Nadella had it easy when he took over. Stock soared before he did anything. The only improvements seemed to be made by others using the CEO change to try & push a few better agendas.
Acquired podcast had Ballmer on this past year. Gives interesting take of how he was never a true CEO, always had Gates still running things.
I imagine Microsoft probably has about 5-10 CEOs running it right now. Nadella is just the face. Amy, Brad & Kathleen for sure. Would not be surprised if Bill still has a lot of say. Guthrie probably doesn't have enough say.
They would only start to care when they see their enterprise business migrating to Linux. As long as they have large businesses buying a suite of licenses for Auth, OS & Office, they have an amazing monopoly cash cow distribution platform. They can enter new markets, offer an inferior product for free as part of their suite & crush the competition.
Have you tried running Affinity products via Wine? I've heard good things. I personally ditched Adobe years ago for Affinity on Windows & Mac. Only people I know still using Adobe for photo or vector work at a company that doesn't blink at paying for it.
Nikki Haley did very well in the primary against a more well known Ron DeSantis & Chris Christie. We have had multiple governors.
The only 2 that have run are not a good example.
A lot of people had strong opinions on Hillary that had nothing to do with her politics or leadership. A lot didn't want another 4-8 years of Clinton/Bush after 28 years depending on how you count Bush Sr. You could even add another 4 to that for Hillary's 4 yrs of influence as Secretary of State.
Harris wasn't popular in the primaries, many thought she wasn't deserving of the VP & she was part of an unpopular White House that was given a few ticking time bombs that they didn't properly diffuse. They also failed miserably to communicate with the public.
I'm not sure if the next few generations will have the same opportunities as the last few that enjoyed America's dominate place in the world, who also took out incredible amounts of debt that the upcoming generations will have to pay back somehow.
The values you mention are timeless & should be taught to all.
Hopefully technology continues to be a thing that rises all boats & that more people can get said boat.
I fear the current tax laws, political contributions & financial regulations favor those with more wealth so much that when you factor in compounding, their wealth will continue to grow at extreme levels compared to those with less wealth. Retail needs to start pulling their money out of stocks until large companies reduce executive pay to reasonable levels. Otherwise we just blindly keep supporting this current chaos. I believe we also need to start taxing margin loans, instead of going down a wealth tax road.
> The values you mention are timeless & should be taught to all.
Agreed, with the related note that I think that facts/knowledge can be taught by strangers, but values must be taught by family or another tight community structure (church, respected elders, or similar). Schools can prattle on all they want about delayed gratification and it won’t move the needle in behavior.
There are schools that can serve in that manner, but it’s a tiny minority of them. No (or virtually no) public schools with 125+ students per grade will have that tight community structure.
A private school with 20 per class and 60 per grade has a fair shot at it. Maybe a small public district could as well, but I’ve never seen it happen there.
Sports teams with strong non-athletic aspects to their program are another possible source of values transmission.
I agree that it’s not the sign on the building that matters, but the content and consistency of what happens inside it.
Is it worth the risk/work to move everything over? For a lot of enterprises, their needs to be a huge cost savings or risk reduction. Risk usually being the most important factor the bigger the company.
I know of one largish bank moving away from Oracle middleware and RDMS. It's happening in pieces starting with low hanging fruit and for awhile the two will run in parallel (with the new data stores starting off as a comparison check to reconcile any bugs that crop up). Some early wins were account transaction logs that can go into better suited DBs, etc.
My understanding is that they were relatively lucky in that most of the hard parts are in the middleware layer and rarely the DB itself - the bank has been around since the 1800s, so has a huge mishmash of technologies that go from old IBM mainframes up to more modern cloud infra. So they're already kind of used to using middleware logic to stitch together various data sources.
The funny thing is that my contact there said the primary impetus is that they see the writing on the wall for a lot of their "legacy" Sun hardware, and figure if they're going to have to redo a lot of it, they may as well re-architect the rest. There'll still be oracle DBs running in the bank for a looong time, but there'll be less and less of it.
If it's the same for others as it was for us recently then very difficult... but the cost savings were so massive in terms of margin the risk was worth it. What taylodl mentioned about growing institutional knowledge and experience with Postgres in other apps first rang true as well. We are not 100% Oracle free, but we have migrated much away already.
In the larger discussion, I also wonder what their new contract rate is for these solutions. Even if 0% were migrating off, if 0% were migrating on then the net rate would still be decently negative because of natural business/app attrition.
When was the last time Microsoft had a unified vision that was focused on building an amazing line of products that integrated well with each other?
I can only think of short snippets in history where they moved in that direction for maybe a year or two & then went scatterbrain.
Microsoft has benefited from a monopoly in the enterprise and has never been forced to innovate from a product perspective. See Slack/Teams as a case study of how they have operated when even slightly pushed.
* Edit - .NET, C#, TypeScript teams are an exception to the above. Highly underrated. Amazing talent there. Not sure who all gets credit. Anders & Mads for sure though.
I'd say the late '80s - early '90s when Microsoft was building the early versions of Microsoft Office. Integration among productivity apps was one of the key points of competition among all of the office suites of that era.
There were other huge coordinated efforts like the TwC initiative and the Windows 10 refactoring but those were invisible to end users.
You are right if talking about the efforts improving C# and CLR, taking the lessons out of Midori, Blazor and Aspire.
Regarding F#, VB, and C++/CLI, the poor souls are on a lifeline that makes CLR nowadays stand out for C# Language Runtime, instead of the original Common.
And the chaos that reigns on Windows Forms, WPF, WinUI, MAUI certainly isn't helping.
Finally they are constrained in what they can put into C# DevKit as means to not canibalize Visual Studio and Windows sales, it can only be good enough, not great and feature parity.
Also regardless of the reasoning behind it, having TypeScript rewriten into C# instead of Go would have been a great opportunity to make C# more relevant outside Microsoft shops, instead anyone looking to contribute to TypeScript compiler will be learning Go instead.
For enterprises it almost always comes down to - does it reduce risk, is it easy to manage, authentication & authorization features, is it good enough & is it compatible with our current stuff.
It would help if Americans educated themselves on the basics of taxes. They would realize quickly how W-2 income employees pay a very high tax rate when you factor in FICA vs high wealth individuals who pay little to no FICA or income taxes. Add in the benefit of compound interest, cheap margin loans, and you have an incredibly unfair system. It's also why many wealthy individuals argue for a "smaller" government & less taxes. They travel private, go to private schools & prefer to avoid anything "public".
All this is with just the very basics, not counting step up basis, trusts or anything slightly complicated.
I'm not joking, in Australia the tax "filing" takes like 2 mins, you literally go, next, next, look at the details, "yep looks correct" put in your claims, and then submit.
You are all done.
Unless you have something wack going on its not even a process. I have had signups which are more complicated then it.
American taxes on the other hand mega suck, and have 9000 pitfalls.
Finland doesn't even ask you to approve. They send you a suggestion and if you do not amend it by deadline they take it as it is.
And amending is online form where everything is clearly explained, links to documentation. And longest time it takes is actually to look up numbers from your own records.
In the US, property tax typically works that way for many people. You get something in the mail that says this is what your tax will be. If you happen to have a loan for your house, the bank in charge of your loan handles it.
The only opposing political argument I've heard is that if income taxes were this simple, many people would be overpaying. I think that argument has many obvious flaws. Unfortunately few US citizens demand anything of their politicians on this topic or other topics that would dramatically improve their lives. Instead they care more about vanity topics that don't even effect them.
Acquired podcast had Ballmer on this past year. Gives interesting take of how he was never a true CEO, always had Gates still running things.
I imagine Microsoft probably has about 5-10 CEOs running it right now. Nadella is just the face. Amy, Brad & Kathleen for sure. Would not be surprised if Bill still has a lot of say. Guthrie probably doesn't have enough say.
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