Latteland · HackerTrans

8 yıl öncediscuss

A large majority of "professional" software engineers use google email on their phones. And I've used gdocs etc at times on my phone continuously over the past 20 years, and many of them i was working at microsoft. Apples sales increased for a long time, even though google's sales increased faster apple was, i repeat was capturing most of the profit. We'll see if that happens. I expect several companies out of china to take the android market from samsung (still using android though).

Latteland

8 yıl öncediscuss

Control of android or being the alternative safe choice that everyone builds apps for is worth a lot of money, but you can also use it to reinforce use of your core apps, like google's gmail and search. microsoft instead lost people from using office apps on android, as they market decayed. sure, they are huge and rich and can afford it, and eventually got to office 360 and android versions of office apps. But it would have been even better for them have never had to suffer loss of marketshare to google docs, and they were fortunate to not loose too much share.

Latteland

8 yıl öncediscuss

There were several good responses to my message like yours.

A ceo of a tech company has to both grow revenue and cultivate new technologies. A major company working in almost every area like microsoft has to do even more, so they don't get usurped like endless other former leading companies. Microsoft was challenged in a lot of ways. Ballmer did very well on the bringing in more money area.

1. mobile phones (basically completely blew it here - they had all the pieces but couldn't put them together because of both poor execution and more nimble competitors). Ballmer did terrible here. Even buying nokia was a disaster.

2. web - they managed to keep it microsoft centric for a long time where it only rendered correctly on ie3, but it eventually escaped them. they do sell some web server software, but the days where it had to render correctly on windows, both preventing other platforms from being used and being used for hosting web apps are gone. He held the world at bay for a long time, so I'll give him 25% success here.

3. cloud - azure started under him, so I'd give him 50% success. Who would have thought amazon would kick Microsoft's butt so thoroughly. I saw so many good people go to work there, I never thought amazon would succeed with such a different philosophy, people leaving there so frequently after 2 years.

4. Money, growth - 4/4. So much money. Yet at the same time, people started looking for other companies, and the company felt more and more like it was missing out by forcing everything to reinforce windows and office.

Satya has at least changed the tenor of the company, attracting developers back. I do think Windows seems to have turned into a terrible mess, with unless beta releases with lots of bugs. They fired all the testers because they weren't doing anything? Satya was also leading the azure division, so I think he does get some credit for that.

Latteland

8 yıl öncediscuss

When I last worked there and ballmer was running things, he thought he was doing great cause he got more money each year from stupid enterprise agreements with stupid companies. But the innovation was really slow and it was all about increasing the value of what they had, windows. The world was moving on without them.

Satya nadella made a surprising change for Microsoft. If a company is going to last long term they have to do more than look at their own navels. You can't just focus on squeezing more money out of your existing lemons.

Happening now at Apple?

Latteland

8 yıl öncediscuss

I love places that don't block throwaway mail providers, cause I really don't want to enter a real email address at every random site. But if I had a site that had a lot of users, I'd probably want that because it would automate many account maintenance issues. I have started thinking my main privacy issue is the phone company tracking my location all the time and then selling it to anybody in the world, and me not being able to do anything to block that is the real issue (short of getting rid of my phone).

Latteland

8 yıl öncediscuss

I also hate being encouraged to enter my email, because I think they want to connect me up via other places I use that email. But I have various ways that I usually use to create a new email for every website, so they can't track me. I have to do a tiny amount of work to manage this but it is not so hard.

I guess other people aren't aware of how to do this or its too much work. Having an email does help the 'reset automatically' the account, without human intervention (when you still have the email).

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