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by AndroTux 212 days ago
Nadella is obviously a very smart and successful business leader. He achieved his goals and transformed Microsoft into a very successful, healthy company. This is why I personally think he isn’t just a bland idiot like for example Steve Ballmer.

However, it’s clear that Nadella’s goals are everything but noble. He doesn’t care about the product, and he really doesn’t care about the customer. He only cares about number go up.
3 comments
rakejake 212 days ago
Ballmer doesn't strike me as an idiot and definitely not bland. He's one of the more colorful tech personalities. MS's almost unassailable lead in enterprise could be attributed to him and the pivot to cloud could not have happened without this. But he definitely fumbled hard on mobile (Windows Phone), Surface (IIRC the initial ARM laptop was a major flop and had a close to 1B+ writeoff) and the disaster that was the Nokia acquisition. I'd say he left at the right time, just as it was becoming clear that MS's bets on Windows Phone and hardware in general weren't paying off.
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mvkel 211 days ago
That's a pretty massive fumble. He was effectively trying to convert Microsoft into a hardware company; Satya marked the return to pure software, and Microsoft is now the biggest SaaS company in the world.
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rakejake 211 days ago
Rather than think of it as a pivot to hardware, I looked at it as MS trying to corner their share in the consumer market. Mobile and Social were the hot things back then and mobile threatened MS's dominance of the OS market. MS ultimately failed but they still owned the enterprise market and continue to keep their lead in desktop market share.
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croes 212 days ago
Nadella plays on level easy.

Too many companies are dependent on MS products so it doesn’t matter how bad it gets.

MS rather disables features instead of fixing security issues and now puts AI in everything in a desperate attempt to force the users to use it.

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mvkel 211 days ago
I assumed he was a product guy until I heard him on Dwarkesh's podcast. He does seem to really only get fired up about numbers going up, and customers are a vehicle for that.
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