Re:How Satya Nadella revived Microsoft
by Analemma_ on Friday February 10, 2017 @11:57AM
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What I kept hearing from people inside Microsoft was that the most helpful single change was getting rid of Sinofsky, and that was when the shift really began. Apparently he (much more than Ballmer) was responsible for the "Windows first" mentality that kept hobbling the rest of the company, though of course Ballmer deserves some blame for not doing his job and pushing back on that.
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If i recall correctly (from what I read at the time) he hid either the existence of Surface RT or the SOC it was running from the team that was porting Office to ARM. So they had to ship an unfinished version of Office (that required multiple steps and different interfaces to update to final. Which no reviewer or early user bothered with) with it.
The team working on office for ios wasn't allowed to ship because they didn't want ios to gain share against windows phone.
Satya came from cloud and enterprise (c+e). His big bet was on the fact that everyone will have a computer in a pocket augmented by the cloud. Capitalizing on that was very important.
Windows growth had been stagnant and ballmer lost the mobile opportunity.
Satya encouraged open source at Microsoft and putting customers need first.
I was part of this transition and the change was definitely felt. He deeply understands where the puck will be rather than where it is.