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371 points greggyb | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.211s | source
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addicted ◴[] No.41978723[source]
This article doesn’t understand what was fundamentally wrong with Ballmer’s leadership and what Nadella actually changed.

The specific technologies that were successful is irrelevant. Microsoft has and continues to invest in nearly every computer related technology that may come around the corner or they got late on.

The problem with Microsoft was everything went through Windows. The entire company was designed to promote Windows.

This was the fundamental flaw with Microsoft that Nadella changed. He quickly not just made Windows just another part of Microsoft’s business, to a great extent he actively devalued it.

The fact that Ballmer invested in Azure, etc before Nadella would all be irrelevant because under Ballmer Azure would have remained a red headed step child to Windows, so it’s unlikely to have seen much success under him anyways. Same goes for pretty much everything else Microsoft is doing right now.

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ThrowawayB7 ◴[] No.41979581[source]
Except Steven Sinofsky, longtime head of the Windows division and one of the internal forces preventing Microsoft from going in alternate directions, was pushed out under Ballmer's tenure, not Nadella's.

Granted, Ballmer made the mistake of putting Terry Myerson, who headed up the failed Windows Phone effort, in charge of Windows but that's another story.

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lenkite ◴[] No.41981463[source]
Windows phone was damn good and was growing in popularity when Nadella came in and killed it. When you are #3 in a market, you need persistence to win. One cannot expect immediate, massive profits in a saturated market. Yet, Windows phone by itself was a growth multiplier for Windows which Nadella annihilated in order to turn Microsoft into a cloud & ad services company.
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1. nashashmi ◴[] No.41984155[source]
Except from a project management standpoint, if you don’t have a vision for a project, the people on that team would get up and leave. And there was no short term vision for the phone in the face of android and iPhone. The long term vision did not have team buy-in.

And then further the phone was a distraction for all of the other teams who were expected in someway to provide some software that would work on there as well as android and iPhone.

I agree that the phone would have been great … at some point. But in an MBA world, it was a liability