People at Microsoft said the wind of change was blowing long before Nadella took the job. They timed the announcement of Nadella to coincide with deliveries of new products / open platforms. The whole thing was to change the image of Microsoft: New products + new face = new Microsoft.
It's not like Nadella fired every one and started afresh.
What I kept hearing from people inside Microsoft was that the most helpful single change was getting rid of Sinofsky, and that was when the shift really began. Apparently he (much more than Ballmer) was responsible for the "Windows first" mentality that kept hobbling the rest of the company, though of course Ballmer deserves some blame for not doing his job and pushing back on that.
If i recall correctly (from what I read at the time) he hid either the existence of Surface RT or the SOC it was running from the team that was porting Office to ARM. So they had to ship an unfinished version of Office (that required multiple steps and different interfaces to update to final. Which no reviewer or early user bothered with) with it.
The team working on office for ios wasn't allowed to ship because they didn't want ios to gain share against windows phone.
Satya came from cloud and enterprise (c+e). His big bet was on the fact that everyone will have a computer in a pocket augmented by the cloud. Capitalizing on that was very important.
Windows growth had been stagnant and ballmer lost the mobile opportunity.
Satya encouraged open source at Microsoft and putting customers need first.
I was part of this transition and the change was definitely felt. He deeply understands where the puck will be rather than where it is.
> It's not like Nadella fired every one and started afresh.
He announced huge layoffs (18,000 people) almost as soon as he took over. A lot of Nokia people, but also 5,500 people not related to mobile and 1,400 of them at HQ. A year later he made another huge cut of 7,800 people.
More evidence for d--b's point. Firing 18k people at Microsoft's scale isn't even close to burning it down and starting from scratch. It's also not something a newly minted CEO would be able to get past the board on such short notice. It must have been planned in advance. Whatever you say about Balmer, someone at MSFT knew how to flawlessly execute a masterful transition plan. I though Apple did a good job, but MSFT nailed it.
"It's not like Nadella fired every one and started afresh." is a colloquialism. d--b was basically saying "it's not like Nadella did a major overhaul.
With which jonknee disagrees, citing a layoff of 18,000. To which simonh claims is not a major overhaul since Microsoft is nebulously enormous. To which piaste disagrees, as 18k was actually 15.7% of the company.
You can all continue to debate whether or not 15.7% is a major overhaul, whether the actual people they fired were significant, etc...
But you quoting a colloquialism and asking us all to take it literally is not helpful to the discussion, or the culture of HN.
I don't disagree, but the parent was being just as pedantic as I was. Perhaps my snark was an attempt to end the petty discussion (apparently, improperly so). Read these two statements in the context of the discussion:
> burning it down and starting from scratch.
> started afresh
15.7% is a major overhaul, but IMO in no way insinuates "burning something down" or "starting afresh". Do you think either of those statements is consistent with a 15% cut in workforce?
PS - 12,500 of those 18,000 came from Nokia[0].
> with 12,500 of those coming out of the streamlining of Microsoft’s acquired Nokia assets.
Don't get me wrong, Microsoft did change course. It was a tanking bloated juggernaut, and the change from pre-Nadella days has been drastic. But what I am saying is that the change had started at least 3 or 4 years before Nadella became CEO.
The article is all about how the guy changed everything so quickly while in fact this was already happening.
What's possible though is that the big guys at Microsoft planned to give the job to Nadella a while ago, and that Nadella, under Ballmer, did actually take all the decisions that took Microsoft in the right direction.
wind of change was blowing long before Nadella took the job
Well, just look at that stock prices graph, seems in line with this: sure there's a flat line during Ballmer's first 10 years, but then it suddenly started going up and the trend just continued in the same trend when Nadella got assigned. Not saying he's not doing a good job: from what I see I'd say he's doing well, though of course there's a whole lot of information I don't see so I really cannot tell.
It's not like Nadella fired every one and started afresh.