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'This is Not Your Father's Microsoft': CEO Satya Nadella On Helping a Faded Legend Find a 'Sense of Purpose' (cnet.com)
News outlet CNET has two big stories on Microsoft today. The publication interviewed CEO Satya Nadella on the changes he has made since taking the top job. The stories, among other things, talks about Microsoft Hackathon, the diversity pushes Nadella has made at the company, and how Microsoft lost the touch with what made it successful, and how Nadella is trying to fix that. From story one: Nadella dreamed up the Microsoft Hackathon, which the company calls the "largest private hackathon in the world," when he became CEO in February 2014. Just a few of the thousands of projects pitched over the past five years have inspired mainstream products. Most of these let's-change-the-world ideas aren't the kind of business tech that Microsoft makes the bulk of its money on -- at least not today.
That's just fine with Nadella, because the meetup serves another purpose: rebranding Microsoft as a modern, relevant company. When he became the third CEO of the world's largest software company, after Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Nadella made changing Microsoft's rigid, hierarchical and arrogant culture his top priority. He sort of had to. Though arguably one of the most successful technology companies in history, Microsoft's had a string of high-profile misses in mobile, search and social networking. Additionally, the company's toxic culture, characterized by corporate politics, infighting and backstabbing, fed an image of Microsoft as a fading legend.
Rivals Apple, Google and Facebook were seen as innovators creating shiny new opportunities with their disruptive tech. A generation grew up without ever having used a Microsoft product. "One of the things that happens when you're super successful is you sort of sometimes lose touch with what made you successful in the first place," Nadella tells us when we ask what he was trying to solve with the hackathon."I wanted to go back to the very genesis of this company: What is that sense of purpose and drive that made us successful? What was the culture that may have been there in the very beginning or in the times when we were able to achieve that success? How do we really capture it?" says Nadella, who joined Microsoft in 1992. It's about "the renaissance as much as about just sort of fixing something that's broken." From story two: CNET: What is the vibe or image of Microsoft you want the world to know?
Nadella: It's in our mission. It's empowering. Any association with this company should be, they put some tools, they put some platforms, they gave me the opportunity to really do something. Whether it's a student writing a term paper, whether it's a startup trying to create a company, a small business that's trying to be more productive or even a public sector institution that's trying to be more efficient and serve its citizens -- [they] should feel that association with Microsoft is empowering to them. That's what I want us to stand for.
That's just fine with Nadella, because the meetup serves another purpose: rebranding Microsoft as a modern, relevant company. When he became the third CEO of the world's largest software company, after Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Nadella made changing Microsoft's rigid, hierarchical and arrogant culture his top priority. He sort of had to. Though arguably one of the most successful technology companies in history, Microsoft's had a string of high-profile misses in mobile, search and social networking. Additionally, the company's toxic culture, characterized by corporate politics, infighting and backstabbing, fed an image of Microsoft as a fading legend.
Rivals Apple, Google and Facebook were seen as innovators creating shiny new opportunities with their disruptive tech. A generation grew up without ever having used a Microsoft product. "One of the things that happens when you're super successful is you sort of sometimes lose touch with what made you successful in the first place," Nadella tells us when we ask what he was trying to solve with the hackathon."I wanted to go back to the very genesis of this company: What is that sense of purpose and drive that made us successful? What was the culture that may have been there in the very beginning or in the times when we were able to achieve that success? How do we really capture it?" says Nadella, who joined Microsoft in 1992. It's about "the renaissance as much as about just sort of fixing something that's broken." From story two: CNET: What is the vibe or image of Microsoft you want the world to know?
Nadella: It's in our mission. It's empowering. Any association with this company should be, they put some tools, they put some platforms, they gave me the opportunity to really do something. Whether it's a student writing a term paper, whether it's a startup trying to create a company, a small business that's trying to be more productive or even a public sector institution that's trying to be more efficient and serve its citizens -- [they] should feel that association with Microsoft is empowering to them. That's what I want us to stand for.
Outsource all labor to the cheapest pajeets in India, and milk existing government and corporate contracts to the last drop.
'This is Now Your Father's Microsoft'
I was always suspicious why my mum carried a photo of Bill Gates in her purse.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
'This is Now Your Father's Microsoft':
I think you mean "not".
I hope.
Apparently I'm smarter than the entirety of MS management with that title right there. Cut the force-installed game apps in Win10 and stop pretending I'm going to give you $1200 to run office for 10 years when we paid about $150/seat for Office 2003 in 2003 and used it until 2014.
Replace the ballmer chant with:
Subscriptions, Subscriptions, Subscriptions!
"Ownership" of software is dead. Get used to the cellphone model, where you simply pay a "small monthly fee" to use the software. Just like a cellphone, you will pay for the device, the software, the bandwidth, AND, as an added bonus, get data mined to death.
But MSFT was only compensated ONCE! That's no good!
What's a bit better, is MSFT getting compensated monthly for the software, what's even better is a locked 1-2 year agreement with hefty cancellation fees. And what's even better, is the added telemetry, so they can use your money, to make more money off you.
To cap it off, MSFT should technically own anything you produce with their software, to be used at their discretion, without compensation or credit.
Only peasants pay for Office and Windows, the rest of us abuse the ability to generate licenses at will from our MSDN accounts.
Dam right this isn't your father's Microsoft.
* Thinks MSVC telemtry is OK
* Thinks Forced updates is OK
* Thinks 100+ endpoints for Win10 is OK
* Thinks DX12 only for Win10 is OK
Yeah, no. Sorry, no longer interested in what spyware you are peddling today MS.
MS has spent decades building a reputation as a greedy, cutthroat, and not terribly competent behemoth.
Even if they could somehow instantly change their internal culture (yeah right), it would take further decades before their reputation recovers.
Microsoft, despite being a near monopoly, made truly useful products for productivity that you could buy and own. Now they are shifting to the same business model as all others - software as a service - turning all of us into digital serfs who make endless monthly payments for everything we use. The truth is that it is wildly lucrative for the company to do this, not to mention a very steady income compared with the traditional product release cycle. But the problem is foisted on to the user, who is paying $5 month here, $30 a month there, $20 a month over there. Pretty soon you're paying out hundreds of dollars a month to use windows, office, Adobe creative suite, etc. If everyone switches to this business model, nobody will be able to afford the combined 'rent' or 'utilities' if you want to see them that way.
When I purchased MS office, I would use it until the PC died and sometimes longer without upgrading, because it worked just fine. Same with Windows. Then eventually buy or build a new PC with an OEM bundle and save money. Compared to the subscription service, there is actually a large savings in money for those who do not need to upgrade frequently. It's actually getting more expensive to use Microsoft software.
When I can no longer use a legacy version of office, I will start to look into LibreOffice and the like, so long as compatibility problems don't arise. LibreOffice supports features like track changes, but based on past experience when a company I worked for tried to shift to OpenOffice wholesale, we eventually had to switch back due to a raft of minor incompatibilities that made it difficult to work with customers. That was a long time ago however and things may have improved since then. Since I am on my own now outside of a traditional corporate environment, it is a bit easier as well.
Microsoft can go join DEC, CDC, Borroughs and UNIVAC.
The thing that made MS great was empowering their users to make choices. The primary choice was to throw out the forced IBM ecosystem that dominated computing in those days.
The problem is they got greedy and BECAME what IBM was and the cycle started all over again.
The fact that his big goal is "hackathons" (which are insipidly stupid things to begin with - if you need hackathons to inspire creative development and ideas in your company you're DOING IT WRONG) and "corporate culture" plays well in a magazine title but does nothing for the company or its tech.
MS STILL doesn't have a real working eco-system in the cloud - partly because it has no phone presence but mainly because, for all its hackathons and creative thinking, no one at MS seems to have a vision for it. I don't have a unified login between my xbox and my windows services - they don't share passwords or videos - half the time my uploads of captures from my XBox to OneDrive fail for inxplicable reasons (or requiring a reboot of the XBox).
MS can't seem to handle the concept of a work account (where I have a corporate email and office access) and my personal account which contains my xbox purchases and keeps defaulting to one of the other until I force it to relogin.
Wrap in all the other issues of Windows 10 (forced, buggy updates, mandatory tracking, etc) plus a stagnating Office product line and a still less than stellar reputation for hardware (XBox and their surface line) and it makes perfect sense why Nadella has to point to his hackathons as his big "win".
Our fathers' Microsoft was more honest than the current one. It made mediocre software, but at least it didn't try to steal (excuse me, cloud-connect) users' data or nickel-and-dime them for eternity for software that doesn't do that much more than the version from 5-10 years ago.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
May that catchphrase work as well for Microsoft as it did for Oldsmobile...
"...the campaign that served as Olds’ final and famous (infamous?) death gasp: “Not Your Father’s Oldsmobile.”
Reference: https://godsofadvertising.word...
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras
Honestly, much of Microsoft's success came from exclusive contracts with IBM and many of us being forced to pay for copies of Windows we didn't want.
MS-DOS wasn't the best OS available at the time by a long shot.
If Microsoft is thinking they got to be a huge company based on innovative products they're lying ... many of their flagship products they just outright bought from someone else anyway, and the rest they just copied. The original Windows interface was more or less stolen from Apple.
Now Microsoft finds themselves catering to corporate desktops and coasting on those revenues, trying to rekindle something which never existed in the first place.
I'm hard pressed to think of a single, actual innovation which has had a lasting impact on the industry that Microsoft can be credited with.
Sorry, dude, but "our father's Microsoft" was already stunted and resting on its laurels.
Sub-point under "forced updates": Forced reboots.
Doesn't matter if you have unsaved work. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.
they gave me the opportunity to really do something
Linux. You're talking about Linux. Microsoft tries to take my computer from me and wants me to pay rent.
Seeing as Microsoft is in the process of improving Windows and Oracle decided to improve Java Licensing, not even mentioning the finer points of Systemd, things look dire.
There's also Vista that got thrown under the Bus (Why would anyone need some old KB-Articles or Software about Vista? Security Essentials can just go and stop working on Vista). XP and Vista got thrown under the Bus by Steam. Lest someone actually wants to install some old game on an old machine. Drivers vanish from vendor pages as soon as support is up. Who needs those anyways?
Is it that hard to focus on some long term stability (... and it's gone.).
6+ hours to run the latest 1803 update? - check (seriously, why is there no "use all resources and install the damned thing" button MS??)
Nagging me to use Microsfot Internet Explo^H^H^H^H Edge and putting the icon back on my desktop after an update? - check.
Skype dumbed down to the point I no longer have an away option just because I am using my computer? check
New year, same old shit.
captcha - heritage
really captcha? seriously, its getting spooky now.
Itâ(TM)s sad but except for drivers and hardware my windows experience peaked at win2000. The ui had a couple functional nice things added in 7 like filtering the files in explorer windows but they totally lost the farm from 8 on. We wonâ(TM)t even talk of me or vista or .net or how mobile kept breaking everything with every release. Hell I still want vb6 back. And what crack head cooked up power shell itâ(TM)s freaking horrible. I canâ(TM)t even bare to use windows anymore and I loooovveeeeed it and crawled through so many api.
Wait... isn't my father's Microsoft what everybody wants?
I mean apart from the evil shit of course, but straightforward functional products that you can buy that perform their task relatively well, and provide a consistent, predictable interface over the product range with a large amount of forwards and backwards compatibility, as well as hardware compatibility, capable of being installed and used by fools who just want to write some documents or calculate some numbers, without worrying about subscriptions and other horrors.
From an incredibly stupid fuck.
The sooner Microsoft dispose of this idiot the better.
Macs actually look great compared to windows 10.
Now instead of just making bad, buggy software they also make bad buggy hardware!
Thanks Bizarro Steve Jobs!
Ah yes, the Adobe(TM) Model.
+1
My father still has his old Dos 6.22, Windows 3.1 and Word 6 floppies. Incidentally, he's been running Ubuntu for more than a decade now. I think his only experience with Windows since 7 was buying some crappy little Lenovo Windows 10 Laptop. He intended to wipe it and install Ubuntu but the UEFI bios was so locked down and lacking basic options that we couldn't manage to install Linux. As someone who's worked in tech for 20 years, it may be rose colored glasses, but I miss "my father's Microsoft."
Wow, such hatred. Don't hold back, tell us how you really feel.
My father didn't have many OS choices. We do. That's the real difference.
Dad could use MS-Dos, PC-Dos or DR-Dos on his x86 compatible PC. That was pretty much it.
But MSFT wasn't in the business of demanding personal data back then as their OS crashed multiple times a day. They had enough work just making it stable.
NT4 was pretty stable. I was a developer and my NT4 workstation wouldn't usually crash more than once a month. It didn't spy.
Vista sucked. It didn't spy.
Then something changed. MSFT decided they knew better than I what I needed and started forcing changes. I stopped patching, because the new EULA wasn't something I could accept. More and more I switched away from using Windows to other options which don't spy.
My father wouldn't allow his computer to spy on him. That is something I'm certain about.
hey, yo.. not everybody is as greedy as the fucks that run today's microsoft.
i happen to prefer the old windows/office model as well.
Microsoft, you're a closed software, broken software, dinosaur.
Fossils.
> Java Licensing, not even mentioning the finer points of Systemd
Those are two major problems. We've been an Oracle customer for over twenty-five years, but we still can't get a quote from them on continuing to get Java 8 updates. The licensing including the term NUP (named user plus) is so confusing even their salespeople don't understand their convoluted licensing. We're will to pay a good bit of money to not have to upgrade to 11 in September because of the high cost of testing and supporting users that would have to upgrade, but they can't tell us what we need to pay.
systemd is a huge improvement in most ways, but it's different which some people don't like and it's harder to troubleshoot with dropped log messages and how it always exits 0 even when there's a problem.
+100. Can't believe I forgot that one.
"A generation grew up without ever having used a Microsoft product. "
I love it when writers out themselves as morons.
always exits 0 even when there's a problem.
That's by design. You don't understand the design.
so much this. microsoft has alienated people trying to force a subscription model no one wants, spying on users, and forcing things on their os no one wants. I don't see any correcting of the course on that. Once folk leave for another os they are not coming back, and windows 7 looks to be my last windows os.
Ballmer fell asleep at the wheel for over a decade. Azure is moving fast. o365 is making progress against Google's lock-in. Win10, visual studio, even Github, all moves to attract developers. Win10, although ugly, goes a long way to improve security while fixing UI flubs over previous Windows.
It's a mess, but they're throwing money in to fix it, and they have a lot of money.
Meanwhile Apple has taken their turn at sleeping. Google is running out of favour in privacy.
Satay Nutella is nothing more than a worthless sandy. Needs to be deported right back to the desert where he belongs.
And we have the problem with updates not being forced for our developers. We recently did an SSAE 16 audit, and the first three Windows machines they looked at hadn't been updated since last summer. Ouch.
I don't understand why I can't seem to disable updates on my home Windows 10 machine. They're blocked for a while but every method I've tried has eventually stopped working. It's the worst of both worlds.
The old MS just tried to make a good OS and Office package. Then they got the delusion that they had actually succeeded and now they are destructive wherever they can be.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
> fixing UI flubs
WTF ??? Windows 10 has the single worst GUI I've ever seen on any operating system ever. And that includes GNOME which is an utter abomination.
The last two are definitely things that are not new. MS has been beating the Windows-for-everything dog to death since at least XP. That's about the point they reached saturation in the PC desktop space and growth was mostly confined to replacement and population/job expansion. Meanwhile, DX10 was Vista+ only, DX11.1 was a Windows 8+ only thing (too lat e to make DX11 exclusive, I guess), and it's little wonder they'd pull the same trick with DX12.
But yea, the former two they weren't quite as willing to do because in the past opt-out telemetry was consider the realm of malware. I think you can mostly thank google and the spread of ad-based apps for the change in mindset. For forced updates, they didn't go that far with Windows XP/7 (never used Vista/8 so can't say for those) but they did somewhat aggressively push the "automated update" and push for more automated reboot. Apparently they've decided that such wasn't aggressive enough (the whole Windows 10 update fiasco is in the same ballpark) because Windows 10 is "free" and so they have every right to do with it what they want.
Really, the major reason this isn't "Your Father's Microsoft" is because "Microsoft lost the touch with what made it successful". In the past, what make Microsoft successful was being in the right place to corner exclusivity and then knowing how to strong arm companies from a monopolistic position where they could push anti-competitive practices. In short, 33% of the equation was lucking out.
Virtually every other attempt to join an extant marketplace and strong arm a monopolistic position has been an abysmal failure precisely because companies will choose to avoid Microsoft's strong arm tactics precisely because they can recognize an abusive relationship and have choice. It's little wonder that Microsoft has moved on to abusing their users trying to squeeze money out of them because that's basically all they have left*.
* Except the XBox and Azure franchise, which I believe the finally made net money somewhere late in the XBox 360 life. But as Sega showed it doesn't take too many major/minor fuck-ups to totally burn out the good will that will have consumers behind your latest platform. If Azure functions half as good as its supposed to, it's even worse because they need to compete on stability, flexibility, and price where the great flexibility only encourages one to follow the lowest price and maybe coming back if the stability elsewhere is horrible.
Yes.
Microsoft lost the touch with what made it successful
They were successful (at least for their shareholders) because they had near-monopoly control on computer operating systems to the detriment of users. They have lost touch with that and it's a good thing.
CAPTCHA: harass
Right. The subscription model with huge cancellations. Promoted by cellphone producers, car leasers, new car manufacturers (like volvo), cable companies, satellite TV companies, digital / satellite radio companies. Autodesk. Katea. Solidworks. It's disgusting. The only one of these that I buy into is the cell-phone plans, and that may likely change when I am out of this contract since the off-contract companies are now very competitive.
That became abundantly clear after Windows 8 landed and when Windows 10 followed. I really miss the 9x/7 interface.
Oh, so now it's my mother's Microsoft!
GNOME says: Hold my beer! Watch this.
Forced data theft and even forcing an advertising ID in to people OS = Shitty and Evil.
Nope. Its better than 8 and 8.1 lol. Still not as good as 95 - 7 though lol.
They all keep trying to corner us into slavery.
OHhh updates, for what? More telemetric updates that run my program slower so you can sell the data?
Do you know how many programs never needed an update and worked fine? They're trying to convince now they need updates every week and we need to pay for it. If there is that much fucking wrong with your software I shouldn't buy it anyway.
This is a great system for them, makes them a ton more money. Hey, people living normal lives, have your wages suddenly jumped up? No. They're just taking more out of the same pot, everyone is. The answer is no. I refused windows 10, windows 10 fucked up a lot of businesses, who needed the earlier version of windows for commercial software but windows was like, fuck you guys, we want more money.
I won't do it. I use windows for media content, games, stuff like that, but at the end of the day, what I actually need for work, I can do in linux quite easily these days.
When it hits the point that I can't find the software anymore for my OS, I'll switch to linux and wash my hands at it. I won't update to windows 10.
Everyone wants full control so you have to do what they say or the turn you off. Hell even my printer wants me to use their special ink cartridges that they give me so many prints a month for monthly subscription and they replace the ink in it, but you cancel? Your printer doesn't print anymore.
Your printer is now a subscription model. I've done the math, for a lot of people, it's going to cost more than just replacing the ink yourself when you need to.
Most of my computer usage since the early 90s was Unix and Linux. I've never cared for microsoft: bloated, bug-ridden, slow, fragile, full of Mack-truck-sized security holes, etc. Except for excel, the office suite is amazingly amateurish. I dumped word in about 2001 for LaTeX and never looked back.
When my windows 10-based laptop died recently, that gave me the impetus I needed to cut the remaining tiny cord to microsoft. I found an old, abandoned machine and installed ubuntu, cups, firefox, gimp, imagemagick, libreoffice, openssh-server, opera, vi[m], whois, xfig, and a few more minor pieces.
I have been microsoft free since July 4th. Let the revolution continue!
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
"Honest" and "Microsoft" never went together. Sure, the methods of evilhood may have changed, but MS has always been slimy. I could tell you stories all day about the good 'ol days (or not so good).
MS could do somewhat of a turn-around if they made their terms clear. Consumers may be okay with ads and/or snooping if they are given a price menu and the effects are clear. One could get a discount and even free software if they accept various degrees of ads and snooping, and be allowed to change the terms. Same with purchase versus rent.
Honest slimebaggary is an under-explored niche. Zig when all the other big tech co's are zagging, and you may get an edge (lower-case).
Table-ized A.I.
I wonder how much of an urge he had to say "synergizing" instead of "empowering".
Table-ized A.I.
Cut the force-installed game apps in Win10 and stop pretending I'm going to give you $1200 to run office for 10 years when we paid about $150/seat for Office 2003 in 2003 and used it until 2014.
To be honest, this isn't quite the part that bothers me. You get an always-up-to-date copy of Office that can be installed on up to five computers, plus some online storage. The licensing is also easier to manage and track. I'm kind of ok with it.
However, it's a little frustrating that for all that money that's gone into Microsoft licenses, there's been very little improvement over the past 20 years. Same with Windows. If Windows 7 was still on sale, and supported by the latest hardware, I'd have stuck with it over Windows 10. I don't want advertising or forced upgrades built into the OS. I still think it's fairly absurd that Microsoft performed product activation in the OS, meaning that they can just refuse to reactivate it and then you won't be able to reinstall the OS even on the original hardware.
For all the money Microsoft has collected on Windows and Office, and given the lack of meaningful changes, they should be absolutely flawless works of engineering. They should be fast, bug-free, and completely reliable. The only usability annoyances should be those that are completely unavoidable. However, it seems that instead of investing in improving their products, Microsoft has put all their resourced behind leveraging their existing products to push you to use their other products. Outlook has been improved by including a button to an Office 365 app store. Windows has been improved by pre-installing a copy of OneDrive that won't actually uninstall without a registry hack.
Have gnu, will travel.
"I can change guy!"
If you are in the US, T-Mobile doesn't have any contract lock-ins. Just pay at the end of the month until you get tired of them. Then go someplace else if you can get a better deal. Apparently they'll also buy out your contract with your existing carrier as well to get you as a customer. I've had them for the last 3-4yrs. Fast unlimited* data, no BS fees - No complaints.
* throttled via QoS after 50GB if you happen to be on a busy tower.
Back when I was young, MS was what rescued us from the clutches of IBM and their mainframes. MS was the alternative, the one that gave us the option to tell IBM to go suck a donkey dick when they came with their "you can't avoid us, eat our shit and call it ice cream" attitude.
Today's MS is not what our father's MS was. Today's MS is what our father's IBM was.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Cmon, if indeed âoeJust a few of the thousands of projects pitched over the past five years have inspired mainstream productsâoe, then it was a massive success
No, Mr. Nadella. I don't.
MS has a history of deceit, chicanery, backstabbing and just plain nasty behavior which won't be erased or forgotten for decades.
I agree, it's not my father's Microsoft because not it sucks even more than before. I mean, link that don't work. What fucking corporation website has links that don't work. And I'm not talking about links from outside, I'm talking about links provided by Microsoft. It's moronic. What kind of shit corporation are they running over there? What a joke.
IBM with their Nazgul (legal teams) plus a crop of accented people who keep giving you - offers you cannot refuse. That coupled with the NSAâ(TM)s attitude to data collection, something that makes Facebook look uninterested in who you are etc...
Microsoft can allow and encourage some truly independent skunkworks, (and keep their damned hands off until it either succeeds or goes bust), or the whole corporation can pull a complete 180 like Apple did when they brought back Jobs. Short of that kind of drastic change, I think Microsoft is unlikely to regain its long-lost status as an innovator, regardless of Nadella's efforts to initiate a company-wide culture shift. The agile, risk-taking, seat-of-the-pants development mindset that fosters innovation, cannot survive when it's subordinated to the risk-averse, inertia-laden culture that gave the world enforced-by-trickery Windows 10 upgrades.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
This is what consumers want. Throw Windows 10, it's spying telemetrics, the forced updates and other app garbage in the trash.
It was freaking anti-competive practices like contracts preventing anything but MS-DOS and later MS-DOS and Window installations.
it was freaking changing the OS API's last minute before releases and only then publishing the updates to the ISV Partners thereby ensuring Microsoft's software works the best on Windows first.
It was breaking things like the TCP/IP stack so things like AOL stopped working and then bringing up a dialog box saying to install MSN, it'lll work fine. Then brilliantly telling a judge it was a programming error and it would be fixed in 6 months.
It was that and so much more which made Microsoft what it is today and what it was yesterday.
But great PR pitch there Nadella.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Funny I would have thought âoenerdsâ would appreciate the idea that software and services need continual maintenance and improvement. Maybe you ARE all just unskilled help desk workers like drinkypoo
I know that you where trying to be sarcastic here but you are actually correct. What people tend to forget here is that the design of systemd is asynchronous, systemctl will exit with a non zero value if there where any problems with the unit file (and with any of the constraints put into the unit file) but once the binary is launched it's a new fork so systemctl exits 0 since the fork+launch was successful. If the binary encounters any problems after launch then of course systemctl cannot exit with an error since systemctl exited long before this happened.
Of course the System V scripts usually did the very same thing so relying on that "service xx start" would return on any error was not supported even back then, it was just that the scripts contained many pre-launch checks that the porters often forgot (at least in the beginning) to add to the unit files so scripts that did use the exit code from the service command happened to work most of the time by pure chance.
So with systemd you actually now instead get a proper and generic way to check that the daemon is running by checking if "systemctl is-active xx" returns 0 or an error. Use that in your scripts instead and they will always work instead of "most of the time".
Please stop with the "dropped log messages" since this have never happened and cannot happen due to how systemd works. Damn it even catches everything written to stdout and stderr as well which makes it catch far more logs than syslog ever did.
Was your developer computers-not-updating problem due to 1803 not installing? I've seen this happen with Windows 7 too where it just stops auto updating and requires a manual fix. Think of all the people that don't realize this problem and put these machines on the internet after a year or two of no updates. In my opinion, current employees at Microsoft are simply very poor programmers and you should avoid anyone who has Microsoft on their resume.
We understand it, we just don't think it's a good design. When non unix people design unix stuff, the results are usually bad, like this.
Are you seriously bitching about $1,200 over 10 years? What are you, a barista at Starbucks?
I can bill that in 3 hours, and my staff is pretty much required to bill that much every single day. If you're business is such shit that you can't afford $1,200 over 10 years, well - guess what? Microsoft is not the company for you.
For the rest of us in the real world, it's a damned pittance, especially with the cloud storage thrown in.
That I can earn it in 1 or 2 days doesn't mean I want to spend it on stuff I don't want to upgrade to in the first place. While moving to a "services" (hah! try to get service of any kind) model will make sure my Microsoft stock will continue to rise at a very fast pace, I prefer not to be the sucker who pays for their profits in the first place.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
"changing Microsoft's rigid, hierarchical and arrogant culture his top priority."
I find all the things stated by the OP to be extremely arrogant, so if that was truly their "top priority" they are doing an extremely shitty job.
The reality was Apple nut checked Microsoft as it blew by them in the end-user market with iPhone and Apple services. Amazon (an online e-commerce bazaar at that) Chuck Norris'ed kicked them to the face with AWS with cloud services. And Google laughed from the sidelines and then stuck up at the end to goose pinch them as they blew past them into the schools with Chromebooks.
I don't 100% disagree with this, but there is definitely revisionist history here.
Apple did indeed manage to outdo Microsoft, no question about it. However, Ballmer wasn't asleep at the wheel here. Remember, MS had mobile phones in a pre-Facebook, pre-Instagram, pre-Spotify, pre-App-store, pre-reasonably-priced-data-plan world. They had a healthy presence in a three horse race, with their larger competition was Blackberry for the enterprise. Palm's focus on simplicity was not gaining them a whole lot of ground. Apple started with a really good feature phone and improved upon it, and while they did ultimately succeed, at the time targeting the enterprise by making really good e-mail devices with centralized management - which they did pretty well. MS tried rebooting its platform so much that it became pointless for developers to target it, and it took them far too long to get their music/tv/movie ecosystem together while simultaneously competing with the iTunes libraries that EVERYONE had at the time.
AWS is again undoubtedly a success, but a whole lot of their money is made by people who simply weren't Microsoft's core market. Windows Server / SQL Server users commonly had on-premise installations and an upgrade cadence of some kind in place. Yes, plenty of very big firms use AWS, but it really got its start in startup world where AWS was able to replace the rack full of servers in a colo that was a tremendous up-front expense for startups that didn't yet have a reliable customer base. It was largely an untapped market that was timed very well with startup apps that needed a scalable backend. Moreover, Amazon was able to start AWS very inexpensively since they started out selling time on servers they only used during the busy holiday season and sat idle most of the year, while Microsoft doesn't have that sort of resource lying around in the same way Amazon does. Yes, Azure is playing catch-up, but they're also doing so while doing far more to target businesses with an existing on-prem Microsoft infrastructure. You can buy generic server time on Azure, but MS has an existing client base they're looking to leverage with easy migration tools and drop-in replacements for their on-prem software. That's a bit of a different sort of thing than AWS.
As for Chromebooks, they're winning in no small part because of how inexpensive the hardware is along with parents and superintendents who don't think past making budget. I'm not saying that Microsoft should be doing better than Google solely by virtue of their respective platforms, but I am saying that if Chromebooks cost the same as entry level x86 laptops running Windows and Office in conjunction with educational IT's default requirement of super-locked-down computers anyway, Chromebooks may not have won out.
Now in a panic rush Microsoft is pivoting and everything is up in the air. Competing products, misaligned consumer and enterprise offerings, a kitchen sink approach to cloud services. It's a hot sticky mess.
I'll agree with at least some of this. Yes, Microsoft is pivoting because the expectation of paying for an OS is basically gone...a problem felt far more by Microsoft than by everyone else who hasn't really charged for OSes in the classical sense. They're continuing to milk Office, but Google Docs and LibreOffice continue to improve. SQL Server is still popular in the SMB market, but the amount of software developed for a full MS stack rather than LAMP certainly isn't increasing. I agree that the infighting and the poor distinction between consumer and business lines is not helping them, but I also think that if Nadella is smart, he'll admit that it isn't necessarily the worst possible fate to join the ranks of SAP and Oracle, being a primarily enterprise company that nobody likes but everybody pays.
Personally, I think mr. Nadella is probably the best CEO in the lineup. Ballmer was way too aggressive and the company suffered from it. If you wonder why they were a bunch of backstabbing, arrogant assholes, look no further. Nadella really needed to provide some tranquilizer there. Which he did. He also put his cards on the cloud infrastructure. And currently, Microsoft's position is extremely good as a result:
- Microsoft Azure is pretty much unbeatable if you look at ease of use, consistency across platforms, ease of deployment, etc. I'm not sure about pricing, but it's competitive. Oracle's cloud is a bad joke. Even if it were brilliant I'd have to be forced into doing business with that bunch of piranhas. Amazon... outside the USA not trusted at all where it comes to keeping data somewhat safe from prying eyes, or even abusing data from competitors. Microsoft makes an effort to reduce corporate angst there.
- SQL Server beats the crap out of Oracle at its own game.
- XBox is finally making money
- Windows 10 is pretty much the standard platform (and I haven't installed it, no, but many people do). It's inescapable.
- MS Office... too expensive IMO in the long run, but not so much people revolt.
- Microsoft Surface is actually getting reasonable reviews and some sales, raking in billions in profit.
(https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/26/17286900/microsoft-q3-2018-earnings-cloud-surface-linkedin-revenue)
- They bought LinkedIn, which is another very strategic purchase that will give them even more insights in what companies are doing, what skillsets they have or need, et cetera.
All in all Nadella has put the company on a good footing internally, and strategically they're probably in the best place they ever have been so far. Unless they try their hand at something ridiculously expensive like launching rockets or self-driving cars. But Microsoft has a huge amount of cash. So... no real threats, and lots of interesting options ahead.
All of which means I think they'll shoot themselves in the head next year. They're good at doing that.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
Two big stories? MS boss tries to keeps its company relevant in 21th century. I am not sure these are big stories.
Microsoft was never a legend, despite how billg would like to rewrite history.
Microsoft Litigation
Let's face it, Microsoft is a huge company and they have their hooks deep into corporate America. Much like Oracle does. It's going to be a long long time before we see businesses moving away from MS in mass. It doesn't matter that their are other viable products - Linux, OpenOffice, etc. The point is that businesses are so entrenched in the MS ecosystem they are highly unlikely to change.
The home user is a different matter entirely. As the article points out, there is an entire generation that grew up on iOS and Android and have no need whatsoever for any MS products, save for the XBOX. Personally I only use Windows at work. Haven't used it on a home device for years. I don't miss it in the least and their current stance on Windows 10 licensing and forced upgrades only reinforces that I already believe.
toggle & keep metered connection setting on - then only turn it off when you want to download updates, install & reboot. then turn it back on.
yep, my dad runs a mac, my mother-in-law a mac and the kids want mac computers, iphones and ipads. What is this world coming to, we all need the return of the great Mainframe, as400, S390 or VAXen!
the old mainframe guys can be cool, I swear, just give them another chance. we will have an as400 running on our phone in no time!
Your Average Joe
Also, I don't feel empowered when I try to open a document and I see a message that I must accept new terms of service and without accepting the office program won't start. Um, I already have a license for a specific version and they are preventing me from using it unless I accept new terms. That happened last week.
From the summary: "...Microsoft lost the touch with what made it successful..."
Oh, you mean the criminal monopolistic behaviors, embrace and extend, and a long list of rubbish that I'm trying to put out of my mind?
Very good, get right back to that then.
Let's see... bios/boot takeover, linux on Windows (but not the other way around of course), I'm sure many of you could go on - I'm not paying enough attention anymore to know more.
I do hope they keep opening the .NET technologies - I can make use of that. On Linux, anyway...
iPhone ... Amazon ... AWS ... Google ,,, Chromebooks
That's not your father's Microsoft, that your older brother's Microsoft.
Lisa ... IBM ... CP/M ... Usenet ,,, Atari
Say what you want about it, they used to put out competitive products when Bill Gates was still in charge in the early 90s. They outdid Apple on design for a while, and windows (aside from crashing often) was a fine operating system. Nowadays, they seem totally incapable of putting out a competitive or even well designed product in any market. And, they have no idea what they want their company to be, or what their products are or should be (let alone who their customers are).
"One of the things that happens when you're super successful is you sort of sometimes lose touch with what made you successful in the first place,"
Great, does this means their getting back in touch with their origins and using illegal tactics to hurt competitors?
I have a copy of Word for Windows 2.0c and Quattro Pro 6. Both work in Windows 3.1 and any later version of 32-bit Windows. I never use them, but I have them and (have tried, just for grins) they install in Windows 3.1 running under DOSBox. Neither one of them calls home for updates, and never did. They can do almost as much as LibreOffice, which also calls home only to check for a newer version (then you have to download and install it manually). So what have we gotten for our conversion to the (not so new, really; remember the IBM Displaywriter word processor that was leased, not sold?) subscription model?
Does anybody have a comprehensive list of what MS Office does (other than put everything "in the cloud") that LibreOffice doesn't. I suspect that there are few things on such a list that would matter for most people.
If that's true, then why aren't the messages in the journal? I work on a lot of different things from Elasticsearch to MongoDB to MySQL with multi-billion row tables, and very often when there's a problem starting a service, there's nothing in the journal. But I see the error message clearly on the console if I try to start the service by hand. I know for a damn fact that systemd is dropping log messages. I've screwed up probably two hundred times since we upgraded to CentOS 7 with it and seen that problem for myself. The latest problem I had today was when I changed the owner of /var/lib/mongodb/mongod.lock to the wrong user so MongoDB wouldn't start. There was no error logged in the journal, but running "mongod --config /etc/mongod.conf" clearly showed the problem.
This is the next wave of capitalsim and its the worst because it gets branded as a social just cause. In fact hackathons deprive people of any value they create. It is the corporates new love child because they found a way to innovate at zero cost.
By your definition of spyware a software system free of it would have no services connecting it to the internet, no services reporting system faults and issues, no way to receive updates, and the last one.... you want state of the art games, but you want the platform which supports those games to be compatible with every archaic version of windows ever released.
I don't think there's an OS out there like you're talking about. Even linux has these sorts of services, the only difference is that by default their switched on and it's more automated in windows. Linux expects its users to be technically proficient enough to know about security issues and to patch their systems in a timely manner. Windows makes no such assumptions, nor should it.
If you're technically proficient enough to run linux, you should be technically proficient to disable these services on windows and manually activate them when you need them. The links you provided actually explains how to deactivate them.
The point about forced updates is BS, I'm still running a media center box in my living room running windows 7, nothing forced me to update it. I'm still receiving windows updates.
But of course you'd probably find a reason for complaining no matter what.
Satay nutella sounds delicious.
If so then you should look at the unit file, chances are quite high that the idiot who wrote it launches mongod with say "--quiet" or similar that makes it not produce the output in the first place. Or they redirect stdout/stderr to some file at launch, or something else is happening. Mongod comes up very often when dropped logs are mentioned so there must be something very wrong with the mongod unit file.
Now I know nothing about mongodb but I installed 4.0.1 in CentOS 7 and changed the user of /var/run/mongodb/ to root:root and when I launched mongo from the console with the mongod user (I could find no lock file, don't know if that is used in prior versions only or if that is something that have to be configured) but the error from mongod could be seen in the journal:
[root@localhost ~]# systemctl status mongod.service
mongod.service - MongoDB Database Server
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/mongod.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since tis 2018-08-21 13:55:22 CEST; 5s ago
Docs: https://docs.mongodb.org/manua...
Process: 11630 ExecStart=/usr/bin/mongod $OPTIONS (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)
Main PID: 11279 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
aug 21 13:55:22 localhost.localdomain systemd[1]: Starting MongoDB Database Server...
aug 21 13:55:22 localhost.localdomain mongod[11630]: 2018-08-21T13:55:22.792+0200 I CONTROL [main] Automatically disabling TLS 1.0, to force-enable TLS 1.0 specify --sslDisabledProtocols 'none'
aug 21 13:55:22 localhost.localdomain mongod[11630]: about to fork child process, waiting until server is ready for connections.
aug 21 13:55:22 localhost.localdomain mongod[11630]: forked process: 11632
aug 21 13:55:22 localhost.localdomain mongod[11630]: ERROR: child process failed, exited with error number 1
aug 21 13:55:22 localhost.localdomain mongod[11630]: To see additional information in this output, start without the "--fork" option.
aug 21 13:55:22 localhost.localdomain systemd[1]: mongod.service: control process exited, code=exited status=1
aug 21 13:55:22 localhost.localdomain systemd[1]: Failed to start MongoDB Database Server.
aug 21 13:55:22 localhost.localdomain systemd[1]: Unit mongod.service entered failed state.
aug 21 13:55:22 localhost.localdomain systemd[1]: mongod.service failed.
Which is the same error it gave on the console:
[root@localhost ~]# su mongod -p --session-command '/usr/bin/mongod --config /etc/mongod.conf'
2018-08-21T13:55:13.168+0200 I CONTROL [main] Automatically disabling TLS 1.0, to force-enable TLS 1.0 specify --sslDisabledProtocols 'none'
about to fork child process, waiting until server is ready for connections.
forked process: 11622
ERROR: child process failed, exited with error number 1
To see additional information in this output, start without the "--fork" option.
So looks like the problem with the unit file have been solved, atleast in the 4.0.1 version
Once folk leave for another os they are not coming back, and windows 7 looks to be my last windows os.,
Me too, and what's especially sad about this for Microsoft is that I for one would have bought Windows 8 if they hadn't mangled the UI, and I would have bought Windows 10 as well if they hadn't made it spyware. And I know I'm not alone, as a gamer. Windows is where the games are, so it was a no-brainer that I'd keep giving Microsoft money even though I despised them... right up until they made those decisions. I'd have upgraded just to get DX12, and the desktop duplication API. Instead, I'm going to run Windows 7 into the ground, and then I'm going to put it into a VM and use it to run whatever Windows games I can. Any I can't, that also won't run in Wine, I just won't play any more. I'm going to let them go with Microsoft.
All Microsoft had to do to keep people like me was to unambiguously provide the ability to disable the spying. Instead, they doubled down on spyware, and started inserting it into Windows 7's update rollups, so that I have to install it and then remove it with every update. That makes me update less often, which makes Windows less secure as an ecosystem, which makes Microsoft look even more incompetent than they actually are. As such, they lose sales both coming and going.
Microsoft has derived substantial benefit from home users of their operating system, since the general familiarity with Windows provides network effects that have helped make it the de facto standard. If Microsoft wants to stem the tide of departing users, they are going to have to give up on being a Big Data company, and go back to their core business of providing an operating system with an easily comprehensible development system — you know, the way they attracted users in the first place.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I don't understand why I can't seem to disable updates on my home Windows 10 machine. They're blocked for a while but every method I've tried has eventually stopped working.
Because Microsoft has switched from enabling users to do things to forcing users to do things. The former model made them great, at least when combined with their anticompetitive behavior. Their current model is making them hated, even by people who used to think they were great. Microsoft tricked users into upgrades because they knew they couldn't convince them. One of the ways they tricked them was with supposed security upgrades which actually were OS delivery tools. They've completely squandered what little trust they had earned in the past.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It redirects to 2>&1 to /dev/null like a lot of other unit files. I don't understand why the systemd guys do that. They just don't get that we need to see stdout and stderr when starting services for troubleshooting. I've heard the kid speak that created it, and he was so arrogant and wouldn't listen to anyone. The idea that we don't need logs is just stupid
Does he mean MS has lost touch with being a predatory company that squashes its competition with vapoware, patent trolling and abusing the Windows monopoly?
Ditto. Also, please bring back Bill Gates. Or even Steve Ballmer!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
That unit file is however not done by a "systemd guy", it's done by a mongodb guy. And from the small tests that I did with it before it also tends to be very bad at logging overall, e.g at error it logged that extra logging would be given if it was run without --fork but when I did that the mongod daemon logged just a single non-error log on error... So all the problems that you and others have with MongoDB is 100% MongoDB problems and the MongoDB devs should be ashamed of themselves.
Since Satya, Windows has changed from a crappy operating system to one that is much better than MacOS now :) I hope Windows 10 continues to improve all they need to do now is make it hybrid so it runs on ARM and x86 with ease.
My father didn't have many OS choices. We do. That's the real difference.
Dad could use MS-Dos, PC-Dos or DR-Dos on his x86 compatible PC. That was pretty much it.
there has never been a shortage of OS choice as far as i can remember.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
What is this habit some people have of quoting the ticker tape codes for companies? I mean, who cares what their ticker tape code is - it's not like it's something you use out in the real world. Wouldn't it be more relevant to write their name in an octal representation of ASCII? Why do people do that?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
And his use of computers goes back well before CP/M.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"