Microsoft's new mission statement: It's all about doing MAGICAL THINGS Satya Nadella, the man who succeeded Steve Ballmer as Microsoft's CEO and only the third chief exec in the company's history, believes the software giant is poised to achieve "magical things" in the coming years. So began an internal, company-wide memo Nadella sent on Thursday morning, in which he rallies the staff in Redmond …
No sarcasm intended - I like it. This guy is starting to impress me, and I am not swift to praise anything Microsoft does.
Of course if Sauron directed the Nazgul: "Go out and upgrade the world", the results are still predictably not rainbow butterfly unicorn kittens.
This is a good mission for them
No sarcasm intended - I like it.
You are surely joking; "Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more". So anything that helps anyone, anywhere do anything better to any degree, would fit into Microsoft's mission. It's almost meaningless, it's entirely unhelpful in informing their strategy, it's just standard CEO garbage.
> Coming from a company that delivers a minority operating system that is diminishing, why should I care enough to take the time to criticize on every single article related to Windows or Microsoft although interestingly not on any articles unrelated to Windows or Microsoft but about technologies which I profess to care about?
A somewhat better question.
> OK someone doesn't understand questions...
Okay, somebody doesn't understand his own words....
The question was "Why should I care?" The better question can be shortened to "why do I care so much at the exclusion of everything else, even things I claim to care about?"
And the answer is that you're a troll.
Go away.
*sigh*
Alright, I'll bite.
Backward compatibility, is the answer. Hundreds of millions of pieces of hardware that work with Windows but don't work with linux or OSX or *BSD. Billions of pieces of software that work on Windows but don't work on linux or OSX or *BSD.
Literally trillions of man-years of effort to make all that hardware and software compatible.
I don't think you realize what a staggering achievement backward compatibility in Windows actually is. Nobody else does it. The linux kernel introduces breaking changes with every major release. Apple are quite happy to fully reboot their whole OS.
Backward compatibility is what every industry that actually makes real things needs. Billions of production lines, control instruments, diagnostic instruments, even basic warehouse handhelds rely on it absolutely.
That is your answer.
I fed the troll. I apologize, everyone else.
I think you may be the troll:-
Windows apps run very well on Linux with wine and in most instances, there is a Linux version. Companies love the reliability of Linux and your erroneous comment about the kernel breaking things with every release is pure fantasy.
Oh yes, and software for one Linux will run on another easily so it is backwards and forwards compatible and can with a little modification which is possible due to the open source nature of the software, be made to run on Solaris, Unix and even Windows.
So why not just run an old version of Windows in " Billions of production lines, control instruments, diagnostic instruments, even basic warehouse handhelds rely on it absolutely"? Oh yes because old Windows is insecure! But if those companies are to survive, they do have a choice to use Linux instead!
So your argument really boils down to what Microsoft did in the past - nothing about the future so you have once again failed to answer the question!
> Windows apps run very well on Linux with wine
Ok, absolute troll confirmed. Go ahead, suggest I run a robotic quality control line consisting of twelve different spectrometers from WINE. Go on. I'll wait right here.
You're either a troll or the biggest moron I've ever encountered (and I include Eadon).
OK I will give you one more attempt - I will ask you a simple question:-
What happens to your control lines if a version of Windows was released that is not compatible with your line of robotic control equipment?
The latest version of Windows server drops 16bit support and it is only a matter of time before 32bit support will be dropped. In the meantime Linux is invading all of the space that Windows used to fill and it completely fills Super computer space as well as the majority of phones (Android) and most network devices as well as running most of the worlds web servers.
Can you reply without being petulant?
> What happens to your control lines if a version of Windows was released that is not compatible with your line of robotic control equipment?
Then there'll probably be a rewrite of the drivers. After the version in use passes out of extended support so you're looking at ten years for that and a far simpler rewrite since there is no paradigm shift from NT kernel to POSIX-ish kernel involved.
Either way it'd be a cost but redevelopment from Windows -> Windows is far cheaper than redevelopment from Windows -> !Windows, as even the most simpleminded of trolls should know.
... something companies want to sell you, but you don't want.
The real problem of many MS executives, especially a couple of latest CEOs, is their narrow mind - they can see things just from one single narrow perspective, and try to fit everything into it.
Just, often the world is a little broader than they think.
I've been saying it for a while: "cloud first, mobile first" really means "customer last".
I absolutely hate the direction Windows is going. The most requested feature in Win10 was Aero. Did Microsoft listen? I realize some people hate Aero. That is fine. In Win7, you had that choice. Microsoft is taking away our choices. They are telling us what to like instead of giving us what we like. You can bet your last dollar that if people did not raise such a vocal stink about the mouse-unfriendly start screen that it would still be here. Look at how many people hate the ribbon menus. What did Microsoft do? Put it in even more places. Microsoft is not listening. At this point, the only thing keeping me with Windows are my games.
"the mouse-unfriendly start screen" is another example of narrow thinking. It works very well in tablet mode, but not at all in desktop mode. A clever OS would offer one or the other depending on device and user settings. But MS first decided to force it upon everybody, then went back, and Windows 10 may then force a desktop UI on tablet users, that didn't work for tablet PCs... is so difficult to look from different perspective from Redmond? They are not a small company without resources to deliver an OS that could adapt to user needs and preferences.
Flat monochromatic UI are another example of blindly following a fashion without listening to users - some of them spending a lot of time in front of a PC performing complex tasks, and needing all those visual clues making their work a little easier.
I'm not agains ribbons, but they would have worked better as augmented toolbars, not full menu replacements.
Who turned up the volume ... in the Microsoft echo chamber?
Back in the days when I worked for a very large company, we would have sent for the men with a white van and straightjackets if our CEO had come out with stuff like this. It has no concrete content at all, and it smacks more of desperation than motivation. Can this really reflect the mindset of the inward looking prisoners inside the big echo box?
That's scary.
The expansion is over, saturation is here. Lenovo's head of design came up with this one...
http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/retro-thinkpad-time-machine/
Microsoft have some room to expand into mobile devices as end points to their back end systems. And they may have machine learning products to sell.
What else is there? What is the next Big Thing? Anyone any ideas? What itches remain to be scratched in the corporate workaday world?
Satya's mail contains 9 times the word more. Never was this comparative used in a comparation. This is IMHO one of the hallmarks of fascistoid verbiage.
BTW Jehovah's Witnesses have to talk on average 5000 hours to win one soul. A.N. Walker converted me to the UNIX environment in a fraction of that time. And Microsoft ™? ... Still trying.
After 5 years of losing marketshare and floundering around with products nobody loves, this new mission statement will somehow fix everything. As a software developer, it's really hard to care about their Windows everywhere mission right now. If it succeeds, it probably won't matter for another 18-24 months because the uptake will be slow (especially mobile). During that time, their competitors will leapfrog ahead again.
Let's see if Nadella can really break away from the personality-driven organization of the last few years and actually create a customer-driven company that creates products people care about.
I think Nadella has shown some good ideas:
1. Focus the teams on working together and avoiding the stupidity of the Sinofsky era where you had the Windows team writing crap apps for Windows 8 when they had talent and apps already in say the Office Team they could have used but wouldn't as they were under a different MS VP.
2. Focus in on what MS is; a software company and lose the mantra of it can only be on Windows and expand to other platforms. It's a business and if other platforms are beating yours accommodate them to sell more product. The only thing I would differ on currently is make sure it's done FIRST and BEST on Windows.
I wish they would stop focusing on mobile and cloud and understand that there are millions of small businesses around the world where cloud is not possibe, a) for simple technical reasons like really poor internet access speeds like we have in great swathes of the UK. Most of my clients are struggling along on 8mbps, you cannot run an entire company in the cloud through one 8mbps connection. I looked into a 1gbps connection in the centre of Gloucester via BT and it was going to cost £30,000 per year! WTF! Cloud my arse!
Review how you deal with Business - You cannot do any serious work on phones and tablets unless you turn them into a laptop like the Surface Pro with a keyboard and then you must be saying to yourself, "why am I spending so much cash on a device that is a poor representation of a laptop".
Business needs desktops and laptops. Except for a few very narrow areas like warehouses where you need a device to tick boxes on a form or TV presenters who need a device they can read from (rather than write on) and it's easy to carry around. Every other use case is Home User and should be kept spearate from what you offer to businesses. I think as usual too many people at Microsoft look admiringly at Apple (who are full square a home user organisation) and they are too simplistically applying what Apple are doing to their business, which in the main is a Business Focussed business. Sure create tablets and mobiles and stay in the Home User Arena for that. DO NOT shove a tablet interface on Windows Server? WTF were they thinking.
If I was Nadella I would focus on defining the two areas separately. Home gets tablets and XBox and Windows Store. Business gets good old fashioned desktop oriented Server and Client Operating Systems and they recognise that not all businesses want cloud and go back to creating really good systems like Small Business Server that are designed to give a great experience to small businesses who don't want cloud either from a cost, limited broadband connectivity perspective or just a strong desire to keep their business away from prying eyes.
Also I would take a long hard look at the damage that has been done to developer relationships pursuing these pointless Cloud first mobile strategies which are not what everyone wants and foster a stable long term future clearly stating what technologies will be used for the next 20 years. So that developers like me know where we are going instead of flitting between C++, C#, HTML 5, Javascript, Silverlight etc etc. Because too may times after you have gone to great expense in time learning a new language or platform and cost buying training materials in what you believe to be MS's strategy going forward, only to find that they have decided to throw that out and head off in a completely different direction and all you have done is a conplete waste of time.
If they wonder why developers migrated to Android and IOS this was a big part of it. That's why now they are struggling with mobile as it's just too unstable a future and people decided to stick with platforms like Java on Android and Objective C and now Swift on IOS that are likely to stay stable for a long time and you won't be wasting your time focusing on a language or platform that some bright spark at MS decides is not "cool" any more and chucks it out!
At least under Gates leadership he was focussed on looking after developers and for years you could get good at a language and know it would be supported and used for years to come and you felt confident investing in that platform to develop for. Now everyone in the Windows development community is scared of what's coming next!
"and actually create a customer-driven company that creates products people care about.
It's already quite clear that Microsoft has not changed a single whit towards being a "customer-driven" company since Nadella took over. Just look at the fact that Windows 10 is nothing more than Windows 8 with a coat of paint slapped on, namely Windows 10 is really just Windows 8.10. Of all the many "wonderful" things added to W8.10, from Cortana to the Edge Browser (which is nothing more than a dumbed-down browser than run runs in an "app" window", there's essentially nothing of any interest to any business of any size who's running Windows 7 as a mission critical PC operating system. EVERYTHING in Windows 8.10 is simply stuff Microsoft THINKS is critical for Microsoft's strategies, and is pretty much unrelated to the needs of PC users.
"We stand in awe of what humans dare to achieve"
The gulf between this statement and the reality of Windows 8 is simply mindboggling.
The rest of it is just basically "our business plan is to milk customers from now on through subscription models for everything".. Whether this is going to succeed or not is the really interesting question. I for one will never buy into this as a consumer, and I doubt that many organisations will be too happy about it either. I cannot see how users are going to accept being milked forever for cash when the CEO has more or less stated that this is what he plans to do. Instead I see customers coming to see "cloud" as synonymous with "pay regularly, forever". Surely the market will then produce a decent enough non subscription alternative.
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