Satya Nadella: Microsoft's new man presses all the old buttons in LONG memo Six months into his new job as Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella has penned what we're supposed to believe is a memo to his troops. Corporate missives to employees are generally hush-hush affairs, something enterprising journalists land by luck or skill. The appearance of the document on the company's website means this is not an …
"I... want to share some additional thoughts on Xbox and its importance to Microsoft,"
Translates into:
"We tried to flog it, nobody wants it"
And..
"We will re-invent productivity to empower every person and every organization on the planet"
Into:
"We will leverage our Windows and Office business to try and push people into subscription services"
No doubt many more, Alas, I can't be bother reading Microsoft's pathetic spin and continuing denial they are in terminal strife.
A good link, keithpeter, and an excellent analysis and dissection (skewering?) of Nadella's memo by Jean-Louis Gassée. In the politest words and manner possible, Gassée rips Nadella a new one.
But I think Gassée gives Nadella undeserved credit when he suggests that Nadella was really just speaking — deliberately — in code. (That Nadella was doing so deliberately is clearly implied.) Nadella was not deliberately wrapping his true message in words cleverly and carefully chosen to conceal his true meaning from all but the discerning few, in the manner posited by the political philosopher Leo Strauss.* He was not trying to protect himself from persecution (à la a handful of great minds throughout history, according to Strauss's controversial theory), and neither was he trying to protect the feelings of his employees or soften the blow to those whose heads are about to roll. He wrote the way he did and used the convoluted, euphemistic words he did because this is how he thinks!**
And that is the most troubling thing of all about this memo, and about everything else I have ever seen that Nadella has said or written.
Especially when, upon further reflection, one realizes that speaking in jargon that way to Steve Ballmer is a big part of how Nadella landed his current position in the first place, and that anyone else who wants to advance within Microsoft will now have to speak the same meaningless, 100% buzzword-compliant language. Nadella's not going to change this broken corporate culture. He embodies it. He lives it and breathes it. He's the problem incarnate, not the solution.
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* I refer to Strauss's 1941 essay and 1952 book, Persecution and the Art of Writing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_and_the_Art_of_Writing
http://thenewschoolhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/strauss_persecutionartwriting.pdf
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/strauss-leo/
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** Nadella may have a high IQ, as Gassée contends, but he is clearly a shallow man. IQ and depth are not the same thing (any more than depth and wit or depth and cleverness); one can have one without the other.
Nadella also clearly lacks a bullshit detector. For if an inner alarm does not go off when he writes crap like this himself, it will not go off when he encounters such meaningless drivel coming from others, either.
I keep seeing that advert on tele about the xbox with the bloke from that TV show where he lauds the benefits of the xbox such as being able to watch TV at the same time as playing a game... That's the very definition of productivity right there!!
I can't imagine there is anyone who has a good use for this feature? The games can't be that engrossing if people can focus on watching bargain hunt or whatever at the same time.
Mobile-First: No thanks, just because my mobile device has a 1920x1080 display and loads of compute power the battery doesnt last long enough to do anything meaningful and the screen size is so small all its good for is browsing, some lite email and maybe a movie whth the headphones in when im bored. If I need to do any actual work its back to my desk with the 24" LCDs and real, usefull input devices.
Cloud-First: Oh Hell No. There is no way I would subscribe to ising the cloud voluntarily. The spooks at the NSA have really put a huge dent in that idea, sure the cloud is a good idea in theory but there are too many issues in practice
Microsoft hires vision-less tit.
What more do you need to write?
Bill Gates had no vision, neither did Ballmer. But Gates was at least a geek.
Microsoft could have launched the ebook reader in the 1990s but Bill wanted the Windows GUI on it and it was a custom device (like any appliance should be to stand a chance of having decent battery life).
"Bill Gates had no vision, neither did Ballmer. But Gates was at least a geek."
With respect, I disagree. In part.
You are quite right about Ballmer being a visionless bundle of fluff and bluster, AC, but Gates had — and doubtless still has — vision. His vision is far from flawless, to be sure — just look at how late he was to appreciate the significance of the Internet for Microsoft's business — but he usually appreciated the Big Picture just as much as he had an amazing head for technical details.*
Gates — with Allen — was quick to see the potential for personal computers, before the Altair. He likewise was quick to see (for better or worse) the potential for commercial software.** And he was just as quick as Jobs to see that mice and bit-mapped GUIs were the future. Just read the accounts of his first meeting with Charles Simonyi, and his first visit to Xerox PARC as Simonyi's guest — before Steve Jobs ever breathed a word to him about the Macintosh or even the Lisa. His earliest interactions with Nathan Myhrvold likewise testify to his being a vision guy.
(Whether he surpassed Paul Allen in these regards, I've no idea. But they were both really solid and sharp tech guys.)
Ballmer, on the other hand, was not. I'm convinced that Ballmer isn't stupid,*** but he just doesn't get things. Even Nadella is better in this regard (though hardly a rival of Gates). Ballmer seems to be just an archetypal B-school product.
And even people who might disagree with me about Gates must agree that he was nowhere near as visionless as Ballmer (as the statement "Bill Gates had no vision, neither did Ballmer" more or less implies). Surely he had/has some vision, whereas Ballmer has none at all.
(I think Gates had/has quite a lot. But the question always arises, compared to what/whom?)
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* He also could code. Seriously well.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/05/15/could_bill_gates_write_code/
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** Gates did not initially appreciate the utility of spreadsheet programs, because all he could think when he was first shown one was how easy it would be for him personally to do the same thing in BASIC. But he quickly realized his mistake and got behind what became Multiplan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplan
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*** Convinced by a single datum: that as an undergraduate at Harvard, he got the second-highest grade in a graduate microeconomics or mathematical economics course (I forget which, but the syllabi of the two courses typically overlap). This means he has to be smart enough to do multivariable calculus, with Lagrangian multipliers; invert matrices; and do linear programming with the simplex algorithm. (There might also have been some game theory.) And he did these things better than any of the graduate students in the class! (At least on the final exam.) The only student in the class who got a higher grade was Gates (with whom he crammed for the final), who of course was also but an undergrad. (And soon to be a drop-out.)
Sure hope MS learn from the people they sorely pissed off over the years (see below). How are they going to win them back when there are now real alternatives?
....Users who hated the Win8 changes and just want another Win7.
....Office users who felt you cynically changed Office and introduced the ribbon to create new lock-in and alienate loyal users on older versions...
....Developers who got certified, only to discover their programs were suddenly dropped.
....Developers who helped push .Net into the corporate space, who now see you backtrack away to JavaScript / html / html5....
....Resellers, who plugged MS product for years being punished for not pushing CloudFog offerings, when everyone knows early adopters will be guinea-pigs...
....Xbox fans alienated by user behavior monitoring, and draconian control tactics, who remain worried you'll reintroduce the beloved 'Trusted Computing' model later..
If you're going to copy and paste comments you should branch out and try it on other sites, your message will travel further. After the third or fourth time you've posted the exact same comment people start to lose attention.
The consistent message tactic is very effective, but you've got to slim it down to a sentence, or less. Politicians and infomercial people are the only ones that don't understand that. You don't want to get grouped in with the dicks and penis pill people.
Guess we can look forward to more wheels with square corners [aka tiles].
Marketing will promote it internally as "product differentiation".
Externally it will be perceived as more corporate inbreeding and "degenerate evolution".
After Windows 8 CE [Circle-Jerk Edition]
Expect Windows 9 DE [Degenerate Edition].
True story: Today I reviewed my student's draft proposal (in Word). Some of her equations seemed distorted. It turns out that it's too hard to make equations in Word (maybe I should say too tedious), so she's been creating them in LO and copying them as pictures from LO and pasting them into Word. I suggested she just use LO. I don't know that I can stomach any more "re-inventing" from MS.
It also stung that Gavin called Sinofsky a data guy and blamed the unholy horror that is Windows 8 on the use of data over "the human factor" (whateverthefuck that is). But then I remembered what I tell my stats students on day one: thinking that statistics and data are about numbers is like thinking that the Declaration of Independence is about spelling and grammar; statistics is about insight. And then I felt better about Windows 8 being data-driven: they just didn't collect the right data or they mis-interpreted it (or, even more likely, they extrapolated beyond the circumstances that gave rise to their data). I'm also reasonably certain that the "telemetry" in the article did not involve any A/B testing.
I expect a MASSIVE boots in productivity as soon as MS sacks the idiots they have allowed near UIs since the 90s and bribes some people away from companies that know what they're doing or, alternatively, some 10 year olds who will most likely do a better job (it is nigh impossible to a worse one).
The last application they have completely f*cked over is Skype. On iOS it has turned into a UI which removes all the usable stuff in favour of glitzy design that is just hard to operate. It is as if someone has told them to imitate Apple, and all they saw was design, and not the base of usability demands that go with it.
Personally, I think they came off the rails somewhere around the time of Vista, and to distract us from that disaster, Office usability had to die too, hence the ribbon. Oh, and Powerpoint (which was already edging towards features over content) simply fell off the charts when people who should be concentrating on the message spend countless office hours experimenting with features that only distract and add zero to content.
In that respect, something like Keynote is a relief, although Haiku Decks seem an interesting new approach too.
Usability, usability, usability - get sweaty Balmer back from his pension to do that one on stage.
give the guy a break?
The big kahooni at MS seems to have said somethink along lines of "we realise computers (that is hardware, software n firmware) now aim for the mundane rather than the spectacular an we (ms that is) want to be in a lead position in that new growth and revenue earner" no?
Its a bit of corporate speak to say IoT has happened?
The Glgafrincham B-Ark makes its final course correction for Earth and engages full power, the Captain splashes happily in his bath with his Ducky and a huddle of marketing execs, while number one heads off to do some shouting elsewhere...
"Microsoft is the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world. We will re-invent productivity to empower every person and every organization on the planet to do more and achieve more"
I feel like being loudly and copiously sick.
At WPC they are making a big deal of their 86% opportunity: their software is NOT on 86% of the devices shipping today. Since the day they signed the DOS deal with IBM they have never had more market share to gain. Woohoo! New worlds to conquer for their new Alexander.
In other words they are standing on the dock with their floppy disk in their hand watching HMS Mobile Opportunity sail away.
"Put XP on it and Office 2003
Hey presto - Productivity and Empowerment for all"
Indeed. Ballmer will be remembered as the man who ruined Office, and — with help from Sinofsky — ruined Windows as well. He was ultimately responsible for both interface-change disasters (ribbon, Metro/Modern), and for the huge Vista disaster before Sinofsky ever arrived in Redmond.
I see now that, according to Wikipedia, Sinofsky was responsible for Office 2007 and the accursed ribbon as well. Who knew?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Sinofsky
I'll never forgive either him or Ballmer for the decision not to leave menus in as an option. Or for Metro.
His slogans remind me of Ford Motor Company's ridiculous and meaningless claim that "We own work."
Or the time I sat through an after-dinner speech by the late Jack Kemp* (at one time more or less a hero of mine) and counted how many times he used the words "empower" and "empowerment." I believe it was well over 20.
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* Former U.S. Representative from Buffalo, New York, and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under the first President Bush. (I forget whether he was still HUD Secretary when he gave the after-dinner speech in question. It was sometime in 1991, '92 or '93.) Also the Republican nominee for Vice President in 1996.
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