Google has largely stagnated with products that they largely already had before Satya Nadella took over. Facebook was kind of at its peak then and they had bought Whatsapp and added Instagram to their portfolio. But since then, Meta has had a few duds as well and it seems a bit lackluster lately. Messenger launched and imploded. Then VR. And now they are messing up with AI.

The point is, if Google and Meta got the best people, what the hell did they do in the last ten years? I think they mostly got more people and less ability to do anything very well. It hasn't worked out that great for them. Neither of them has much to show for their efforts. Google bootstrapped AI and then had their people walk off to form OpenAI who are (for now) best buddies with MS. Facebook/Meta keeps changing their mind about what they are about. Social media, VR, and now AI. But it seems they end up chasing their tail every time.

MS actually got better over the last ten years. They too had a few nice acquisitions. But more importantly, they revitalized what was a pretty dead development strategy. Github was critical. The attitude towards Linux and the complete 180 on open source in general was critical. MS did quite a few things right under Nadella.

> They don't have any interesting new products.

None of these companies do.

>The best fresh graduates from the top colleges went to Google and Facebook in the last decade -- because they paid significantly more -- and Microsoft picked up the rest.

That seems shaky as a justification. I don’t have any data behind it, but in a world of eight billion people, it’s a hard sell that there’s only enough top talent for 3 companies.

Plus, feel free to correct me but I don’t feel Meta has brought anything technically brilliant to the table lately. Google might be a better sell with alphafold and some other projects but none of it seems mainstream tech either.

Maybe pixels if you want to stretch it, but search, maps, Gmail, YouTube, android, and even photos were there a decade ago already.

Azure began adopting and offering Linux while Ballmer was CEO.

Microsoft already began the process of open sourcing stuff while Ballmer was CEO. Eg. What would become DotNet Core.

There are a number of other errors in your points. Some public, some not. I encourage you to re-examine what you think to be true.

Look, I agree it was time for Ballmer to retire and I’m glad Satya is CEO, but while he made some miscalculations, he wasn’t the zero some try to make him to be.

Somehow I've always been in the MS ecosystem for work. I wouldn't call their MS365 strategy "coasting". MS365 is incredible value for money, and there is an element of looking outside and incorporating it (just copy Slack with Teams for example), it does all work quite well. I join MS365 regularly as a 100% Linux person and for example PowerPoint went from being unusable to pretty good in the FireFox over a period of a year or so. I can live in the ecosystem in the browser as long as I do office/consulting work, obviously I'd hate it if would force me to Windows. I just installed a Windows 11 PC for my neighbor, what a s*show. I think I clicked "pass" on 100 options and offers, I asked some to my neighbor, she said: "Please, you decide I don't know what any of this means". Compare that to Ubuntu, which just works after you give it your name, and stays out of your way. I'm converting their old desktop to Ubuntu this week now that it's e-waste to MS.

Once a company are over a certain size its ability to execute is throttled by business process, not individual's abilities. Individuals are kept from making an impact as they don't want that, they want predictable, replaceable cogs in the machine. Google and Meta suffer the same problem but, as businesses, they are slightly more nimble as they 3x smaller, but that has 0 to do with their hiring/promotion practices.

> let go of the Windows monopoly, and Azure in its early days was based on Windows servers. Then Satya came in and said, no it is OK to support Linux, and in fact it is OK to run Microsoft's own services on Linux. It is OK to support Open Source, and in fact we'll open source some of our stuff. That put Microsoft back on track

Not to be over cynical, I'm happy when big corps give away stuff for free, but has this made them any money?

They seem to have lost all their moats. LibreOffice is on par with MS's offering (which hasn't really done anything interesting in decades). Windows is semi abandoned and bloated adware. The unified OS ecosystem between desktop console and mobile is pretty much dead. The MS "ecosystem" is a half hearted afterthought at this point

Sure, Azure happened to boom in the meantime, but that seems coincidental and not a product of them giving everything away. It's also a lot less of a moat. Cloud is becoming commodity over time.

MS is now Azure with a bunch of atrophying vestigial bits hanging off the side.

>Satya's mistake though is that he has filled Microsoft with average people. The best fresh graduates from the top colleges went to Google and Facebook in the last decade -- because they paid significantly more -- and Microsoft picked up the rest. What is the impact of that? Microsoft's execution ability is lower, and we'll see the impact of that in the coming years.

How do you know it (that top ppl didnt go there) and why it didn't materialize after a decade?

I work with customer facing and adjacent Microsoft people regularly. I’d say in my observation they recruit well. The problem is that the culture is a toxic waste dump.

If I write down the 10-12 best MS people I’ve worked with in those forward facing roles… I’d say 80% of them have been laid off at random or due to internal politics. Standing out there is bad for your health. As a customer, I’m aware of their politics — bad sign.

I don't like the guy because he killed Windows Phone and the Native (Chakra-based) Edge browser - both of which were excellent products.

Also it was towards the end of Ballmer's tenure that the Linux switch happened AFAIK - though Nadella got the credit for it.

I’ve worked through all 3 CEO eras of Microsoft. Satya’s biggest mistake will be breaking the internal culture that made Microsoft what it is, for better and worse. Classic “be careful what you wish for” or perhaps law of unintended consequences, imo.

And yes, part of that involves the way they’ve changed the hiring and retention objectives.

LLMs and whatever succeeds them are going to change how we interact with information in a big way. Microsoft has so far mostly stayed out of that race and that’ll be a huge issue that compounds over time. What they do have though is access to power and pretty significant data centre presence. I definitely wouldn’t write them off but it’s not looking good over the long term.

This take seems bad top to bottom.

And the Satya revisionist history on his quote is absurd since it’s well documented. He didn’t just say it at a women’s conference. He was asked “For women who aren’t comfortable asking for a raise, what’s your advice for them?”. And part of response included “That might be one of the initial ‘super powers’ that, quite frankly, women don’t ask for a raise have. It’s good karma. It will come back.”

He has since sufficiently walked this back, so it’s odd the need to lie about what he said.

>The best fresh graduates from the top colleges went to Google and Facebook in the last decade -- because they paid significantly more -- and Microsoft picked up the rest.

1. The best new grads are absolutely not going to Google or Meta. There are many far sexier companies. As a CS grad, landing in big tech is mostly regarded as having settled for mediocrity.

2. Microsoft's compensation for early career is competitive with Google and Meta (at least for the first couple of years; Meta will grow your level faster and Google gives better annual RSU refreshers, but many people don't know this and go by the offer's face value). I don't think there's much of a difference in the talent that they can pick up.

Microsoft also aggressively sops up the best talent in Tier 2 geos -- it's unlikely that the best devs in the Bay Area work at Microsoft but some of the best devs in Vancouver or Atlanta probably work at Microsoft.

Attitude to Linux and open source was not really a problem for Ballmer IMO. Microsoft had vast revenues locked in to their software in PC and business servers. In the regulatory environment in which they were permitted to operate, it made a lot of sense to try to keep competitors out. A cohort of geeks hated Microsoft's attitude, but I'd be surprised if it did much to their bottom line. But Linux and OSS are just a tools, easily adopted when the winds change.

Microsoft under Ballmer completely missed the boat on a bunch of things which should have been pretty close to Microsoft's wheelhouse -- search, social media, mobile/smartphone, and cloud, to name some of the big ones (each one of these spawned a big 10 corporation). It's not that they should be expected to cover all these things or that no other tech company should have become successful, it's just that they had little response to any big developments in the industry for many years.

I think it's less that he wasn't willing to let go of Windows, more that the myopic focus on it blinded them to other issues, or deluded them into believing they could continue using Windows to gatekeep and buy or crush competition. They missed the boat on the internet before Ballmer too, but eventually managed to use the money and power that Windows provided them to grind down the competition.

> He said employees should not ask for a raise (not women employees specifically) and instead should rely on the system to give you the appropriate raise at the appropriate time.

Sorry but he surely got burned because this completely ignores systemic advantages given to men. If everyone quietly relies on the system then women will be disadvantaged. I know that's not a popular thing to say around here but it's been shown time and again and the women at that conference all knew it too.

> Satya has had to fight against this accusation and he has done so by establishing a quota system for promoting women employees...

That's great and everything but did he actually own the error or recognise the problem with what he said? Volunteer for bias training or anything that would actually help the issue at the core rather than putting bandaids over the wounds?

> he has filled Microsoft with average people. The best fresh graduates from the top colleges went to Google and Facebook in the last decade

Is there a way to demonstrate that this actually mattered? That paying more did get them “better” talent that actually made a difference? Ie. not any self serving “they did because they’re better and they’re better because they were paid more.”

I was never a fan of Windows, being a Mac guy. However Word used to be good. After a long avoidance I had to use it for work. Teams Word, online Word, Word.app Word. It is a complete cluster fuck and formatting etc is a shambles across versions. The ecosystem within MS products is a dumpster fire. And yet is the state of the art.

The Office suite is one of their key products, and it’s awful.

> Microsoft is directly tied to promotion of women employees, and as a result, a lot of women now occupy positions they would not otherwise. Again, the impact is decreased ability to execute.

I mean are you saying women are worse leaders? Because it seems to me microsoft is harnessing the limitless potential of gender diversity. With a gender-diverse staff they will be able to crush their peers by streamlining against horrible things such as toxic masculinity where the bourgeois men keep down honest and hardworking proleteriat women

I have been both impressed and kind of disappointed in Satya's role. He made some hard and direct changes initially that has allowed them to coast very comfortably, but we have also seen Microsoft become very tame in some areas. I was optimistic at first, especially because he was willing to make the hard choices like binning Windows mobile even with all the potential it had.

Cloud is just being the cloud, the AI stuff they are excited on but maybe at the detriment of everything else, Xbox is dying a slow sad death as they are directionless and Windows is just a dump truck for all the more questionable business decisions possible.

Really interesting comment. Is there a source for the promo quota thing? Or is this a policy that’s only discussed internally on a need-to-know basis?

I'm a Ballmer truther. He was completely right about many things including his vision for AI. I know that being early is often the same as being wrong but I don't think his big strategic moves as CEO were incorrect. Microsoft during his era was more marked by an inability to execute on those strategies.

Ballmer and MSFT got the last laugh. In 2005-2006 a lot of people counted them out.

I think Microsoft actually just hired experienced H1Bs instead of new college grads. And they have such a moat with their corporate customers using excel, outlook, etc that execution doesnt matter as much for them.