Source: Me, at MSFT before Ballmer left and still there now.

That doesn't mean Satya's not had a good effect overall. Part of the investor postives were due to PR differences that Satya made (which are very good), and his ability to talk about the future of the company is far superior to Ballmer.

Ballmer also subjected all of those new initiatives to the Windows/Office dominance, which is why they all failed.

Nadella's most impactful, and fundamental, contribution was demolishing Windows's hold over every other department.

It moved the onus of testing on Devs who've never done it before as part of their job and thusly very lacking. The bungled W10 recent releases can be directly tied back to this model. As PMs and Devs don't account for testing like they used to before shipping to customers.

This may be fine and dandy short-term, but if you're biggest customers rely on stability for code bases over 25 years old--getting rid of focused testing and reliability is a big no-no.

Could this explain some of the QA blunders like some Windows 10 users losing files after an upgrade?

If so the move may turn out far more costly than any savings or telemetry gains.

I don't quite understand this move. Would you mind to elaborate?

Are you saying that previously SDET role exist at MSFT and today, it does not exist anymore? And that Developers have to rely on Telemetry (logging, metrics, notifications, error reporting, etc etc) ?

Perhaps I don't understand "Telemetry" in this statement.

The 'Quality' role implements Telemetry for the working product which turns into metrics that PMs/Dev Managers look at to determine shipping.

I used to be an SDET, and re-interviewed in order to be a Dev after the big switch. I could have rolled right into 'Quality', but I didn't find that as interesting. As a result, the automated Testing that used to be done by the SDET team is moved to be the responsibility of the Dev teams. Most dev teams knew little to nothing about the automated tests that were being run every day against their code (Upgrade tests, BVTs, integration tests).

SDETs also created tools and internal frameworks which were created to reduce cost; for example, I implemented a Code-Coverage based test-pass to reduce the 24 hour automated test suite that was running every day on Windows Phone main branch.

The previous SDET role's responsbility has moved 100% to Dev Teams, none of which had to ever think about that facet of development before. As a result, you get me implementing automated test suites for 5 different teams in 3 years (WSL, Ink, Text, Touch input, kernel sec) because I know the frameworks more than 25 year veterans of Windows internal development. Some of these teams had 10-15 years of built in collatoral that is now attempting to be revived because management realizes that they've dropped the ball quite a bit.

No one really knows what’s going to happen in a recession. I suspect it won’t be pretty. Revenues will probably contract just as well in the reverse direction and I suspect many customers will look to cut costs by eliminating monthly recurring expenses.

Perhaps recurring revenue business will be more resilient. I can see a path for that as well. But no one really knows.

The difference is that recurring payments vastly improve your cashflow situation. Instead of giant pulses every 3 years you have a smoother pipeline of cash coming in all the time. Even if that pipeline shrinks, it still flows.

It's far easier to plan for a 10% reduction that happens continuously than a 3 year plan with lots of "??$??" sprinkled throughout it. And far easier to recover from mistakes.

Most companies don't optimize for cloud costs to great lengths.

Though the big corporate user base is not a certain success, IBM is a testament to this.

(Was going to say Oracle too, they haven't had a stock surge comparable to Microsoft but seem to be growing (some how?))

What is this, specifically?

Before it was extremely profitable, and it had no competition.