Satya Nadella is 'a sheep, a follower' says ex-Microsoft exec Dan Lyons, the writer behind Fake Steve Jobs, has found someone willing to bucket incoming Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. That someone is Joachim Kempin, who was general manager of Microsoft Germany in the subsidiary's early days and rose to become a senior veep in charge of Microsoft's OEM business. Kempin has form criticising …
The comment about 'sheep ... who can't spell consumer or product' is harsh criticism, moving into insult. However, your second paragraph is spot on, as can be seen from all the company notices that follow a parting of the ways when a high level manager or executive leaves a company.
Well if we are going to be picky, I'd note that even in the IT dialect of English (which is found of verbing), "device" certainly isn't a verb and I'd hate to imagine what devicing a consumer might entail so I'm glad the new chap is unable to.
What he meant was "can spell neither consumer nor device".
Whilst this was probably meant as an insult, I think many might actually take this as a compliment!
As many have observed MS desperately needs to keep its enterprise and business customers on-board. Particularly, given the move of things move into the cloud and the changing end user device landscape.
"Well if I was going to be picky I'd suggest that whilst users of the English language within the IT sector are possibly FOND of verbing, I wouldn't say they were FOUND of it."
I find the use of "verb" as a verb horribly recursive and jarring...I am not fond of it (or, for that matter, found of it).
I find the use of "verb" as a verb horribly recursive and jarring
That's rather the point (though "horribly" is, of course, subjective; as a shibboleth I have to say this one ranks quite far down on my list).
The use of "verb" as a verb in this sense was popularized by Bill Watterson in a famous Calvin and Hobbes strip. In the final panel, Calvin declares "Verbing weirds language", and Hobbes replies "Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding". The text and tone of the strip clearly1 imply that such usage is intended2 to be jarring ("weird").
Of course, Hobbes' objection in the strip isn't terribly persuasive either, since there's no evidence to suggest that English speakers are significantly confused by part-of-speech shifts, finding such neologistic usage perfectly cromulent.3
1Under the obvious, straightforward reading; counterinterpretations are left as an exercise for the reader.
2The myriad problems of intentionalist readings notwithstanding, we can speak of the intent of a rhetorical trope such as part-of-speech shifting without prejudicing the interpretive act or implying a privileged interpretation; rhetorical evaluation still leaves us plenty of interpretive margin thanks to uptake, etc.
3... he wrote, to forestall the otherwise-inevitable follow-up post by one of the local wags.
Confirms my understanding from earlier articles that the new man is expected to execute the game plan left by Ballmer.
If so, can we really expect any changes to the rot that set in with Ballmer. And if Nadella comes from the server end of the company is he likely to understand what consumers want, that Microsoft has so consistently failed to deliver in the last decade ?
I suspect that if Microsoft's place in the consumer market is to survive the onslaught of iPad, it will need to produce the next big thing. Before Apple. And do it properly, so Apple can't just re-do it better, later.
From observations here -- and among the my non-techy friends -- Microsoft has made enemies of many of its customers. Turning that around by ceasing to be the schoolyard bully would be a good start. But perhaps all we are going to see is a more efficient version of policies like renting MS Office and forcing Windows 8 down our throats.
If Nadella is a "server" man, he might actually understand much of the dislike that power-users have been voicing towards Windows 8. He might be in mental touch with admins and veteran Windows users.
If OTOH he's a "cloud" buzzword hipster evangelist, that doesn't sound nearly as promising.
What does the Microsoft's humongous profit consist of these days? Is it still selling Windows and Office? If that's the case, It has seemd to me lately that they've been doing all their best to kill that hen laying golden eggs... They've always been capitalizing on the sheer compatibility and historical omnipresence of their Win32 OS platform and office suite. In the recent years though, they've done a good job of scaring their once faithful customers away with counter-intuitive UI changes, software bloat and mind-boggling licensing :-(
There's an obvious win to be had by competing with Amazon: producing an MS Compute Cloud product, and selling it to enterprise on the basis that MS rather than in-house IT manage all the roll-outs, deployments, fixes, upgrades, and other time-wasting crap that server systems usually suffer from.
Azure almost does this. But not quite. Certainly not reliably enough. And certainly not cheaply enough.
Problem is, Nadella will probably decide consumers want this too, and try to turn Win 9 into the MS Chromebook for Dummies OS - while not getting the enterprise angle right either.
>I find it hard to value the opinion of a man who uses double
>negatives in a sentence by using neither and nor
"Nor
used before the second or further of two or more alternatives (the first being introduced by a negative such as ‘neither’ or ‘not’) to indicate that they are each untrue or each do not happen:
they were neither cheap nor convenient
the sheets were never washed, nor the towels, nor his shirts"
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/nor
I find it hard to value... etc.
Well this the opposite to what I was taught on the use if neither and nor, so I stand corrected there.
It appears that you agree with me on the word order though, since your example was
"they were neither cheap nor convenient"
rather than
"they neither were cheap nor convenient"
He's a sad, embittered man, ekeing out his fast-fading fame long after his Fake Steve Jobs column (which was genuinely funny and insightful), shuffling from high-profile publications to ever-less-relevant ones. He now spends his time snarking at Apple, so I suppose Microsoft should feel vaguely flattered that he's flinging muck at them too...
I feel a tiny bit sorry for him, he had a great thing going with Fake Steve, then he gets a call from a trusted source at Apple saying basically, let it go, Steve's dying.
So he does, and fuck me, Steve doesn't seem to be dying at all, and no mention of any illness. it must have seemed like they played him exactly the way his own Fake Steve would have done, so he becomes bitter and adopts a hateful relationship with Apple that sours his writing and puts off a lot of Apple happy Fake Steve fans.
Years later Steve dies and it turns out they wern't lying, it's just pretty hard to predict exactly when someone's going to kick the bucket because Doctors tend to er on the pessimistic side. Dan seems to have mellowed since, I'm hopeful we might see a return to the wit and insight from those old days again.
Dan Lyons proving that even a stopped clock is right sometimes ;)
Microsoft needed change and this appointment signals that all the large changes are already finalised, he's just there for minor course corrections. Hard to see that being enough. Not enough to change internal MS culture enough and there's no hint at all of any change to their attitude towards customers.
Too little to break Microsoft out of the stasis it's mired in.
"In his book, Kempkin writes about how Microsoft predicted many of the major developments in technology in the last decade, such as tablets, smartphones and social media, but failed to capitalise on any of them.
He added that the decline in sales of PCs is partly due to Microsoft’s management of manufacturers, many of whom have publically declared their unease about the Redmond-based company’s move into hardware"
...do it.
Are you the same person now? Unchanged, undeveloped, living and working under the same conditions? Have you grown / moved / shifted your perspective on life, love, and the universe?
You haven't? Oh. Good for you.
I certainly have, and I don't think I'd liked to be judged, in the now, for the person I was then. Not that that was anything salacious or anything, but I was indeed a different person nonetheless.
Give the guy a break, eh? Let him dig his own holes.
In essentials, yes I am. Some of the details may have changed a bit. In fact, in essentials I'm pretty much the same person now I was when I graduated from high school back in the dark ages of personal computing. Except for one major fault cracking, which was not in any way shape or form good. Fortunately for me those costs are unlikely to affect much of anyone besides me. But I was forged in fire and I don't expect that will be true of most people.
And I will give the guy a break.
Another semi-useless human being that couldn't handle an actual IT job, or probably even the average burger-flipping job is now in a position of power in a large corporation. Intelligence beyond that of how to manipulate people is not required. Neither is vision. Only an MBA in most cases. He will be overpaid, out of touch with reality, and either make cuts or purchases likely with a half understanding at best of the tech, or whatever slightly more intelligent yes men advise him on.
For the rest of us, the public and those corporations that have inked a deal in blood with Microsoft, we will be stuck for the most part with whatever half-aware decisions they make. We will continue to have to use and support products for which we are unwitting beta testers, and with "features" and interfaces that were rushed to market, and that no one likely needed anyway. Let's rearrange menus and "the look" of things once again because if it "looks old", it isn't new, right? It doesn't matter that the steering wheel in your car has been in front of the driver for a century, let's move it off to the side, make it square, and call it an improvement in usability. Or leveraging masturbatility, or whatever. Let's innovate! Let's lay off thousands and a year later hire back a different thousand!
Guess I woke up on the wrong side of the bed or forgot my meds or something this morning...
There seems to be a lot of bad feeling in el reg towards Microsoft, and digging out some irrelevant ex-staffer to have a pop at Nadella before he's even started seems a bit harsh.
Good for you I say - I've had 20 years of being messed around by Microsoft and their shit software. I don't care who's in charge, I just want to beat them with a big stick!
I'd be willing to see what he does before judging him.
However, I don't know if anyone would have even half a chance with Bill Gates breathing down their necks.
That guy needs to either take back control (a la Steve Jobs) or make a clean break. There's no halfway house that can really work for Microsoft's top brass.
Microsoft is never going to be the company I want it to be (and I would guess most of are hoping for). Quite frankly, we are only getting more diverse in our technology and these technologies are largely being focues on open source platforms with target of interoperability.
I don't need companies that take standards and fuck them up adding propritary BS and claim its the norm, nor do I want this. I want companies to make my life easier by allowing any technology I use to intergrate with the other tech I use. (Not saying FOSS is perfect, but still its the better option)
My last real bitch. Licensing. Fuck you MS and your damn licensing. (I feel better). I hate feeling like I am getting screwed and so I'll push stong open source alternates. I'd much rather MS created epic cross platform tools that are easy to use, but hey the FOSS community struggles with that too
Maybe, just maybe, a bit of pre-game sledging will do Satya no harm at all.
Continuing the cricket analogy, will he pull a performance like the 1981 Headingley test, dragging victory from the quicksand of defeat? I will wait and see.
Oh and BTW, Simon, we had something of a discussion about the Sachin Tendulkar thing yesterday at work, with the result being not quite as clear-cut as may have been expected. At the risk of being consigned to the outer darkness, and of course forever banned from the subcontinent, can I continue this in the forums? It being Friday and all :)
And it seems relevant even today. Of course a different object to throw the hammer at, but yes there seems to be a conforming audience to "cheer" on the "man behind the curtain". Look what happened to the last object of the thrown hammer, as we look forward to the next object.
Of course, if it were chairs that were thrown, it might be a different commercial.
1984 all over again. Maybe a rewrite with different characters. Haven't I seen this movie before??
Like all those involved in 'OEM' it's a sales role. So Kempin's ultimate boss was Ballmer who was, allegedly, fond of shouting and throwing furniture. So anyone not in that mold is going to look soft to those who accept Ballmer's way is appropriate.
The board, probably unhappy with both the management style and the results, I feel are likely to have been looking for a less acerbic more consensual leader. Ovine qualities allowed him to rise to lead a $20bn business so who's to say they will not serve him well in the hot seat?
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