CEO Satya Nadella ruining Microsoft?

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wincritter

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I realize by wall-street standards he is a great Ceo, since he has cut and slashed and returned microsoft to short term "profits" by being another IBM and going after enterprise.
But personally I think a company, especially tech, needs to be more than just profit.

I read that he never agreed with Balmer to acquire Nokia, so he basically decided to kill the phone division from the beginning. But that choice was choosing to make microsoft completely irrelevant to mainstream culture and will make microsoft completely irrelevant over time.
And I think consumer relevance is the ultimate driver of enterprise and not the other way around.
So it's easy to go for short term profits, but eventually google will eat them for lunch as everyone including enterprise will move on.

Microsoft seems to have an inability to commit and also doesn't seem to understand the value of a product line that isn't first place.
They should have kept the Lumia - it was a well respected product line with a loyal following. If they wanted to reduce expenses they could have just reduced the release cycle to a new phone every few years but staying committed to the OS would have had long term benefits.
 

N_LaRUE

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I don' think you have a clear idea of what Microsoft does. Your focus is solely on consumer based products and Microsoft was not a hardware maker and technically isn't a big one still.

It wasn't only Nadella who didn't want the phone division (others in MS didn't either), the majority of shareholders didn't want it. It wasn't a profitable business.

Not sure how much you know about enterprise but I don't think it's much. The vast majority of enterprises still use Microsoft systems. Lots of governments. Then there's the cloud services which are used by millions of businesses and consumers both. Sometimes without realising you're using them.

Microsoft is not Google or Apple. They're a different type of company entirely. I don't get why people want to make them the same as everyone else.

They're not irrelevant just different. Their stability is what attracts the customers they have along with the ease of which everything works together.

Maybe one day MS might do something in mobile again but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Lastly, MS is a high profit company so obviously they know what they're doing and doing it well.
 

Drael646464

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I realize by wall-street standards he is a great Ceo, since he has cut and slashed and returned microsoft to short term "profits" by being another IBM and going after enterprise.
But personally I think a company, especially tech, needs to be more than just profit.

I read that he never agreed with Balmer to acquire Nokia, so he basically decided to kill the phone division from the beginning. But that choice was choosing to make microsoft completely irrelevant to mainstream culture and will make microsoft completely irrelevant over time.
And I think consumer relevance is the ultimate driver of enterprise and not the other way around.
So it's easy to go for short term profits, but eventually google will eat them for lunch as everyone including enterprise will move on.

Microsoft seems to have an inability to commit and also doesn't seem to understand the value of a product line that isn't first place.
They should have kept the Lumia - it was a well respected product line with a loyal following. If they wanted to reduce expenses they could have just reduced the release cycle to a new phone every few years but staying committed to the OS would have had long term benefits.

Google has a single main income stream, next to which, all others are dwarfed: search. If anyone invents a better search that people adopt, or search becomes redundant, google could fall off the face of the earth.

Microsoft by comparison has a diversified profit portfolio. About 1/3 of profits come from from their games studios, who's names are various umbrella'd under 'xbox studios' formerly 'microsoft studios'. A larger share comes from cloud based services including block chain, which serve everything from informational databases to industrial factories IoT. Then there's the other portion; service subscriptions, windows, office and cloud storage.

In reality, for all the brand recognition google, or even apple have, they have never managed to get a significant foothold in any other industries. For google it's even worse; because their profit model is a new, and relatively untested advertising based model, and no one can guess how stable that is. But should for eg Google lose search, there would no longer be any benefit in them giving chrome or android away for free, and the house of cards collapses,as those are only vehicles to force people to view adds.

Around the time when Microsoft bowed out of the smartphone market, it was just years before we officially hit 'saturation' in the west. That's the point when instead of uptake, everyone already has one. This is the time when sales diminish significantly, when upgrade cylces grow longer, and when competition loves to price point and value proposition competition at the middle and budget teirs of device. It's a bad time to invest heavily in phones. Samsung is sinking, the mid teir is exploding, apple is about to sink and the whole profit from that industry will get thinner as people will start to 'buy just what I need, and only when my old phoe doesn't do it'

What you'll see in the next five years or so, is the collapse of apples profit model, largely based on the iphone. As deveoping nations like india approach saturation, there will be a massive sales collapse. If they aren't careful that could crush them.

This is why it's not just MSFT looking for 'the next big thing', in AR/VR, AI/ IoT, but all of these companies. Because whilst the next big thing won't grow as fast as smartphones used to, it'll be that growth.

MFST is actually doing very well, especially this year. Games are approximately a 140 billion dollar industry (profit, not gross), and growing, and lead ahead of movies, save for a few big franchises with toy sales etc. Games is a growth industry, unlike smartphones (and includes games ON smartphones). Cloud based computing and IoT has some major advances ahead of it, as the cloud becomes more intelligent. Companies deal in information, and nothing is keeping up with Azure. For services MFST does extraordinarily well next to most companies selling such things, partly because it's bundled and designed to work together, and best of all offline where it is reliable, responsive and feature rich.

Good news for MSFT too, not only is VR the fastest growing of all those new future techs, but windows mixed reality now has over 12% market share and growing because of it's efforts (and deal with steam). The Hololens borrows that momentum with it's UWP, windows core platform.

Whilst apple has yet not even really entered such markets, and google has focused on slower growing IoT, and yet to mature cloud based AI. Googles growth proposition is especially tricky as a near monolophy on search, and producing AI products that don't come at a fee. I predict some point they'll need something more to grwo.

The last part might be especially tricky given MSFT also has some stiff competition heading their way, with the next upcoming cortana, and it's TRUELy natural language interaction and contextual understanding pulled from an AI language startup, as well as MSFT's own AI api's, all of which can be adapted by thrid parties, and run with the cloud.

Technology and commerce changes moment to moment. These days, who's really heard of IBM, or nokia or blackberry or walkman? Apple nearly went bust pushing the apple mac until their cut everything and ran with the product that saved their company, the well executed but totally derivative ipod.

Brand regcognition only really gives you a second class when you product bombs.

My point is, the only thing is certain, is the winds of change are always blowing. You worry about the companies unaware of that, not the ones who've been through it, and know it quite well. The whole smartphone threat, now waning, that microsoft faced is exactly WHY they didn't put all eggs in one basket, some consumer, some business, and why they know when to be risk averse if a product isn't likely to have legs.
 

N_LaRUE

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The whole smartphone threat, now waning, that microsoft faced is exactly WHY they didn't put all eggs in one basket, some consumer, some business, and why they know when to be risk averse if a product isn't likely to have legs.

I'll give them sort of credit for sticking to the phone market as long as they could. Whether they put in their best effort is another question entirely as it is with other 'failed' products like Zune for example.

It should be pointed out that both Google and Apple are not perfect and have had many fails with both products, services and software in recent times. We just tend to forget about them.
 

fatclue_98

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Microsoft recently reached trillion dollar valuation status. Yeah, he sucks and we should burn him at the stake if he doesn’t repent. I’m a Windows Mobile user and I hate what happened but it wasn’t Nadella’s doing. He just happened to be at the wheel when the iceberg hit.
 

Ryujingt3

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Microsoft are doing far better without a mobile division than they ever did with one - money talks after all. Microsoft tried and tried in the mobile space and failed. Most likely, had Satya Nadella carried on with Microsoft phones and Windows Phone we would still be in the same situation as we are today (i.e. it still dies).

Windows Phones were great, but Microsoft made tons of bad decisions, as did consumers and service providers by not supporting or not understanding what they were about.

Ultimately you just have to let it go.

You could argue that dropping Windows Phone was MS's best decision. Think about it. Apple, sure, they sell tons of phones, but now they are only starting to branch out to put their services on other platforms, because they see the end in sight (read: diminished sales) for iPhone. MS has been there and done that and they got out.

With Apple also merging iOS and MacOS (something MS also tried at) you could argue that MS set that trend, and whilst they ultimately failed, maybe Apple will have more luck. Apple have realised they now need as many customers using their platform/services as they can get, because they can't sell iPhones forever. This is something that MS is now very good at, but only after dropping Windows Phone first.
 
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fatclue_98

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Windows Phones were great, but Microsoft made tons of bad decisions, as did consumers and service providers by not supporting or not understanding what they were about.

Therein lies the problem. Windows Phone (7) was the bad decision. Microsoft had a healthy market share during the WinMo days in the mid-2000s. The main issue was resistive screens and god-awful hardware in comparison to the new iPhone and subsequent Android offerings. The HTC HD2 proved WinMo ran great on modern (at the time) hardware with capacitive displays. Granted, the HD2 was available only on T-Mobile which was an afterthought back then. Carrier support was omnipresent then which proved fatal later on.
 

Drael646464

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With Apple also merging iOS and MacOS (something MS also tried at) you could argue that MS set that trend, and whilst they ultimately failed, maybe Apple will have more luck. Apple have realised they now need as many customers using their platform/services as they can get, because they can't sell iPhones forever. This is something that MS is now very good at, but only after dropping Windows Phone first.

Apple hasn't merged iOS and MacOSX. They just made it possible to run iOS apps on MacOSX (but not vice versa). In fact Apple has repeatedly came out in the last few years saying they have no intention of merging the two. They are, as you say, starting to shift focus onto services, as the smartphone market shows signs of waning.

Arguably Apple is in the best position for a merger and creating a true hybrid OS because they have the iPad, and both a desktop and mobile platform (offering a bridge between small and big screen that neither google nor MS have yet). But they refuse to walk fully down that pathway.
 

wincritter

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Well I see pretty much everyone doesn't agree with me :) shucks. I understand what enterprise is about and I understand it's widely more profitable to them.
But I do think that not having enough consumer focus will just turn them into another IBM which is basically what is happening.
To me that sucks because IBM makes a lot of money but they are basically ghosts of their original company as far as making a dent in the universe - and I don't want the same to happen to Microsoft.
And yeah after reading that Nadella didn't support the nokia acquisition and he didn't want mobile in the first place - well it was no surprise that it died under his watch. I think he is an awful CEO but obviously that is just my 2 cents- microsoft was a thousand times more innovative under Balmer and Gates before him.
Nadella also criticized Gates original company goal of having "a pc on every desk" and he has replaced it with "to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more." which is pretty much a bunch of generic babble and he doesn't seem to get that Gates goal was actually achieved and made a huge difference on the world - whereas his generic goal sounds like it is out of a canned yoga self help book & even if they achieve it the impact is hardly worth reporting to work for.
So yeah I think he should be sent packing.
 

wincritter

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You guys right that I missed their consumer reach in gaming. But I think abandoning mobile was a huge mistake. They already spent billions - and maintaining a basic lumia line would have kept them in the game even if they drastically reduced the expenses in the release cycle. Plus, the whole universal app concept becomes kind of pointless when they are not in one of the biggest sectors of devices.
That and Microsoft has given themselves a horrible reputation with customers in abandoning product lines. They really should stop that.
 

Drael646464

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You guys right that I missed their consumer reach in gaming. But I think abandoning mobile was a huge mistake. They already spent billions - and maintaining a basic lumia line would have kept them in the game even if they drastically reduced the expenses in the release cycle. Plus, the whole universal app concept becomes kind of pointless when they are not in one of the biggest sectors of devices.
That and Microsoft has given themselves a horrible reputation with customers in abandoning product lines. They really should stop that.

I'd agree with the UWP thing, except that I don't know if it was going that well anyway. 2015 was the last phone release, not that long ago, and market share was slim to none. Excellent phones tho.

I don't know what the next play is there. I know they need SOME kind of device that is smaller than a GO, in order to keep UWP rolling. They have andromeda, but they need some special sauce to soothe the app gap. PWA isn't picking up fast enough (uber, and twitter, google apps and a few others, but not enough)

They COULD bundle android apps, just for that device, but then that doesn't help UWP, only the device. Hololens may help, but it's still not consumer (great product, but still early tech).

Microsoft mixed reality is picking up, so that's a small consumer win, and helps UWP a tiny bit.

But that small device......you'd hope they have a trick or two up their sleeve, at least in a few years when folding screens come about. Maybe windows lite will help a bit.

Hard to say, but they need a strategy. I don't agree that mobile was it, it was just failing too much. But I do agree they can't leave the space entirely; in order to make 'one OS to rule them all', the hybrid scaling OS they have been working on since windows 10; they need VR/VR, voice, a big screen and a small screen. Every other box is ticked.....

They need something, and they need it before everyone loses interest in UWP.
 

Drael646464

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I was actually just thinking earlier; amazon, microsoft and now huawei all have app gap issues. Shame they can't work together, or even better, just agree to use something open source like f-droid (which everyone could then pile on into). If all those companies had the same store for the mobile space, or the same app platform, it might work better.

But microsoft needs UWP to work, huawei can't work with any americans any more, and amazon already had the most successful paid app store outside of google already (and they want alexa not cortana).

Still it sucks to see multiple bigwigs trying to 'crack the giant', but not working together as 'underdogs'. It's messy for MSFT getting into mobile.

At the very least, they could team up and make a core suit of PWA apps, to compete with google apps. They could invite a few major players in like FB etc, and help boost the cross platform app solution that solves all their problems.
 
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tgp

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I was actually just thinking earlier; android, microsoft and now huawei all have app gap issues.

I'm curious why you included Android in this list. Also, Huawei doesn't have an app gap right now, and the US government has issued a 3 month reprieve. I wouldn't be surprised if it isn't eventually dropped, or some kind of watered down version of the ban is agreed upon.

Right now, Microsoft is the only valid entity in your list. And you're splitting hairs somewhere if you think Android should be here.
 

Drael646464

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I'm curious why you included Android in this list. Also, Huawei doesn't have an app gap right now, and the US government has issued a 3 month reprieve. I wouldn't be surprised if it isn't eventually dropped, or some kind of watered down version of the ban is agreed upon.

Right now, Microsoft is the only valid entity in your list. And you're splitting hairs somewhere if you think Android should be here.

Typo, I meant amazon. Is it possible the ban is just tactics for the trade war? Sure.

But google is banned in china for similar reasons, and actually it's not lacking sensibility having caution around foreign tech. We know for example the state have backdoors in intel chipsets (hence all the intel security patches), it would be niave to think the chinese govt doesn't do similar things, especially with their social credit system. At the very least, banning chinese tech from essential government uses, and major infrastructure is not unwise.

Even if it doesn't stick, amazon and microsoft both share the same concern about apps, and could put a team together for building up PWA actively. Hell Samsung would probably get on that, they don't want reliance on google either.
 

wincritter

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Hard to say, but they need a strategy. I don't agree that mobile was it, it was just failing too much. But I do agree they can't leave the space entirely; in order to make 'one OS to rule them all', the hybrid scaling OS they have been working on since windows 10; they need VR/VR, voice, a big screen and a small screen. Every other box is ticked.....

They need something, and they need it before everyone loses interest in UWP.

Well I guess I don't see why they couldn't have just downsized phone release cycles drastically to reduce their expenses.
It's not like BlackBerry who pretty much had nothing but phones - they are maintaining tablet windows already - so coming out with a new lumia every few years or something would have been fine.
Instead they just trashed the whole thing.
 

Drael646464

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Well I guess I don't see why they couldn't have just downsized phone release cycles drastically to reduce their expenses.
It's not like BlackBerry who pretty much had nothing but phones - they are maintaining tablet windows already - so coming out with a new lumia every few years or something would have been fine.
Instead they just trashed the whole thing.

I hear you. I think their idea was 'this wasn't working we need to retreat, regroup and look for another way in'. Could be they should have done as you say, just to keep the lights on for small screen windows. Maybe they have some grand plan that will make sense of it all. Time will certainly tell.

And you are probably right, that they could have gone for a bare minimum approach, minor software updates and a single device every few years without it costing them much. But there was a time when MSFTs status has seemed to slump. Now, it's booming. Perhaps if it had been doing as well at the time, it wouldn't have happened.
 

Ryujingt3

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Microsoft isn't consumer focused anymore. The Surface and Xbox lines withstanding, all other consumer ventures died or were scrapped. Microsoft doesn't do well with consumers, Apple, and to a lesser extent Google, do. Therefore, to stay relevant, MS need to get their services on these platforms, which is what they are doing.
 

JazzL5

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Satya needs to go. He's not consumer focused. Or, they need to separate consumer from the enterprise side, with consumer being run separately with someone devoted to the consumer products.
 
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