As Satya Nadella becomes the third CEO of Microsoft, he brings a relentless drive for innovation and a spirit of collaboration to his new role. He joined Microsoft 22 years ago because he saw how clearly Microsoft empowers people to do magical things and ultimately make the world a better place. Many companies, he says, “aspire to change the world. But very few have all the elements required: talent, resources and perseverance. Microsoft has proven that it has all three in abundance.”
Say what you will – I won’t say anything, I know nothing about this stuff – but I love this webpage introducing the new CEO. Very well done.
Congratulations to Satya (whose name incidentally means “ultimate reality” in sanskrit)
Microsoft is in need of little upgrading, at least from a marketing point of view, and one would hope that even an insider such as Satya could achieve that.
Edited 2014-02-04 15:02 UTC
Hotmail, MSN, Live, Bing, everything.NET, the company has made so many efforts to re brand itself only to throw away the terms later on.
For all their “struggles” they don’t seem interested in budging on things like their license model at all.
Now, imagine this coming from Darth Vader kind of officer, talking about the way of the empire… Then wonder what kind of innovation does he have in mind?-)
I read that pull quote and immediately thought:
Gone is the tradition of verifying/validating the design before a single line of code gets written.
Gone is the tradition of periodic code review.
Gone is the tradition of efficiency and minimalism (Norman Wilson’s 5-year involvement with Unix development made it smaller and leaner–he removed more code than he added).
The industry doesn’t respect any of that. Which pretty well explains Microsoft’s current state of affairs.
Edited 2014-02-04 19:24 UTC
I think this actually speaks to our [western] culture as a whole. Simplicity and efficiency just aren’t “sexy” anymore. What we want is more, more, more (i.e. bloat), while we simultaneously think and do less, less, less (i.e. having it handed to us on a silver platter).
Everyday
I have more respect
for the core utils
and less
for the kernel
What is even more interesting to me is that Gates will be playing a more prominent technical role.
While this is actually good news because I don’t think Windows 8 would have been the nightmare it was if Gates had been there.
Too bad it is so late however because the Microsoft Brain Drain is almost complete.
Well, the initial brain drain at MS happened during Longhorn/Vista development as creators of core features left before their project was complete. Somehow those core features were finished but never really embraced afterwards.
I think MS has gotten better at shipping things that actually work. Win 7, winphone 7,8, win 8. I don’t like their design internally or externally, but they do what they are supposed to do more often than previous ms products.
Cool, you can even print new CEO’s photo and put it on your desk!
First point for new CEO: it takes less space than Ballmer’s.
Stop this utterly litteral marketing nonsense :
“He joined Microsoft 22 years ago because he saw how clearly Microsoft empowers people to do magical things and ultimately make the world a better place. Many companies, he says, “aspire to change the world. But very few have all the elements required: talent, resources and perseverance. Microsoft has proven that it has all three in abundance.”
Blah-blah-blah… Microsoft wanted to make money, he wanted to make money, and now he is Microsoft’s new CEO and is going to make even more money…
Microsoft is *NOT* a NGO and/or all butterflies.
Kochise
What Nadella said about Microsoft can be his true feelings… why not? He could make money in a different company but He stayed 22 years at Microsoft.
IMHO this is a really good message from Microsoft instead of hiring a stupid trendy CEO like Yahoo did, They promoted their own brilliant people.
Good for Microsoft!
Never said it was a bad move or the bad person.
It’s just the utterly rubbish marketing communication that makes me shiver. If Microsoft was such making great product to empower people, those consumers wouldn’t want to throw their Windows 8 and/or Windows Phone through… the window.
Kochise
PR speak on a PR page. News at 11.
I mean seriously.
Yeah, but this kind of PR communication is bad, and they should feel bad…
It’s like Monsanto going berserk about being greener, more ecological than horse manure, making so many people happier and healthier.
That doesn’t makes me puke rainbows :/
Kochise
Edited 2014-02-04 16:42 UTC
“feel bad” about what? It’s just a PR announce… what did you expect?
And regarding the “evil” Monsanto… they’ve done more to combat human hunger than any other company, person, political party or government in the whole history of humanity. But hey, nobody cares about that detail. Monsanto is evil, evil!!! Pure leftist demagogy.
With that logic, I could start a corporation feeding the hungry soylent green. As long as the ends justifies the means, I should of course be overlooked for my egregious business practices, right?
No, Monsanto really is evil. They’re up there with Union Carbide and DeBeers.
LOL, there hasn’t been an OS I’ve tried yet that didn’t make me want to hurl my PC or mobile device through a Window at some point. For example, Android has such a piss-poor user experience while in the car, I’ve seriously considered putting my phone under a tire and driving over it on several occasions. And Linux? Don’t even get me started
Sorry, there is no way a CEO announcement by a large corporation is not going to be filled with such flowery nonsense. Does it make any sense? No, not at all. But its expected behavior.
Sill, “magical things”? Really?
Is it so hard to imagine that there exists a higher motivation than money? It ain’t work if you love it…
“Say what you will – I won’t say anything, I know nothing about this stuff – but I love this webpage introducing the new CEO.”
I’ll say that these CSS tricks and designs have been much better executed for the last couple of years and this clearly seems to be an aping of Apple’s recent success with nearly the exact same design but much better executed… as with the Mac Pro page:
http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/
Completely unclear why this announcement became an opportunity to celebrate this web design.
Hardly. First thing I thought when I loaded the MacPro page was, “How come page-down doesn’t work?” The MacPro page breaks common web navigation idioms. It’s as awful as any Flash-based web page.
At least it degrades perfectly with Javascript disabled.
(Which was very necessary as, once I allowed it in NoScript, I couldn’t even figure out how to get it to display all the content I saw on the overview when I initially loaded it.)
While it is nothing special. It is a pretty clean page, about the new CEO. The video roll-over effect while simple was quite nice.
Edited 2014-02-04 17:32 UTC
I’ve come to enjoy the word Perseverance in recent years!
It’s true of any journey to achievement, including Life. From Perseverance to Release !
basically, I agree with that sentiment, also being echoed from Ballmer. And not only is it a worthy value to promote and focus attention on, I also enjoy its slight and possibly knowing jarring with (what I perceive to be) the core values of the FTSE NASDAQ world…
Plus it’s a very MFST value, they’ve shown that over the years.
As for the page design, meh -take it or leave – is ok.
Edited 2014-02-04 17:45 UTC
Microsoft using in their presentation of their new CEO videos hosted on youtube? No self hosting? No Silverlight?
Silverlight is only good in specific scenarios such as adaptive bitrate streaming, not really needed here.
Otherwise it just makes it harder to view on mobile.
Or with another point of view: making your competitor pay for your bandwidth.
With more likes/views, they gets money back from their enemy. Not such a bad move
Kochise
A great new leader, Gates coming back for real product work, and all the idiots who got us here flushed the hell out.
This is excellent news and I am optimistic about Microsoft for the first time in 10 years. MSFT for me goes from “sell” to “buy” after the last year.
I wouldn’t be so quick to start buying their stock. The incoming CEO may prove to be even worse than Ballmer. Or they could pull an Elop. The point being wait and see what happens before wasting your money.
At least, buying their products is not a waste. It’s just a rip-off since they makes you buy them again and again for little incremental added value.
But still, Windows (2000/XP/7) is quite good IMHO.
Kochise
Edited 2014-02-04 21:38 UTC
Definitely the same that Apple does but at least for a little more value, with Apple you buy a new product for an icon change.
Satya has a proven track record running a division in MS that has higher revenues than most companies.
He’s one of few (another being Elop) who could actually pull the job off.
This is the kind of wonderful stuff Gates did when he was more involved.
http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an-epic-bi…
I’m not expecting much more than crazy microsoft at its finest.
That email is awesome, and Bill Gates was in control during the period when Microsoft actually made new good things.
No, I don’t think he was in control. That’s kind of the point,imho. He was there, and they made it terribly difficult just to get their software. He just berated people mercilessly, and pointlessly in meetings, even when they had obviously good ideas.
Dear Satya
I bought three Windows 8 laptops for my grand children during Xmas becuase they are starting school.
They all have iPhones and iPads.
I suddenly found my grand children and I do not know how to use computers. This is very bad.
The iPhone and iPad did not come with manuals, but everything works.
I have been using PC since Window 3.1. I am totaly lost in the Windows 8 world. A simple thing as calculator is hard to find.
Youtube did not work. The grand children ask why. Could you please explain to them?
I would love to see Elop dutifully congratulate his new boss.
Isn’t that called incest ?
Kochise
He has the spunk needed to succeed…
…I hate spunk!
I have been Microsoft Soft user
since DOS times.
Mi view is that
in hunting for bigger and bigger revenues
-The inner daemon of economic ventures-
Merchandising have replaced technology.
Latter Apple and Google
are going to confront this conundrum.