Comment by bitpush
1 day ago
Since we're on the topic of Microsoft, I'm sure you'd agree that Satya has done a phenomenal job. If you look objectively, what is Satya's accomplishments? One word - Azure. Azure is #2, behind AWS because Satya's effective and strategic decisions. But that's it. The "vibes" for Microsoft has changed, but MS hasnt innovated at all.
Satya looked like a genius last year with OpenAI partnership, but it is becoming increasingly clear that MS has no strategy. Nobody is using Github Copilot (pioneer) or MS Copilot (a joke). They dont have any foundational models, nor a consumer product. Bing is still.. bing, and has barely gained any market share.
People now days don't understand how genius MS was in the 90s.
Their strategy and execution was insanely good, and I doubt we'll ever see anything so comprehensive ever again.
1. Clear mission statement: A PC in very house.
2. A nationwide training + certification program for software engineers and system admins across all of Microsoft's tooling
3. Programming lessons in schools and community centers across the country to ensure kids got started using MS tooling first
4. Their developer operations divisions was an insane powerhouse, they had an army of in house technical writers creating some of the best documentation that has ever existed. Microsoft contracted out to real software engineering companies to create fully fledged demo apps to show off new technologies, these weren't hello world sample apps, they were real applications that had months of effort and testing put into them.
5. Because the internet wasn't a distribution platform yet, Microsoft mailed out huge binders of physical CDs with sample code, documentation, and dev editions of all their software.
6. Microsoft hired the top technical writers to write books on the top MS software stacks and SDKs.
7. Their internal test labs had thousands upon thousands of manual testers whose job was to run through manual tests of all the most popular software, dating back a decade+, ensuring it kept working with each new build of Windows.
8. Microsoft pressed PC OEMs to lower prices again and again. MS also put their weight behind standards like AC'97 to further drop costs.
9. Microsoft innovated relentlessly, from online gaming to smart TVs to tablets. Microsoft was an early entrant in a ton of fields. The first Windows tablet PC was in 1991! Microsoft tried to make smart TVs a thing before there was any content, or even wide spread internet adoption (oops). They created some of the first e-readers, the first multimedia PDAs, the first smart infotainment systems, and so on and so forth.
And they did all this with a far leaner team than what they have now!
(IIRC the Windows CE kernel team was less than a dozen people!)
There was some innovation - and some good products ( MS office stands out for me ) - however what MS did relentlessly well, as you mentioned, was sales, distribution and developers.
They also leveraged their relationship with Intel to the max - Wintel was a phrase for a reason. Companies like Apple faltered, in part, in the 90's because of hardware disadvantages.
Often their competitors had superior products - but MS still won through - in part helped by their ruthlessly leveraging of synergies across their platforms. ( though as new platforms emerged the desire to maximise synergies across platforms eventually held them back).
That aggressive, Windows everywhere behaviour, is what united it's competitors around things like Java, then Linux and open source in general which stopped MS's march into the data centre, and got regulators involved when they tried to strangle the web.
> the Windows CE kernel team was less than a dozen people!
It showed
CE was a dog and probably a big part of the reason Windows Phone failed. Migrating off of it was a huge distraction and prevented the app platform from being good for a long time. I was at Microsoft and worked on Silverlight for a bit back then.
Windows phone 7's kernel was amazing. It was a complete rewrite from the old kernel and had incredible performance, minimal resource usage, and an amazing power profile.
IMHO the reason for Microsoft's failed phone venture was moving onto the windows kernel and 2xing system requirements.
2 replies →
> some of the best documentation that has ever existed.
You have got to be kidding. The 90s was my heyday, and Microsoft documentation was extravagantly unhelpful, always.
Compared to today's documentation it is amazing.
One of my internships was at a company writing an example app for SQL server offline replication. Taking a DB that had changed while offline and syncing them to a master DB when reconnection happened. (Back in 2004 or so, now days this is an easier thing).
The company I interned at was hired by MSFT to write a sample app for Fabrikam Fine Furniture that did the following:
1. Sales people on the floor could draw a floorplan on a tablet PC of a desired sectional couch layout and the pieces would be identified and the order automatically made up .
2. Customer enters their delivery info on the tablet.
3. DB replicated down to the delivery driver's tablet PC when the driver next pulls into the loading bay with all the order info.
4. After the delivery is finished and signed for on the tablet PC, the customer's signature is digitally signed so it cannot be tampered with later.
5. When the delivery truck pulls back into the depot, SQL server replication happens again, syncing state changes from the driver back to the master DB.
That is an insane sample app, just one of countless thousands that Microsoft shipped out. Compare that to the bare bones hello world samples you get now days.
> Azure is #2, behind AWS because Satya's effective and strategic decisions
I am going to have to disagree with this. Azure is number 2, because MS is number 1 in business software. Cloud is a very natural expansion for that market. They just had to build something that isn't horrible and the customers would have come crawling to MS.
You could just as easily make the argument that cloud is a very natural expansion for Google given their expertise in datacenters and cloud software infrastructure, but they are still behind. Satya absolutely deserves credit for Microsoft's success here.
I just listened to the Acquired podcast guys talk to Balmer. Steve actually deserves a huge amount of the credit for Azure that Satya enjoys today.
- Created the windows server product
- Created the "rent a server" business line
- Identified the need for a VM kernel and hired the right people
- Oversaw MSFT's build out of web services (MSN, Xbox Live, Bing) which gave them the distributed systems and uptime know-how
- Picked Satya to take over Azure, and then to succeed him
No, you couldn't. The natural extension is related to customer relationships, familiarity, lock in (somewhat).
Google is not behind capability wise, they are in front of MSFT actually. The customer relationships matter a whole lot more.
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Microsoft has become a lot more friendly to open source under Satya. VSCode, GitHub, and WSL happened during his tenure, and probably wouldn't have happened under Ballmer. Turning the ship from a focus on protecting platform lock-in to meeting developers where they are is a huge accomplishment IMO.
> Microsoft has become a lot more friendly to open source under Satya. True, but that's just few open source projects, albeit influential ones. There are soo many other companies doing influential open source projects.
I dont disagree with anything you said because turning a ship around is hard. But hand-to-heart, what big tech company is truly innovating to the future. Lets look at each company.
Apple - bets are on VR/AR. Apple Car is dead. So it is just Vision Pro
Amazon - No new bets. AWS is printing money, but nothing for the future.
Microsoft - No new bets. They fumbled their early lead in AI.
Google - Gemini, Waymo ..
I think Satya gets a lot more coverage than his peer at Google.
Waymo and DeepMind and the TPU program all predate Sundar as CEO.
IMO Google should have invested more in Waymo and scaled sooner. Instead they partnered with traditional automakers and rideshare companies, sought outside investment, and prioritized a prestige launch in SF over expanding as fast as possible in easier markets.
In other areas they utterly wasted huge initial investments in AR/VR and robotics, remain behind in cloud, and Google X has been a parade of boondoggles (excluding Waymo which, again, predates Sundar and even X itself).
You could also argue that they fumbled AI, literally inventing the transformer architecture but failing at building products. Gemini 2.5 Pro is good, but they started out many years ahead and lost their lead.
Apple - have you used a Macbook recently - their ARM based product line is a big step forward - sure it's not self driving cars - but it's been the biggest jump in standard PC's for quite a while and has required innovation up and down the stack.
Microsoft - No new bets. Really? Their OpenAI deal and integrating that tech into core products?
Amazon - No new bets? It's still trying drone delivery, and it's also got project Kuiper - moving beyond data centres to providing the network
> a lot more friendly to open source under Satya. VSCode, GitHub, and WSL
This is all the 1st step of embrace and extinguish.
Diversifying Microsoft away from the traditional cash cow of Windows and Office is the single most important strategy for Microsoft and he executed it well.
His genius is really just making good bets on people, and letting them do their thing.
People like Scott Guthrie who was a key person behind dot.net, and went on to be the driving force behind Azure. Anyone who did any dot.net work 10+ years ago would know the ScottGu blog and his red shirt.
Google similarly bet on Demis, and the results also show. For someone who got his start doing level design on Syndicate (still one of my all-time favourite games) he's come a long way.
> If you look objectively, what is Satya's accomplishments?
Managing to keep the MS Office grift going and even expand it with MS Teams is something