Microsoft's CEO On A Mission To Make Windows Matter Again

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A mission to make Windows matter again? When did Windows become irrelevant?

Nadella, who celebrates his one-year anniversary Wednesday as Microsoft's third-ever chief executive, has been working quietly and steadily to convince developers and consumers that the world's biggest software company -- and its Windows operating system for computers, tablets and smartphones -- is once again relevant. He's got a tough sell.
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How can I take this article seriously when it can't even get the name of Microsoft's cloud service right?
 
Make windows as accessable as android, so you can install it on any device, at any time.

If they could figure out a way for x86 apps to run on arm that would make it even more cross platform friendly.
 
Relevant? Better description might be "necessary evil".

That's what I'm hearing more and more now, people use cause they have to, not because they want to. Which not a good sign for MS cause some or later as soon as they can people will jump to something that can do the job AND they want to use.
 
Yakk said:
Relevant? Better description might be "necessary evil".

That's what I'm hearing more and more now, people use cause they have to, not because they want to. Which not a good sign for MS cause some or later as soon as they can people will jump to something that can do the job AND they want to use.
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Most people just don't want to use computers. A ton of people I talk to just hate computers, no rhyme or reason, they just don't like them. Until you can get them to like a computer, they won't like windows, or mac's or linux.
 
"Mac User" here. Running Yosemite 10.10.2 on a 2013 Mac Pro 6C / Dual D700s. And I cannot bloody wait to install Windows 10 over this stuttering, laggy, audio-buggy, cannot-fully-utilize-both-GPUs, poor-3D-printer-support operating system. It's great hardware that's manacled by a rubbish operating system.

That's not to say it wouldn't be a good O/S for consumers, much in the way iOS is, but it's just not a serious offering any longer.*

* Yes, older versions of OS X were far better, but Apple's insistence of not permitting 10.6 on anything resembling new hardware stinks.

** Before the rabid Mac brigade comes down on me, yes, I am running a fresh install as of four days ago; it didn't improve things.

*** This whole drawn-out post was simply to say "I'm running the Tech Preview on a Surface 3 Pro and think it's brilliant. REALLY looking forward to running it on the MP.
 
When I use a Mac, I feel like the only reason it runs software is because it has to.
 
The surprising thing is that Nadella has lasted a year under the radar as CEO!!! The amount of people including some in IT who still think Bill Gates or Ballmaer are head of Microsoft!!
 
Yakk said:
Relevant? Better description might be "necessary evil".

That's what I'm hearing more and more now, people use cause they have to, not because they want to. Which not a good sign for MS cause some or later as soon as they can people will jump to something that can do the job AND they want to use.
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All OSs are a necessary evil. Their core function is just to serve as a gateway for getting to the things you actually want or need to do with your device.

Ideally the OS should read your mind.... or better yet see in to the future and know what you want to do and be ready to do it the moment before you are and you should never see the OS. But we can't do that so instead we have these user interfaces, the goal in the design of which should be to simply be as minimally frustrating as possible.
 
toffty said:
It made complete sense and I laughed out loud (I really did)

It's amazing how crappy iOS is especially for developing software for and on it.
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As a long, long time developer (and an iOS dev for around five years now) I'll say it USED to be a great development environment. Until, that is, Apple started fragmenting the hardware ecosystem without enabling things like proper resolution independence. It's a real hassle to develop for all of the phone iterations now.

To be fair, iPad development isn't the same mess but this is an area that Android was always better than iOS.

* again, a caveat: there are many instances where Android device fragmentation is a real PITA but as mentioned above, Android has always handled differing screen resolutions far better than iOS.
 
GaryJohnson said:
Ideally the OS should read your mind.... or better yet see in to the future and know what you want to do and be ready to do it the moment before you are and you should never see the OS. But we can't do that so instead we have these user interfaces, the goal in the design of which should be to simply be as minimally frustrating as possible.
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One thing I would love is:

Having the OS keep analytics on what apps I use and when, so if it know i use outlook every day, when the PC boots it goes ahead and pre fetches the outlook app so all it has to do when i click on outlook is load the gui portion of the program. That would cut down on load times by a lot, especially on the surface pro which can boot in a few seconds, then outlook takes longer than the OS to load lol.
 
k1pp3r said:
Make windows as accessable as android, so you can install it on any device, at any time.
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The main issue with this is drivers, and what devices would you want it on?
The only devices which are mainstream, and would even begin to be worth it to Microsoft, are tablets and smartphones; this would also shoot Microsoft in the foot since they already have their Surface tablets and Windows Phone 8 smartphones, making this idea redundant with zero benefits to Microsoft.

If they could figure out a way for x86 apps to run on arm that would make it even more cross platform friendly.
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They, and everyone else, already does; it's called emulation.
The reason this hasn't taken off, is because emulation requires lots of processing power.

Even the fastest ARM CPU available, would be about the equivalent to a 200MHz x86 CPU in terms of emulation-performance when emulating x86.
Enjoy running Photoshop on that and see how long it takes to render a single HD photo filter. ;)

You have good ideas, and they would have been totally relevant around 7-10 years ago.
Microsoft already has almost all of this covered in this era, though.

If Microsoft wants to be more relevant, they need to separate Windows' GUI modes for tablets and non-touchscreen devices, and rather than switching things up all of the time, continue to be consistent, i.e. Windows 95 -> 7 consistent.
 
Microsoft's biggest problem and why Windows is thought irrelevant is because of Microsoft's struggles in the mobile client OS market, particularly phones. It's difficult to see at this point how Microsoft gets to any significant share in phones. The tablet space, while much smaller, is an area where I think Microsoft can do reasonably well in as their with full x86 Windows devices Microsoft has something, though niche, that's significantly different and useful.

Outside of mobile, Microsoft seems to doing well particularly with the cloud. The desktop Windows licensing model though is going through a lot of changes necessitated by cheap clients where the market can't sustain at cost Windows thus Microsoft has been forced to go to a free model at the low end. That change hit the Windows bottom line pretty hard in Microsoft's last quarter, though the number of Windows copies increased revenue was down 13% overall. It's going to nearly impossible to make up that difference with anything that has the margins of Windows licenses.
 
VanDiesil said:
The surprising thing is that Nadella has lasted a year under the radar as CEO!!! The amount of people including some in IT who still think Bill Gates or Ballmaer are head of Microsoft!!
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They are the largets private shareholders and the 4th & 5th largest share holders period. Not to mention the sway Gates likely has over some of the remaining shareholders by force of reputation/legacy.

And even something as fast moving as software, much of what has come out under Nadella was in the works before he took over.
 
jpm100 said:
And even something as fast moving as software, much of what has come out under Nadella was in the works before he took over.
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Most of what Nadella has done to date has been purely tactical, he's not been CEO long enough to have yet made a significant strategic impact. For the time being I don't think he will either. Overall I think Microsoft's strategy finally got sorted out at the end of Ballmer's tenure and no Nadella's main mission for the next several years is to execute well. If after that time Microsoft hasn't made some good progress especially in the phone and mobile app space, then it will be time for a new strategy.
 
One of Nadella's first organization shakeups last year was to make Phil Spencer, former head of Microsoft's game development arm, in charge of the entire Xbox unit. The result has been a huge boon to Xbox sales as Spencer steered the division toward more serious gamers and away from mass-market consumers in what was a botched attempt to take over the living room. Last fall, Microsoft extended its gaming commitment by buying Mojang, maker of the popular Minecraft game, for $2.5 billion.
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Yeah and he is not responsible for the exceptional screw ups where people in the media got blasted for mentioning all of the Xbox1 pathetic "limitations" which in the end caused so much backlash that nearly all of them have been eliminated from the Xbox1.

Mobile hardware also is key to Microsoft's turnaround. After acquiring Nokia's handset division in April 2014 for $7.2 billion, Microsoft now takes in around $2 billion in revenue each quarter from sales of Lumia smartphones. Last quarter, Microsoft shipped more than 10 million units. And while that's paltry compared to the 74.5 million iPhones Apple shipped in the holiday quarter, the relatively stable business does more good than harm for the company as a whole, analysts say.

"Microsoft is going to stay in the phone business as long they're not cratering," Gartner's Adrian said. "Not because they want to get to No. 1 or No. 2 in the phone business, but because as a market participant they learn a lot that extends to the rest of the company." Microsoft, for instance, can apply what it learns in the consumer market to the enterprise space -- and vice versa.
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In other words if we keep making phones our product matters?

And then for the final quote from analyst Roger Kay:
"Ballmer didn't have a sense of where Microsoft should go"

Okay Ballmer is gone now everything will be al right because now everyone knows that he was the one that was doing such bad things as opposed to what has happened or what is happening. Wait they killed WindowsRT that must be it.......
 
The Smart thing would be to take $100 million, 20 of their best engineers, set them up off site, with the task to design a ground up new OS, scalable from Phone/Tablet to desktop super computer, using HTML 5, and include DVD/BluRay in a media center native ... NO FLASH, JAVA etc what so ever.

In other words, build a new business to kick their own ass .... before someone else does it for them. :eek::cool::cool:
 
k1pp3r said:
One thing I would love is:

Having the OS keep analytics on what apps I use and when, so if it know i use outlook every day, when the PC boots it goes ahead and pre fetches the outlook app so all it has to do when i click on outlook is load the gui portion of the program. That would cut down on load times by a lot, especially on the surface pro which can boot in a few seconds, then outlook takes longer than the OS to load lol.
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That's the prefetcher. It's been in Windows since XP, though I don't know that it really worked well till it became "Superfetch" in Vista.

There's an equivalent for Linux called Preload.

I think OSX and iOS do something similar too, but information on it is sparse. I think Mac doesn't unload running programs when you close them so that subsequent launches are fast.
 
xX_Jack_Carver_Xx said:
The Smart thing would be to take $100 million, 20 of their best engineers, set them up off site, with the task to design a ground up new OS, scalable from Phone/Tablet to desktop super computer, using HTML 5, and include DVD/BluRay in a media center native ... NO FLASH, JAVA etc what so ever.

In other words, build a new business to kick their own ass .... before someone else does it for them. :eek::cool::cool:
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The problem here though is legacy. Building an OS from the ground up is easy compared to abandoning legacy tech and getting 3rd party support for a completely new system.

Windows 10, though not as purely as you may want, always does a lot of these things. Windows RT or whatever it will be called next was designed to scale across multiple devices will the tooling for apps to do the same. Spartan is a new browser built with HTML 5 and standards in mine. No Flash or Java, that's 3rd party stuff that you could not support but then there's a lot of folks that still need those things especially on the desktop. Native DVD/BD support. Kind of niche these days and there's good 3rd party support for these things today, better than any other platform.
 
toffty said:
It made complete sense and I laughed out loud (I really did)

It's amazing how crappy iOS is especially for developing software for and on it.
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It made no sense at all. If it's an obtuse reference to sandboxing, well, welcome to the future of computing.

As for iOS... two words: App Store. /argument
 
This is what I dislike so much about a significant part of the "tech culture" nowadays - enterprise and 'un-sexy' backend stuff doesn't matter. 1 billion idiots on SnapChat?! OMG changing the world! Actually creating new hardware, software, that enables these kids to put all this stuff together (cough, Windows?) Meh, they're going under, they suck!

No mention that since it underpins everything else they're all making, they won't be able to do much without more serious-minded people pushing this stuff forward.
 
TwistedAegis said:
This is what I dislike so much about a significant part of the "tech culture" nowadays - enterprise and 'un-sexy' backend stuff doesn't matter. 1 billion idiots on SnapChat?! OMG changing the world! Actually creating new hardware, software, that enables these kids to put all this stuff together (cough, Windows?) Meh, they're going under, they suck!

No mention that since it underpins everything else they're all making, they won't be able to do much without more serious-minded people pushing this stuff forward.
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It has always been this way, especially in the last 20 years.
Look at what happened to Apple in the 2000s; they went from XServe systems and SANs to iPads and iPhones.

While the latter was far more "popular", I can tell you which of these devices I would have rather seen more of:

xserve.jpg


vs

apple-hipsters1.jpg
 
In related news, scientists have trouble convincing people why oxygen is important to breathing. With so many other gases available to breathe, they have a tough sell.

Not an entirely accurate analogy, but it will suffice.
 
All the kids like Facebook, Macs and Google.

Microsoft is pretty irrelevant in their eyes.
 
It'd be nice if MS entered the 20th century and moved over to open-source technologies. These are no longer the old days where you pop on a peecee to play Oregon Trail for an hour or two and then turn it off. People's entire lives are on their computing devices now. Transparency is pretty much a non-negotiable.

They should build their OS off of one of the open-source kernels like a BSD or Linux or whatever, where all the subsystems run circles around the crap in Windows. And then have a good, open-source, non-proprietary filesystem. Oh and IE / Spartan / whatever needs to be 100% open source. The browser is the primary connection between one's PC and the entire Internet. WhoTF would use a closed-source browser? Have people completely lost their minds?

The biggest problem I have with Windows is that it's all closed-up, proprietary, plays-well-with-nobody, non-standard crap. Crap like DX, etc. designed to lock you in to one path. And then when you want to integrate it into some kind of heterogeneous environment it's a big CF. That's the biggest reason I gave up on Windows.

tl;dr: Open source or GTFO.
 
k1pp3r said:
Make windows as accessable as android, so you can install it on any device, at any time.

If they could figure out a way for x86 apps to run on arm that would make it even more cross platform friendly.
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What is stopping anyone from installing windows at any time on any device?
 
jwcalla said:
It'd be nice if MS entered the 20th century and moved over to open-source technologies. These are no longer the old days where you pop on a peecee to play Oregon Trail for an hour or two and then turn it off. People's entire lives are on their computing devices now. Transparency is pretty much a non-negotiable.

They should build their OS off of one of the open-source kernels like a BSD or Linux or whatever, where all the subsystems run circles around the crap in Windows. And then have a good, open-source, non-proprietary filesystem. Oh and IE / Spartan / whatever needs to be 100% open source. The browser is the primary connection between one's PC and the entire Internet. WhoTF would use a closed-source browser? Have people completely lost their minds?

The biggest problem I have with Windows is that it's all closed-up, proprietary, plays-well-with-nobody, non-standard crap. Crap like DX, etc. designed to lock you in to one path. And then when you want to integrate it into some kind of heterogeneous environment it's a big CF. That's the biggest reason I gave up on Windows.

tl;dr: Open source or GTFO.
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Open source doesn't mean anything no one in the real world gives a single shit about it. Apple is incredibly successful with closed software and hardware. Google only used open source because they were lazy and didn't want to build front he ground up now they are moving to close it down. And windows and most of its software has been successful for decades without it and even now days the server, cloud and enterprise markets are readily adopting MS products that are closed source. And in the last 5 years I have seen less Linux computers than ever before as most of the people I know that used such have moved to macs.
 
rpeters1969 said:
"Mac User" here. Running Yosemite 10.10.2 on a 2013 Mac Pro 6C / Dual D700s. And I cannot bloody wait to install Windows 10 over this stuttering, laggy, audio-buggy, cannot-fully-utilize-both-GPUs, poor-3D-printer-support operating system. It's great hardware that's manacled by a rubbish operating system.

That's not to say it wouldn't be a good O/S for consumers, much in the way iOS is, but it's just not a serious offering any longer.*

* Yes, older versions of OS X were far better, but Apple's insistence of not permitting 10.6 on anything resembling new hardware stinks.

** Before the rabid Mac brigade comes down on me, yes, I am running a fresh install as of four days ago; it didn't improve things.

*** This whole drawn-out post was simply to say "I'm running the Tech Preview on a Surface 3 Pro and think it's brilliant. REALLY looking forward to running it on the MP.
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I have always preferred WIndows over OSX but with this latest version, I think it is just as good as Windows. I don't know about all your grievances about OSX but something you say is very true. While Windows hasn't gotten any slower over the last few versions, OSX sure as has. I have an old MBP and have upgraded the last few years (because their OS is free) and man does boot up take forever now (mechhanical disk). It is like each new version takes 30% longer to boot than the version before it. OVer a few years, this can equal several minutes.
 
Based on my experiences with MS customer service and tech support over the past year I would say they need to wake up to the fact that customers now have other options besides Windows. They need to stop acting like a careless monopoly who can give folks bullshit and then say take it or leave it. The Windows folks remind me of Comcast based on the fact that when I had to contact them for support they would not help and instead simply tried to get me to upgrade to newer versions of Windows.
 
rudy said:
Open source doesn't mean anything no one in the real world gives a single shit about it. Apple is incredibly successful with closed software and hardware. Google only used open source because they were lazy and didn't want to build front he ground up now they are moving to close it down. And windows and most of its software has been successful for decades without it and even now days the server, cloud and enterprise markets are readily adopting MS products that are closed source. And in the last 5 years I have seen less Linux computers than ever before as most of the people I know that used such have moved to macs.
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Most of the Apple software is built around open source. I know their kernels and compiler toolchains are open source.

MS is really out alone by itself in this area. An anachronism of the '80s.
 
lol that's such a joke..... Once again Apple only does this just enough to make morons talk about it. Wake me up when any notion at all of the open source spirit is discovered in a sliver of apples products that isn't purely a self serving joke. Maybe they will not force people to jail break iphones or maybe people will actually get to install iOS on open hardware.

lol their compiler which is code for we don't even want to bother optimizing this ourselves rofl. You do it for us for free and we will keep the cash. Open source proponents live in a fantasy world and the whole time companies jack their code make money off of it then dump it or close it up at will.
 
jwcalla said:
Most of the Apple software is built around open source. I know their kernels and compiler toolchains are open source.

MS is really out alone by itself in this area. An anachronism of the '80s.
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Apple isn't a software company. All of its core software is solely for its own proprietary hardware and services. Microsoft has a good deal of support for open source. It's open sourced .NET. Where has Apple open sourced any of it's key software?
 
rudy said:
lol that's such a joke..... Once again Apple only does this just enough to make morons talk about it. Wake me up when any notion at all of the open source spirit is discovered in a sliver of apples products that isn't purely a self serving joke. Maybe they will not force people to jail break iphones or maybe people will actually get to install iOS on open hardware.

lol their compiler which is code for we don't even want to bother optimizing this ourselves rofl. You do it for us for free and we will keep the cash. Open source proponents live in a fantasy world and the whole time companies jack their code make money off of it then dump it or close it up at will.
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"open source" and "self serving" are not mutually exclusive. not all open source terms require "giving back".

I'm not saying Apple is the most open company -- and I wouldn't trust their software -- but MS isn't even in the game. MS goes out of its way to get people off of industry standards to lock them in to their own ecosystem.
 
heatlesssun said:
Apple isn't a software company. All of its core software is solely for its own proprietary hardware and services. Microsoft has a good deal of support for open source. It's open sourced .NET. Where has Apple open sourced any of it's key software?
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Like I said, their kernels are open source, and they contribute to LLVM. As well as CUPS, WebKit, and other crap like that.

MS open sourced .NET about 20 years after nobody cares about it anymore. Seriously. This is your go-to example? The entire intention behind creating .NET was to thwart the similar cross-platform tech (Java) and get people locked into Windows. And it worked for the most part.
 
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