this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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Are you kidding? He's made some...questionable decisions over the last couple of years, but look at where Microsoft is at today compared to when Ballmer left. It's a much more successful, more exciting, and more open company than it was. Could you imagine Ballmer's Microsoft releasing WSL? Or greenlighting a major faithful remaster and re-release of all 4 of the big Age of Empires games, as well as developing an entire new one? Or buying and actually being a surprisingly good steward of GitHub?
He's far from perfect, and all the enshittification of the last 2 or 4 years should be roundly criticised. But overall, Nadella has been a net positive for the company both financially and in terms of the company's societal impact.
The same can not be said for Google's Pichai...
Yes, let’s look at it. Great for the shareholder, not for the customer.
Somehow other companies in these spaces have not had problems making this stuff work. It’s obvious all Nadella is interested in is cloud based products with subscriptions. And while that might be insanely profitable, it’s driving the consumer space to Google, Apple, and Linux. All the creativity and inventiveness has been removed from Microsoft. Xbox somehow survives in spite of his leadership.
I have an issue with calling Edge "a bloated privacy invading Chrome clone". It's a "a bloated privacy invading Chrome repackage", thank you.
A product which, as interesting as it was, had sadly failed pretty resoundingly in the market under Ballmer's leadership.
As far as I'm aware, Hololens still exists? True it's a product not getting as much attention as might have the potential to, but the same can be said for the entire VR market. Outside of a couple of very narrow fields, nobody has managed to get VR to really catch on the way the hype suggested it might back when Google Glass was a thing or when Hololens was first announced. (Who knows, maybe Apple will manage it with their product like how they made smartphones and tablets mainstream.)
Honestly that seems like a real stretch. What exactly was their raison d'être? There are so many options for peripherals from companies that are better at it.
A joke when it was released under Ballmer. Still a joke today. That's not a mark in Nadella's favour, for sure, but nor can it really be counted against him.
Edge only existed under Nadella. Under Ballmer Microsoft still had Internet Explorer.
Depends on what customer you're talking about. As a software engineer, his tenure has been incredible. WSL is probably the single greatest thing to happen to Windows since '95. .NET Core and later simple .NET is such a huge improvement over the ancient .NET Framework for developing modern applications.
As an RTS gamer, I suspect he probably didn't have a lot of involvement here, but it was still under his leadership of Microsoft that we've seen the greatest era in Microsoft's first-party gaming since the 1997–2007 period when the original trilogy + AoM were being released by Ensemble Studios.
The creativity and inventiveness at Microsoft died under Ballmer. Nearly any Microsoft watcher will tell you he's turned it around for the better not just in terms of business, but in terms of how it impacts the customer, as well.
Personally I've been relatively disappointed with Microsoft over the last 2-ish years, but compared to the last half-decade or so of Ballmer, the first 8 years of Nadella's tenure were impeccable.
Honestly so would I, but looking back on it now, I can't say that Microsoft has been bad for it. If Microsoft hadn't bought it, maybe someone else would have, who would have been far worse. Google might have bought it and shut it down 6 months later. Or Facebook data-mined it and sold all your private repos off to Russia. Or we could have been in a world where Microsoft did what many (myself included) expected would happen, with them ruining it themselves.
Yes, GitHub staying independent would have been the best-case scenario. But what we got was probably second-best.
MS is still alive ONLY because of the licensing model they use which makes all corporations globally dependent. Period. The bundles, the product dependency, the price. If it’s not for this it would have banished years ago.
Microsoft is still alive. That is bad. And nadella made it bigger. Even worse.
No company that size and power should exist at all.
Whether Nadella is running Microsoft well is a separate argument from whether trillion dollar corporations should be allowed to exist.
Thought the original comment was that nadella ruined microsoft by letting it live. And comment i replied to missed that point.
Maybe wrong then.
WSL? Trying to keep developers on the platform. Ages of Empire? Bought up studios to get a grasp on the market. Github? Again developers on their platform.
Exactly. That doesn't mean positive for the customer. He only made the cancer bigger.