[jjaksic]

When Nadella took over from Ballmer, he steered Microsoft in a better direction for a while. But by now he's become a lot worse. The biggest software company can no longer produce good software and its products are actively hostile to users. Nadella cares only about one thing, which is shoving AI everywhere and to everyone, at any cost. The irony is that he knows nothing about AI, how to build capable models or how to build useful AI products, nor does he have people who do. AI is his Metaverse: something he's singularity focused on, to the point of neglecting everything else, without any idea what to actually do with it.

[csdreamer7]

Nadella was the one who fired Microsoft's QA team for Windows. It took a while but those chickens finally came home to roost.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/1626871/microsoft-to-b...

This one youtuber, I forget his name, was fired as part of that layoff. He had a son with severe Autism and Microsoft's health benefits were very important to him.

[frde_me]

> He had a son with severe Autism and Microsoft's health benefits were very important to him.

This really sucks for him. Through should Microsoft _not_ layoff specific people due to health conditions? Is that something we require from companies?

[project2501a]

How about you nationalize your healthcare, so people like that are not depended on their work to get the care they need?

[WalterBright]

Employer provided health care insurance came about during WW2 because Roosevelt froze wages. Companies discovered they could "raise" wages by paying for the insurance themselves.

The practice persisted because employer paid health insurance is tax-deductible, while it isn't if a person pays it out of pocket.

The obvious solution is to make it tax-deductible.

[y7]

> The obvious solution is to make it tax-deductible.

Or make employer paid health insurance count as income and therefore not tax-deductible.

[WalterBright]

True. Total employee compensation is around 145% of their salary. The government could tax that extra 45%, but I doubt that would fly politically.

Typical accounts of employee compensation only measure wages and salaries. I've only seen the WSJ using total employee compensation, which is a far more realistic figure.

[okasaki]

That's how it works in the UK

[wombatpm]

Or lower the age for Medicare every year until everyone is covered.

[SpaceNoodled]

We could just lower it once, to zero, and be done with it.

[hysan]

Wouldn’t that leave out the set of people who have no income? For example, long term unemployed, adults switching careers and needing to take a long time off for education, etc? While the solution gets close, I don’t think it’s strictly the same thing. Add on top of that our unnecessarily complicated tax system and this sounds even less equivalent.

[jagged-chisel]

I don’t see how this addresses the comment you replied to.

[wwweston]

It doesn’t. It’s part of a rosary of things people wield to stave off thinking about the topic. You can do other things besides nationalizing all care or insurance, but when you hear people talk about “open up markets to cross state competition”, or “everyone gets an HSA”, or “make insurance tax deductible/it’s fdr’s fault”, it’s rarely about the specific policy, those are liturgical texts / catechisms designed to give the impression of solutions without substance.

Tax deductibility is only a very minor reason why most private insurance is employer provided; the much larger reason is that employment is a decent way to get a reasonably distributed group (of people generally healthy enough to work) and that’s one way of getting balanced risk pool if you’re not doing community rating or a societ wide pool.

[WalterBright]

I suggested an alternative solution to the one proposed by the comment I replied to.

[KetoManx64]

How about you do some research on the kind of healthcare that people in countries with socialized healthcare receive. 6 month waitlists for a cancer screenings, multi day emergency room waits for broken bones, maybe you've heard of the oh so wonderful death pods in Canada? Our system is by no means the best, but I'll take it any day over socialized systems.

[jayelem]

This is not my experience in Canada. It is not the experience of anyone I know. There are often long wait times in ERs for things that are non urgent. I waited 5 or 6 hours my last visit after initial assessment. I’ve known a few people that had life threatening cancers here: they were treated quickly, and compassionately by the health care system. There are bad wait times for some things: a hearing assessment took 6 months (there are private options for this but many people would rather wait - they trust the system more). There is a shortage of family doctors. Medications are not fully covered. But I promise you we have no death pods in our hospitals. If you get hit by a car, diagnosed with cancer, need an X-ray, a breathing test, etc. You get that care. It’s nowhere near perfect, but I’m thankful for it and most people I know feel similarly.

[acdha]

Can you cite the sources you researched? I’ve known people from all over the world and none of them found that to be true: the American healthcare system was commented on in disbelief over both the cost and difficulty of getting treatment compared to where they had previously lived.

[KetoManx64]

The first result when you Google Canada's healthcare waiting lists: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7292524/

Yes it is. The system has some very deep issues due to government involvement/meddling with both healthcare and insurance, but at least you can still receive life saving treatment in a timely manner.

They can be in disbelief all the want, but when people in countries with socialized healthcare get cancer or other life threatening medical conditions they come to the US and a private healthcare to get treated.

[project2501a]

I did: Greece, UK, France, Saudi Arabia, Japan and now Norway.

Never paid a single dime out of pocket as a diabetic.

> so wonderful death pods in Canada?

propaganda at it's height.

[DANmode]

Yeah, but those systems won’t hide breaking research like checks notes antioxidants and high-dose Vitamin D from cancer patients, so…

[trollbridge]

Note that a freshly laid off person will usually qualify for generous Medicaid benefits, including in WA state.

[_DeadFred_]

What does 'usually' mean? In my experience 'usually' has never worked in my favor. Say it does, does it kick in immediately? What do they have to do to switch over providers? Does all currently being coveraged treatment just move over to being covered by Medicaid automatically or will they need re-approvals?

If you are saying they are covered either way, why not just have consistent healthcare coverage for them and for everyone, all the time?

[trollbridge]

In my state it would kick in immediately. You would report your current income, which is now $0 since you just lost your job.

Virtually every provider in my state is in-network for the various Medicaid options to choose from, so you would not need to "switch over providers". It's usually better than private insurance.

As far as "why not just have consistent healthcare coverage for them and for everyone, all the time", because it would be very expensive to do so? Medicaid covers poorer Americans (including people who just lost their jobs), not the entire population.

[mindcrime]

(Looking at this from an American centric point-of-view):

The Czar of health-care in the US today is a brain-worm addled, drug-addicted, vaccine-denying, conspiracy mongering, incompetent jackass. And the overall current administration has shown itself to be hostile to basically anyone who isn't a cis-gendered, white, heterosexual, Christian male.

How many of us really trust these people to make good decisions regarding our health-care? A position that they (or their delegates) would find themselves in if we "nationalize health care".

I think this is a classic example of an idea that sounds good on paper, but doesn't survive contact with reality.

[_DeadFred_]

In the UK, it's operated as trusts separate from day to day government. In Canada it's provincially administered. In Australia, Medicare is a national, tax-funded system with independent statutory authorities overseeing parts of it. Germany, France, Japan have social insurance systems.

[rgblambda]

I would imagine individual states would manage their own health services, with the federal government acting as more of a coordinating and standard setting body. At least that's how it works in UK, Spain etc.

[ghurtado]

There's probably no federal agency less related to the issue of nationalized healthcare than the DHHS.

[mindcrime]

Even so, the issues I am referring to go all the way to the top (POTUS) and descend down through everybody in the reporting chain to various degrees. And even for people who are Trump supporters, just ask yourself the question "What happens if the ONE PERSON I HATE MOST gets elected POTUS in a world where I depend on the federal government for health care?"

I know in years past we all though the US government was somewhat immune for really radical swings in direction and what-not, but I think now we have an existence proof that really sudden and radical changes can happen.

[ethbr1]

You know CMS is under HHS, right?

[bagels]

What role did you specifically play in your country's nationalization of healthcare?

[cheesecakejava]

Maybe not that person above, but I’ve continually voted in support of it and initiatives to expand it

[eek2121]

Legally, Microsoft, or any company, cannot use any personal factors in determining who to lay off. If they do, they risk a very real lawsuit. All one needs to do is show some evidence of discrimination, and the EEOC doesn't charge a dime, the worst they will do is deny to pursue. If that happens, most private lawyers will take the case on contingency.

This is the reason you see sweeping cuts without regard to age, sex, etc.

There have also been lawsuits in the past that have settled out of court where a company's layoffs appear to overly inflict damage on one class vs. another, even if the intent was not to do that.

I am not defending these companies at ALL btw. I just have a bit of experience in this area due to the legalities, and I wanted to share it.

I am also not saying that companies don't do this, but the smart ones don't, and the smart ones at least try to at least avoid making it look obvious.

[Terr_]

> the EEOC

Which—for the folks not following along aghast at everything—has been sabotaged by recent federal political changes.

https://www.epi.org/blog/trump-is-making-it-easier-for-emplo...

[mschuster91]

> Is that something we require from companies?

In Germany, yes. For mass layoffs, this absolutely has to be considered. In general, the older the employee is, or if the employee has dependents, the more difficult it gets to both fire them or lay them off.

[WalterBright]

Germany's GDP is shrinking.

The regulations that make it hard to lay off someone have an equal and opposite effect of making companies very reluctant to hire. This impedes the efficient allocation of labor, resulting in a poorer GDP.

[monocasa]

It looks like Germany's GDP has increased every year in recent memory except 2009 and 2020.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Germany#Data

[WalterBright]

google [german gdb growth] says: "-0.2% annual change (2024)"

[_DeadFred_]

"The Stupidity of GDP per Capita"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiymTzsZfoA

How much of this years GDP growth in the USA went to average citizens? What does GDP growth matter if your citizens have zero access to healthcare, can't improve their conditions, can't innovate, can't try new ideas because they are tied to healthcare via their current job?

How much of American GDP growth goes to Billionaires and isn't a useful health metric?

See: Billionaires added record $2.2tn in wealth in 2025 https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/dec/31/billionaires-ad...

[WalterBright]

Billionaires become billionaires by making and selling things people want. Obviously, a lot of people want what they are selling, and think it is worth buying.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

I would 100% chose to live in Germany than the USA. GDP is one consideration, but QOL more important.

[WalterBright]

Live wherever you want to!

[wahnfrieden]

It is, but more generally. In many other countries, it is not so easy to lay off employees as it is in the US. It is also not necessary that your access to healthcare be contingent to your employer's whims.

[chrishare]

Not at all - it's legal, but it doesn't garner goodwill either.

[mxkopy]

Yes

[dghlsakjg]

Companies don’t have agency. People do. Compassion is a cross cultural value. Including amongst those that run companies.

For the most part none of us has any “required” obligation to anyone else.

Is it something we require of companies? No. But being a responsible, compassionate human being that considers the totality of circumstance is something I expect of that company’s leaders. Especially a company that has the money and need for technical skills elsewhere in the org.

The golden rule does not stop being true just because you are at work.

Preemptively: duty to shareholders is broader than short term profit maximizing. Avoiding bad PR like this is also in the service of MS shareholders.

As a side note: Nadella moved his home to Canada, while working at MS, so his special needs kid could go to a specialist school. That is absolutely the right choice. The argument that MS should not consider the health of their employees children is horseshit when they allow the CEO to set up house hours away in a different country for that exact reason.

At the end of the day, a kid suffered unnecessarily through no fault of his parents or his own.

[bowsamic]

Yes I’d say that such people should get extra protections

[kwanbix]

In europe (at least in Germany), they do get extra protection.

[CrimsonRain]

And that's why people think 5 times before hiring such. It's already super hard to fire people unless they make gross mistakes. It's nearly impossible to fire someone like that. It's stupid.

[kakacik]

Its not stupid rather humane, just very ineffective from economical perspective.

You want society where its everybody for themselves, fuck the rest, be lucky with ie your health so you and your family can have a decent life and one problem big enough can wipe you out? The benefit is more money, economy works better, is more agile to ever-changing situation. Just those extra money often go to that healthcare (since we all end up with various issues over time, the only exception is early death), or university for kids, or cost of properties.

Or something glacial, without real pressure to improve, more poor, but with additional safety nets.

I keep saying it over and over - EU should take over system (and mindset, good luck there) of Swiss folks. They strike the best balance between predatory capitalism that often grinds unlucky individuals and various safety nets (free top notch public education, almost free public healthcare, very good but not ridiculous social system etc). Unsurprisingly, mix of European competency and a bit of proper capitalism creates one of best stable living standards in the world, and arguably still The most free nation in the world (TM).

Its a place that french or germans just can't swallow - neighbor showing them how much better a similar society can end up functioning with few rather minor tweaks.

[jasomill]

In the US at least, there are needs-based high-risk insurance programs run by states that do just that.

Even so, while it's not a good argument against layoffs, the fact that it's even considered as such is in itself a reasonable argument against health care being tied to specific employment.

[bsimpson]

There's a long-circulating mind virus that makes executives believe top-tier engineers don't need their software tested.

Google's QA is pitiful too.

[ahartmetz]

In case of some recent Windows parts, that would need to be compounded by the mistaken belief to have top-tier engineers working for them.

[Seattle3503]

It's always the departments that are closest to the customer that pay the price in my experience. At one company, after killing QA, the support team created their own internal QA process. They were going to deal with the issues anyways, so they wanted to catch as many as they could first.

[hnthrowaway0328]

They have long adopted the mindset to get users as free beta testers. Long gone the tradition that quality matters.

[AstroNutt]

Jerry Berg is the person you're probably thinking of. His YouTube channel is Barnacules Nerdgasm.

He's a super smart programmer, but seems to be suffering from depression since Microsoft laid him off. He often talks about his issues when he livestreams Tech Talk on Saturdays.

[csdreamer7]

> Jerry Berg is the person you're probably thinking of. His YouTube channel is Barnacules Nerdgasm.

Ty, that is him.

[GuB-42]

Well, you have two distinct problems here.

One is Microsoft releasing shitty software.

The other is a deeper societal problem with healthcare and loyalty between companies and their employees.

For me, they are unrelated problems. In a welfare state, the QA team may have been reaffected to some other tasks within the company and have the health benefits provided by the state, but it wouldn't have made the software less shitty.

[SlightlyLeftPad]

Was he the reason shift-left hit mainstream? Recently, smaller non-faang companies followed suit and fired all the qa people. DevOps/SRE people are likely next.

[WalterBright]

COBRA enables one to continue with the employer's insurance for up to 18 months after a layoff.

[trollbridge]

Yes, because it’s easy to afford $2000 or $3000 a month when you just got laid off.

[WalterBright]

Microsoft pays well. The prudent move is to not increase spending until saving up at a bare minimum 6 months of "runway".

I live in Washington. My accountant told me stories, one of which was a Microsoftian who got the big job, and promptly bought the most expensive house he could swing. He soon ran into trouble because he didn't have enough left to pay the property tax, and was forced to sell it.

BTW, Microsoft has unusually generous benefits for autism. Many autism clinics have sprouted up around the campus to take advantage of that.

Never, ever, EVER assume that a high paying job is a guarantee for life.

[csdreamer7]

> Microsoft pays well. The prudent move is to not increase spending until saving up at a bare minimum 6 months of "runway".

> I live in Washington. My accountant told me stories, one of which was a Microsoftian who got the big job, and promptly bought the most expensive house he could swing. He soon ran into trouble because he didn't have enough left to pay the property tax, and was forced to sell it.

> Never, ever, EVER assume that a high paying job is a guarantee for life.

I do not know why you wrote this. This wasn't a guy who blew all his money on a big house and was forced to sell it when he lost his job.

The guy's kid was born with a low functioning level of Autism that required expensive therapy to treat. You do not choose that. He had savings, but he may be taking care of the kid for the rest of his life. What is he suppose to do? Eat ramen to save up 40 years of out of pocket therapy treatment when he was fired from a position that Microsoft should have kept? No, that is ridiculous.

[WalterBright]

The point was when you get a high paying job, the first order of business is to build up savings because jobs are not guaranteed for life. 6 months of runway gives one time to find another position.

[awesan]

People have forgotten this, but he did the same with Windows Phone for a while at the very start of his time as CEO. His motto was "cloud first, mobile first" where cloud meant Azure and mobile meant Windows Phone. After some time he gave up and they pivoted into the direction he is now well known for, which was to focus on good developer tooling regardless of OS.

[echelon]

GitHub and VSCode were smart ways to quickly recapture developer mindshare. They felt distinctly un-Microsoft with how open and multiplatform they were.

The Azure Linux friendliness play was essential and smart. Again, Microsoft felt like they were opening up to the world.

But they've backslidden. They've ceded Windows and gaming to their cloud and AI infra ambitions. They're not being friendly anymore.

Microsoft spent a lot of energy making Windows more consumer friendly, only to piss it away with Windows 11.

One evil thing they were doing that they've suddenly given up on: they spent a ton of money buying up gaming studios (highly anti-competitively) to win on the console front and to stymie Steam's ability to move off Windows. They wanted to make Windows/Xbox gaming the place everyone would be. They threw all of that away because AI became a bigger target.

They'll continue to win in enterprise, but they're losing consumer, gamer, and developer/IC support and mindshare. I've never seen so many people bitch about GitHub as in the last year. You'd swear it had became worse than Windows 7 at this point.

[the_snooze]

>One evil thing they were doing that they've suddenly given up on: they spent a ton of money buying up gaming studios (highly anti-competitively) to win on the console front and to stymie Steam's ability to move off Windows. They wanted to make Windows/Xbox gaming the place everyone would be. They threw all of that away because AI became a bigger target.

No kidding, the totally threw it all away. It used to be that Windows was already the place for gaming. And the Xbox 360 arguably won its generation. But that was a long time ago. Has any Microsoft gaming release exceeded expectations lately? Call of Duty will always sell like hotcakes, but the latest Black Ops is a hot expensive mess that underperformed last year's title.

[starkparker]

> the Xbox 360 arguably won its generation

Maybe it won some battles in your part of the world, presumably North America. But the PS3 outsold it globally as its contemporary, and even the PS5 passed the 360 in global lifetime sales as of November 2025: https://www.vgchartz.com/article/466599/ps5-outsells-xbox-36...

[layer8]

Microsoft seems to have decided that they can't make all that much money with gaming. But they are underestimating the mindshare they are losing with that.

Slightly related, they also discontinued most of their PC peripherals in 2023, many of which were quite good: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35748645

[mattmanser]

Do you think they'll continue to win in enterprise? As a casual office user, who's had to do some PowerPoint and word docs recently, I found the experience of using office 365 truly miserable. All of them are laggy and horrible to use.

I think by moving onto the cloud they've left themselves open to being disrupted, and when it comes it'll be like Lotus Notes, an extremely quick downfall.

[layer8]

They have enterprise users locked in mainly due to Active Directory, for which there is no good replacement, and to a some extent SharePoint. There's also Office, of course, and you are right that the migration to web tech isn't well taken. I'm thinking of "New Outlook" in particular. They probably plan to EOL classic Outlook when Office 2024 EOLs in 2029. The last stronghold will be Excel. If native Excel ever gets discontinued, then everything Microsoft will have been webshittified™.

[ezst]

Trust me, I really want that to happen, but who has the billions to burn (and the will to use them at that) to build a solid alternative? Most probably, the EU will have a misguided shot at it, out of desperation from the USA, and will subsidise some inadequate local actors. I'm not sure whether it will be good, timely nor sufficient.

[WWLink]

Microsoft has never been an end-user-focused company. Almost every successful product they've ever made was to sell to a business for their employees to use. Everything else they seem to either half ass or screw up or lose their passion for at some point.

I think I first came to that realization with windows phone 7/8? The UI was cool looking, but functionality was half-baked and third party app availability was dismal. HOWEVER! You could sign a windows phone into an active directory/365 account and manage the bloody daylights out of it via group policy and the tools to do that were SUPER WELL MADE.

Same is/was true of Microsoft Teams - an utter abomination of a chat client, the search is garbage, the emoji and sticker variety sometimes weird, the client itself randomly uses up 100% CPU for no reason and is just generally buggy... but gosh darnit, MS made sure sysadmins could ban memes and use of certain emoji via policy and gave insane amounts of detail to auditing and record keeping. So sure it's a pile of shit to use, but awesome if you wanna spy on your employees and restrict their every move.

Windows is fun because with the enterprise version, they give all that control to the employers, but with the consumer version they give all that control to advertisers, developers, and themselves.

I think this is also why every consumer-focused product they make either fails instantly, or ends up rotting on the vine and failing after whoever evangelized that product leaves the company (possibly being forced out for not being a "culture fit"). Do I have to go on about zune/windows phone/xbox? Or surface? Or the way they randomly dumped their peripherals product line on another company? lol.

[DoctorDabadedoo]

I believe Microsoft biggest achievement is being capable to stay relevant for the past 50 years, largely due to enterprise.

If you take a close look as an user, all their products is half-baked in some way (inconsistent behaviors, dark patterns, poor support, etc.), good enough so they can lock you in and hold your data hostage with time.

[hulitu]

> largely due to enterprise.

And government bribes, and piracy, and giving Windows for free to some Universities in exchange for being included in curriculum.

[ghurtado]

You either die a hero or live long enough to become IBM

[nunez]

That and Teams is free with an Office 365 subscription (sorry, Microsoft 365 Copilot -- geez).

Same reason why Google Chat and Meet are super popular now despite Slack and Zoom being infinitely better (free with Google Workspace)

[Brian_K_White]

Windows 7 was about the best Windows ever got, like 2K and XP. Vista and 8 (and now 11) are the bad ones.

[misiek08]

Every other Windows is bad. 95 bad, 98 okayish, ME bad, etc. Win 10 was good and now we have the 11.

[WalterBright]

Yes, I use Win7 every day!

[littlestymaar]

> You'd swear it had became worse than Windows 7 at this point.

Do you mean Windows Vista instead? Because Windows 7 was probably the last (half-)decent windows (no UI though for tablet, no ads in the OS, no ubiquitous telemetry, no account BS).

[echelon]

Yeah, my mistake. I spent the post-XP era on Linux and specially Ubuntu.

I've been using all three major OS families recently and I'm not enjoying my time on Windows. It's so full of ads, and the Linux / Unix bits feel bolted on.

[timeon]

Often gets confused because of same liquid-glass as vista.

[layer8]

Windows 7 was the last Windows version to still support the Classic theme: https://betawiki.net/images/d/da/Windows_7_classic_theme.png

[hdgvhicv]

I don’t see program manager there, what does “classic” mean?

[amluto]

> But they've backslidden. They've ceded Windows and gaming to their cloud and AI infra ambitions. They're not being friendly anymore.

Forget being “friendly”. GitHub has enormous mindshare and has frankly quite reasonably pricing (far cheaper than GitLab, for example), but the product just sucks lately. The website, while quite capable (impressively so at times) is so slow and buggy that it’s hard to benefit from any of its capabilities.

It’s gotten to the point where, every time I try a newish capability, I ask myself “how bad can this possibly be,” and it invariably exceeds expectations.

GitHub needs to take a step back and focus on fixing things. Existing features should work, be coherent, and be fast. If it takes longer to load a diff in the web viewer than it takes to pull the entire branch and view the diff locally, something is wrong.

If a coworker reviews my code, I should not sitting right next to them, literally looking at the same website they’re on, and wondering why they see the correct context for their review comment but I don’t.

[justsomehnguy]

> "focus on good developer tooling"

So "developers, developers, developers"?

[its-summertime]

The ability to know that giving up might be the right path forwards, is very useful.

[coliveira]

People don't understand that this is MS culture. It doesn't mater the CEO. They'll always move to lock customers into the useless products they create.

[lofaszvanitt]

So the clunky user interface and experience and the jumbled and meaningless features locks you in somehow? Or what's the spiel here?

[joshribakoff]

I actually just had to independently tag him on LinkedIn after my son had an issue with his Minecraft account. Their account recovery flow directs you to call on the phone and then when you call on the phone, it directs you to use the account recovery flow. When we went to their Support page we received a stack trace from asp.net. After wasting several hours, we screenshot of the error and tagged him on LinkedIn and filed a credit card dispute.

In my LinkedIn post I questioned if they can’t be trusted with a $30 game license how can we trust them with a multi million dollar copilot rollout? I pointed out that it seems like this is more than just a lack of human support. It is a company that: does not care about their own brand, the up-time of their own systems, their own employees, or their customers.

I question if their goal is to simply extract money under unethical conditions. I question whether they expect the customer to just repeatedly purchased the game every time the company fails to deliver it. I also questioned to him why he has hiring managers bragging on LinkedIn that they expect people to output 1 million lines of code per month, so they can rewrite the operating system in rust, while their systems are off-line.

[YY4387268632]

I noticed an immediate dip in quality of the products when Nadella came into power. Even Windows 8, for all the faults of the Metro UX, felt like a complete product.

[ezst]

I feel the same, but in hindsight it makes a ton of sense once you consider that Microsoft customers have not, and for a very long time, been its end users. Instead, it's been those (mostly technically incompetent) FortuneXXX middle/top-managers and IT support department managers that they hooked on to Azure & al. via obscene service agreements (for no better cause than "everyone else is doing it anyway" and "nobody ever gets fired for placating MS stuff everywhere").

Microsoft is just profiteering off of their defacto monopoly, selling more is their only metric, the "what" is secondary.

[lexoj]

True, its insane how bad MS teams performs and is built and this is coming from a company that have written their own OS, Programming languages, frameworks etc.

[misiek08]

Today Microsoft didn’t write any OS and had only partial participation in programming language or framework. They open sourced .NET and in Windows 10 you can still see same behavior and internal as XP.

I wonder how many real top-tier engineers are there at Microsoft and how hard they have to work to prevent it from failing. It’s not uncommon in any bigger than probably 200 people company - the belief of having a lot of talents while having maybe 1% of the company capable of doing anything working.

[adabyron]

Nadella had it easy when he took over. Stock soared before he did anything. The only improvements seemed to be made by others using the CEO change to try & push a few better agendas.

Acquired podcast had Ballmer on this past year. Gives interesting take of how he was never a true CEO, always had Gates still running things.

I imagine Microsoft probably has about 5-10 CEOs running it right now. Nadella is just the face. Amy, Brad & Kathleen for sure. Would not be surprised if Bill still has a lot of say. Guthrie probably doesn't have enough say.

[pjmlp]

I miss Balmer in what concerns Windows development culture.

[burnte]

As someone who lived through a small portion of the internal mess that was Vista, I DO NOT miss him at all. I worked there 6 months and his bizarre management directives were obvious. Behind every single developer push was a lock-in push, too. Every "open" product had to have some form of lock in or vendor-only advantage. None of it was driving customer success, it was all about enforcement and lock-in from top down.

[pjmlp]

Meanwhile nowadays everyone at Windows is a Web developer.

[wolvoleo]

He seemed to me like such a total d**k, sorry to say but the energy I got from him and the things he did (throwing chairs etc), brrr. Also his public shows were so hard and pushy. This is not ok even for a CEO. A toxic work environment is never acceptable.

If I had worked for MS I would have hated him and the company he forged. I don't like Nadella much (note, there's very few 'leaders' I like) but at least he seems to be a nice person.

[pjmlp]

At least Windows development wasn't done with Chrome.

[bezier-curve]

It wasn't? There are those kernel protected msedgewebview2.exe processes Microsoft shoved into Windows 11, actively making performance horrible.

[pjmlp]

Potato potato, it is still part of Chrome.

[wolvoleo]

Yeah Edge is Chrome so webview2 is also chrome.

[wolvoleo]

That's a good point. The new electron apps like teams and "new" outlook are terrible.

[acka]

Developers, developers, developers, developers[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fcSviC7cRM

[Geste]

Not aiming at you specifically, but I am tired of seeing shitty behaviour that is dismissed as best as incompetence. I do not want to believe someone becomes the CEO of one of the strongest organization on earth without a strategy sixth sense. So, why would he be shoving AI everywhere ? What does he know that we don't about it ? Is it just plan surveillance ?

[solarkraft]

I think Hanlon‘s razor becomes a lot weaker the more the offender has to gain from their action.

Nadella is doing his job of shareholder value maximization quite well.

[mihaaly]

Concerning AI he is also cluless about how to use it well - or at all - for their non-AI product portfolio.

[renegade-otter]

For the big companies, you are no longer a customer - you are a source of training data. Windows feels like a data extraction platform at this point. Well, I am Steaming on Linux now. Have fun with your AI.

[cyanydeez]

It's definitely not ignorance of AI that is the problem. It's entirely enshittification and number goes up.

It's just exceedingly bizarre watching this AI stuff and not except that global capitalism is deranged dick measuring.