to go around the Win 8 hassles using the keyboard. However if the UI can only be practical if a user learns by heart all sorts of commands and shortcuts, then it is a massive failure, it defeats the very purpose of a UI, particularly a UI targeted at consumers.
Consumers are not the primary target for Windows. Never has been. Microsoft is primarily a B2B company. That's why they have long support cycles. That's why they make Excel. That's why they make Visual Studio...and languages and frameworks and SQL Server and Windows Server and Exchange etc etc.
Picking tools based on first impressions, is in my opinion, a suboptimal strategy. YMMV.
They are getting cornered into a corporate environment. But they used to dominate the consumer market, and windows 8 was precisely designed to reconquer this lost market share.
> It took a day or two to become effective. A few months to become more effective than I had been under Windows 7, and a while before I really started to get it.
I've been using Win8 for about 1 hour/day for the last few months. The flips between Metro and Desktop still drive me crazy. You might have learned to accept that, or to avoid those flips, but this schizoid mode of operation comes with unneeded cognitive overload for desktop work, even if you did master it.
The thing is, Win8 was optimized for Microsoft's benefit, not yours. Win8.1 gave up some of those things, because (a) it didn't provide the benefit it was optimized for -- windows phone acceptance, and (b) it did alienate a significant portion of the userbase that clang hard to their Win7.
"Using 8 meant you had to learn something", yes. But for what purpose?
My wife and I share a laptop that runs Windows 8.1 Pro. In order to help her use it I had to install a program called Classic Start Menu that brought back the Start Menu. She could not figure out the Modern UI screen.
There used to be a book on Windows Annoyances that told how to deal with them. The most annoying thing about Windows 8/8.1 is the Windows Update and having to restart the OS in order to update and not knowing how long it is going to take and watching the "Updating 12 of 64" with the dots in a circle loop and not being able to do anything with your computer while that happens. If only Windows Update could run in the background and not need to restart the computer or if it does restart the computer it can estimate how much time is remaining of the updates.
I think that it's much more reasonable to assume that he was talking defensively, as he actually did see the enormous threat of ios. He sounds like a scared man there.
I'm not sure what they're getting at with the "Microsoft is building its own hardware, just like Apple." jab. Microsoft has had a hardware division since 1982!
Ballmer wasn't an idiot. It's not as if he didn't see the changing landscape. He left the company in a position to shape the future.