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Reports Say Satya Nadella Is Microsoft's Next CEO
Nerval's Lobster writes "Microsoft's next CEO will be Satya Nadella, if current reports prove accurate. According to Re/code, which drew its information from "numerous sources close to Microsoft," Nadella could officially assume the role in early February. Meanwhile, anonymous sources speaking to Bloomberg suggested that co-founder Bill Gates could be forced to give up his longtime chairman role. Nadella (again, if confirmed) seems a logical choice for Microsoft. He's been with the company for more than twenty years, eventually becoming executive vice president of its Cloud and Enterprise division. The enterprise remains a key—perhaps the key — customer segment for Microsoft, especially as its mobile and consumer efforts (excluding the Xbox) have floundered in recent years; in order to retain those business clients, Nadella and his team embarked on the creation of 'Cloud OS,' the platform that powers Microsoft's large-scale cloud services such as SkyDrive, Azure, and Office 365. Under his guidance, Microsoft's revenue from cloud services has grown by several billion over the past few years, so he's shown that he can expand a business. In addition, his technical background could afford him a measure of respect from Microsoft's legions of engineers and developers. But if he's ultimately tapped for the CEO seat, Nadella faces one of the toughest jobs in the technology industry: not only does he need to craft a plan that will allow Microsoft to grow and prosper in an integrated, holistic manner—he'll need to do it while guiding the company through the massive internal reorganization initiated by his predecessor, Steve Ballmer."
let B.G. become CEO again. founders are a better choice (as a rule, which means it also has exceptions ofc)
If he brings back the start button.
Who cares? I'm more interested in the rumors that they are scheming to oust Bill Gates as Chairman...
Yay, another inbred Microsoftie. Means nothing will change and the company will continue its long slow slide into oblivion.
I thought Microsoft was trying to re-brand itself as a devices and services player. So, what does it mean when they bring on board a technical, enterprise guy as the CEO?
To me, it would seem that they're ignoring everything Apple has taught the industry -- usability, good design, and marketing.
Instead, they'll become the next IBM and be a large behemoth who just does enterprise tech "stuff".
Quite sad. And I'm pretty sure eventually they'll eventually spin off their Xbox division.
Seems like tech companies are trending towards ultraslim CEOs. Like literally dudes who look like they just stepped out of a concentration camp. I blame Apple :)
Give the users what they want on the desktop. Give them what they loved about Windows 7 back and give it them for free. Maybe go so far as to offer a free copy of the previous version of Office to everyone who suffered through Windows 8.1 or 8.0.
All the rats have jumped ship!
And
In ten years, there is no Micro-Soft!
So
Hellayouyeah!
Picking this guys shows the board doesn't have any plan on saving the company.
Look how profitable they were last quarter. Mighty fine corpse, eh?
He will get H1B salary.
all the chairs at microsoft are taking a sigh of relief.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
"pivot to Devices and Services" -- That's Ballmerese for "doubling down on your core incompetencies"
Why is Microsoft trying so hard to compete against highly capable Apple and Google? It's a symptom of 15 years of typical Ballmerist "ooh, shiny.. gimme! I want one too!!!"?
They just aren't institutionally set up to do so.
Plan for incoming Microsoft CEO:
0) Assume your predecessor was wrong about everything until proven otherwise.
1) Halt the re-org until you know what you're doing.
2) in addition to "Devices and Services", how about, uh, ***Business Software***???? Now that I work in a mid-large company there is all sorts of ugly and junky application software whose capabilities and quality makes Microsoft Office seem like, oh, a properly-working HAL 9000.
Instead of throwing themselves up in a pathetic siege against highly capable, wealthy and motivated, Apple and Google, why not shoot for a much softer target: Oracle (other than the relational database). People hate them more than Microsoft and their products are poor.
Microsoft's primary focus should be "Diversified Business Software": there is a large range of software across many areas with much lower existing standard capability and quality than in the consumer market. MS has the scale to attack this heavily, could actually be good here, and make money consistently.
3) Windows. Oy vey. Microsoft will remain a primary business software company forever. Deal with it. So, a plan.
* Release Windows 7.5, backporting all the internal improvements of the Win 8 series which can fit, keeping the Win 7 interface. Expect all your business to upgrade to this, and skip Win 8. It will be the new XP, and you'll support it for at least a decade. Deal with it.
* Release Windows 8.5 with slightly-less bogosity, and lower your expectations.
* Much more seriously, go to the Research group and academia and work exceptionally hard to make a truly great, innovative, non-touch desktop interface, possibly including other physical input modalities (alternate mice, hardware, who knows?) Make Windows 9 (or 10) a really big deal. Not different for merely the sake of difference, but unmistakably GOOD. Recognize the physical realities of the world and humans.
Who cares?
Microsoft can Do The Needful.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Who cares?
Well you would care if you lost your job due to the H1B scam. After all, we have a shortage of skilled programmers in the americas right? Oh we don't...
Om, nomnomnom...
The enterprise remains a keyâ"perhaps the key â" customer segment for Microsoft
Really. Microsoft abandoned the enterprise market when they released Windows 7.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Microsoft's revenue from cloud services has grown by several billion over the past few years, so he's shown that he can expand a business.
This only proves the person was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. Sure there is some skill and intelligence involved. but sitting in a chair and filing important sounding decisions while your market and revenue grow do not always imply competence.By that logic, in some respects Ballmer is a god.
From wikipedia:
Under Ballmer's tenure as CEO, Microsoft's annual revenue has surged from $25 billion to $70 billion, while its net income has increased 215 percent to $23 billion, and its gross profit of 75 cents on every dollar in sales is double that of Google or International Business Machines Corp.[20] In terms of leading the company's total annual profit growth, Ballmer's tenure at Microsoft (16.4 percent) has surpassed the performances of other well-known CEOs such as General Electric's Jack Welch (11.2 percent) and IBM's Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. (2 percent).[18]
Silence is a state of mime.
Somebody who doesn't bend over to Obama's speeches and cry in ecstasy?
Thoughts on all of this:
1. John Thompson (former Symantec CEO) as Chairman? Oh no. Symantec produced more steaming piles of crap called "software" than any company really has a right to. This wouldn't bode well.
2. People can say what they want about consumer devices, but enterprise software is worth LOTS of money. Having a guy like Nadella that understands a lot of the enterprise angle running things is a good idea. Yeah, you can sell people a phone (with a final cost of some $500), and a bunch of $1 and $2 applications, and some fraction of a $50 monthly cell bill. OR, you can sell them an OS for each computer in the place at a cost of $30-$50, an indispensable office suite for $150 per seat, client licenses for file servers, active directory, databases, web servers, and the like, PLUS the costly licenses for the server software, PLUS annual maintenance. It's easy to see where the cash is, and it's not in consumer devices.
3. I can see why people might prefer Windows 7 to Windows 8, but most of the time people are speaking from ignorance, never having used Windows 8 (or having used it only with a mouse). It's a different beast entirely with a touch screen. As for usability, Apple is on a downward slide, IMHO. We're getting nothing but gratuitous changes in every release now, and Mavericks positively ruined an otherwise serviceable 5-year-old MacBook by destroying its performance. Windows Phone 8 is really nice, especially in the way it emphasizes the productivity uses of the phone over games and glitz. It's a lot tighter resource-wise than Android for sure.
4. Microsoft spends like four times as much on R&D as Apple does. Apple's a rather minor player in this regard.
I think Microsoft could be positioned for a real resurgence with the right leadership.
MS' dominance is doomed. Free productivity offerings are quickly encircling Office which is just too damned expensive, Linux, iOS and Android are stomping Windows in terms of number of installations, more work is being done to move drivers and apps to Linux on the desktop, IIS has small market share and probably shrinking, IE's market share is shrinking, XBox One is relatively a dud, Logitech is outselling MS by a larger margin in the PC hardware accessory arena, MS has no real strategy for the smartphone or the tablet, and every other device or idea they generate seems to fail, like that shitty digital brick they called the Zune, for instance.
They're being run aground by markets that are changing faster than they can adapt imo, and they're not showing any creativity or willingness to innovate and respond to new developments in computing. For instance: Windows 8 on a fucking phone? Who wants that crap? No one. People wants tablets and phones, for the most part, not ugly, lumbering beasts of burden like that shoggoth OS they're trying to push.
Momentum man. p=mv. They're big and heavy and it's going to take a lot to stop and move in a different direction, and I'm not even sure they know which direction to go.
Their industry dominance is dead in the near term, really. If content creation apps go to Linux and if PC games can be ported to a 3D api like DX on Linux, what's left? Sure they'll always have some crap people will buy, but...they're not the chieftain lion in the computing savannah any more, and that's increasingly clear to anyone who looks.
If you are decent, H1B or no H1B, you find a job in the software world in the US. Period.
I would give US companies more H1B, but they have to pay, say US$ 100K each, and I would invest that money in public education.
So that, maybe, in a few years, we would stop asking for engineers abroad, as more people could afford the education.
Nervall's Lobster is an account that Slashdot's content-filler, Nick Kolakowski, uses to post his own material.
If you look at the Nervall's Lobster account history, you will see that that user
a) makes no comments, and
b) only posts stories that link to one of the Slashdot spinoff sites
Given that Nick Kolakowski is a Slashdot Editor, I don't know why he didn't simply post this article under his own name.
I do know that their behavior is dishonest.
Find me this mythical person if he exists. We need to cut him open and find out the part of his brain that doesn't exist or has atrophied in the rest of the electorate's brains.
Three Microsoft things I hear about the least, SkyDrive, Azure, and Office 365. Does Microsoft's "Cloud and Enterprise division" equate to Hyper-V?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
For a little while, I was afraid that Microsoft would choose someone from outside of their own toxic corporate culture and regain at least a little bit of the dominance they once had. Now that it seems likely they will choose someone who has been drinking the Microsoft KoolAid for several decades, I am suddenly much less worried. Then again, these "leaks" could just be schemes from the board to get the press, business writers, and public at large to critique each candidate for them like one giant focus group.
Just posting agian to complain about Slashdot/dice posting links to Buisness Intelligence. Terrible. Horrible. Absolutely hate it with all my being. Stop actually trying to write terrible articles and focus on your core strengths: editing story summaries terribly.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
They United States is a fork of England, and thus must be equivalent, yes?
MS SQL left Sybase in its dust a *long* time ago.
I have to wonder what will happen to their outsourcing efforts if a person from India is made CEO? Microsoft already has well over 10,000 jobs outsourced to India as it is now? That being said their enterprise division generally seems to be run much more competently than their other divisions and he may well be the best candidate for the job.
Well, Kodak was profitable even while it was starting to spiral around in the shitter, too.
This is the same as Apple does. I have both an ipad and surface and settings are reset during updates. Serious question, is Android different?
Back in the days, a few microsofties who worked with/for this guy would chime in with some interesting observation.
Now? It's all bullshit comments, including this one by me.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Show some self-respect. Leave the work to people who are too poor to have a choice.
Nadella used to run Bing. Bing had a leadership vacuum after he left (and still does), but it didn't do all that great while he was there.
Microsoft's approach to Bing upper management is very strange. Microsoft sends people there, but you never hear about them while they're there. You hear about them after they're promoted to better parts of Microsoft. Mark Penn was brought in to turn around Bing, and accomplished little there. Now he heads Microsoft Advertising. Qi Lu ran Bing for a while, and now he's head of Applications and Services. So failing to turn Bing around doesn't seem to hurt executive careers at Microsoft.
On a DC street near K President Barak Obama wearing a mini-skirt and halter-top holding a BIG baton leads the marching band.
WE
Are Blazing Saddles
WE
Are Blazing Saddles
WE
Are Blazing Saddles
FIGHT FOR DC.
Ha ha
At least he's a systems guy. They could have gone the way HP did and hire business boffins (MBA's and whatnot). And they do the business-efficient thing at every turn. And the company downsizes. And they get rid of engineers: we have already invented and developed everything and engineers are expensive: so bonuses for the bosses. Next we increase prices, purchase product lines from other countries, offshore everything and save even more: so bonuses for the bosses. Next we sell off key technologies to competitors for one-time windfall profits: so bonuses for bosses. Then we "right size" followed by "down size" all local manufacturing, close 3 old plants and 2 new ones, record a better profit/expense ratio: so bonuses for bosses. Finally we are left with corporate headquarters: overseas manufacturing and engineering, offshore call centre, 3rd party marketing, 3rd party accounting. We lease patents and sell off other intellectual property for one-time windfall profits: so bonuses for bosses. Corporate head count seems high: senior management accepts a buyout/golden-parachute/golden-handshake for doing such a wonderful job: each leave with $10,000,000 exit payout, as a final act they lease part of corporate headquarters to competitor: take an extra final bonus. 2 days later stock is de-listed, traded over-the-counter on pink sheets.
Who would have guessed that Billg lacks the balls to bring in an outsider and instead will name yet another tired old insider retread to the job. Here is hoping that the fail is massive, even eclipsing Ballmer.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
So, Sat[y]aN. is the new CEO of Microsoft? Now, this explains a lot, including the evilness of the missing Start button!
Come to think of it, besides being the titular guy in charge of it, how do we know that Nadella understands enterprise?
I'm just being too lazy to look, but shouldn't there be signs that he's not just a figurehead? You know, memos, presentations, letters to the public or to the staff. Anything?
Have a nice time.
They just haven't been forgotten yet.
Well, zombies were all the rage a few years ago, so it would make sense that MS is going zombie after everyone else...
Be seeing you...
Elop did a fantastic job managing Nokia.
They United States is a fork of England, and thus must be equivalent, yes?
MS SQL left Sybase in its dust a *long* time ago.
This is the best analogy I've seen in days. Can I borrow it? :)
no matter what your personal settings about half of the windows updates will override them and randomly change your logon background page and the presence of the logon page itself.
I've been using Windows 8 for six months. That's never happened to me, not even once. Also, I never use the bulit-in photo viewer. I installed Irfanview. Problem solved.
mssql 6.5 was the last version from the Sybase fork. Since mssql 7.0 there is a new relational engine, storage engine and optimizer. Today t-sql has lots of differences and they algo have lots of little different behaviours.
They should start a tradition of making a clean sweep by tossing the old one(s) into a live volcano.
When you say MS SQL is standard, do you mean it adheres to the SQL standard? How does it do on importing/exporting databases, i.e., can I export a database from MS SQL and import it into PostgreSQL with minimal effort?
I can't speak to its scalability or its speed, but given that the only people who tend to use MS SQL are windows shops, and folks like Amazon, Netflix, Google *don't* use MS SQL I don't see why you would think MS SQL is that good. I have never experienced anything speaking well of Oracle databases, only that their support is good but expensive.
....here in Little India (formerly known as Seattle), whose small businesses (those which are still left) are taking a pounding, since around half the IT workers are Punjabis (foreign visa scab workers primarily from India, although a few from Pakistan), he will be soundly applauded. Those foreign visa workers from India, unfortunately, don't patronize the local fine restaurants, many of which have now gone out of business, and certainly not the book stores for their tech books, as the local and American IT workers once did (Yeah, I know so much is online, but you still need the books for real study). The corporations bring in foreign visa scab workers form India, and the local small businesses suffer, and the tax base is shrunk because fewer Americans are paying taxes, and so many jobs have been offshored. Only traitors still give a rat's ass about Micro$oft.
That's one shitty indian motherfucker. From now on, Americans need not apply, only Indians will be hired. The smellier the better!
Their goal should be: "How do we make a fantastic interface for a desktop operating system made for business software". And actually implement it. (I personally have some ideas with alternate mice). And write and sell that business software.
Just saying, some of the comments on here are frankly disgusting and, surprisingly, not all just AC.
satya nadella is the best option microsoft having for next CEO...