7 ms·
Ask HN: Is Satya Nadella the best tech CEO of last decade?
He turned around an almost dying windows to become this Kraken that has the majority dev environment in its chokehold. That's impressive
Other candidates in my list are Frank Slootman of Snowflake and Tim Cook of Apple for how he has not dropped the ball from Steve Jobs. What are yours?
- drcongo 3y agoHi Satya, thanks for posing this interesting question.
- uberman 3y agoI don't know how much of the MS turnaround can be attributed to him, but if we take it at face value that the CEO is responsible for everything, then MS definitely has had a dramatic positive run following Nadella taking the reigns from Ballmer. MS still lacks a industry leading 21st century consumer device and Nadella has not been able to change that but his bets on cloud computing, embracing of Linux and open source and the rise of VSCode are something to behold. As an "older-school" dev, I am constantly amazed that I can open a linux prompt on windows or do VSCode work with a local gui on a remote computer or inside a docker container.
- zamnos 3y agoBalmer said it best, 'Developers, developers, developers!' And then Microsoft bought Github.
- phkahler 3y agoI feel like Google would have been a better fit for Github. But then it would be about due for cancellation about now...
- prepend 3y agoGoogle would have killed GitHub as it doesn’t earn money. Google isn’t about developers, it’s about getting data and selling ads. Microsoft needs people to build things on windows, on azure, on their APIs, etc. Google literally had the GitHub competitor, Google Code, and GitHub was only formed because google neglected Code. Remember how Google would only support mercurial over git? And of course, Google shut down Code a few years ago. I have to remind myself while Google hires lots of programmers and does lots of programming, they don’t really need anyone else to program. Microsoft needs developers.
- joelrwilliams1 3y agoYou tell 'em, Steve...sweat-stained shirt and all... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxbJw8PrIkc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxbJw8PrIkc
- rhaway84773 3y agoBallmer may have screamed “Developers, developers, developers”, but what he actually meant was “Windows, Office, developers”. Windows and Office came before everything. The big change Nadella brought to the table was completely eliminating Windows as a primary goal for the company, and reducing Office’s importance as well.
- zamnos 3y ago> MS still lacks a industry leading 21st century consumer device The XBox division doesn't count?
- jayd16 3y agoSuccessful but not perhaps not dominant. That said, they have more market share vs Playstation than iOS has over Android.
- VWWHFSfQ 3y agoI don't know any numbers but I would guess that Xbox is not close to being the market leader. Sony has that wrapped. Xbox is probably closer to Nintendo. They do, however, have a competitive platform which is important. Something they could never do with Windows Phone.
- froggychairs 3y agoVideo game consoles are technically 20th century invention. Xbox is just a continuation of that legacy even if the brand started in 21st Xbox also isn’t top dog among the big 3. They’ve really struggled to ship big exclusive system sellers (which is a bummer. I’m a big fan of a lot of Xbox IP), so they certainly aren’t “industry leading”. Doesn’t mean the exclusives they’ve shipped aren’t good. They certainly are, just that their is no Xbox answer to God of War or Last of Us GamePass is one of the biggest success stories to come out of Xbox and is certainly the dominant game streaming service
- bm-rf 3y agoBest yet is VSCode into a docker container on a remote host. Feels like magic!
- slondr 3y agoEmacs has been able to edit files transparently on remote hosts for longer than vscode has existed
- uberman 3y agoWhile I agree with this technically and I have used vi(m) for years, there is something experientially quite different about being able to use a local gui with all the mouse support and ease of use of VSCode or Sublime compared to the chording of more traditional terminal editors. I'm not knocking Emacs or Vim, they are powerful tools but to be able to show a typical first year student how to edit their code remotely using SSH/Container support in VSCode is comparatively dead simple. All the students I work with now use this strategy, much in the same way they prefer to use jupyter and pandas when they can.
- ginko 3y agoEmacs had a GUI mode with mouse support since the 80s.
- Vanit 3y agoYes. Now are you going to respond to the parent's actual content? Seamless remote editing with Emacs GUI is not a thing.
- unmole 3y ago> Seamless remote editing with Emacs GUI is not a thing. TRAMP has been a thing for a very long time: https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/ https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/
- 3y ago
- flatiron 3y agoWSL is amazing. I switched from Macs to thinkpads at my office and having the bells and whistles of windows MS office (lets admin macos office stinks) and vscode that opens and literally runs on Linux is amazing. No IT hassles about developers running Linux with support and VPNs and stuff. Just buy some more RAM and ship developers windows laptops has been great for the org and honestly the developers. We deploy and run on Linux and the weird quirks of macos has bit us in the past.
- ddalex 3y agoApparently the Year of Linux on the Desktop has happened without anybody noticing or giving a point.
- Tanjreeve 3y agoSomeone wished for Linux to be a successful desktop OS on a monkey's paw.
- rvz 3y agoExactly. The best Linux Desktop distro is Windows.
- hammyhavoc 3y agoDebatable as user requirements vary drastically. What might be perfect for one user might be wholly inappropriate for another.
- phkahler 3y ago>> MS still lacks a industry leading 21st century consumer device Oh but they have brought 21st century advertising and bullshit to windows devices!
- voisin 3y ago> MS still lacks a industry leading 21st century consumer device Is this a prerequisite to being a great technology company today? Or is this just one vector that some competitors choose to compete on? For example, would we say Apple isn’t a great technology company because it doesn’t have an industry leasing office suite like MS and Google?
- colanderman 3y ago> I am constantly amazed that I can open a linux prompt on windows Similarly, I'm amazed that I can build truly cross-platform .NET apps using Microsoft's own open-source tools from the Linux command line. (Apparently .NET Core, which both adopted the MIT license, and ushered in true cross-platform support, was announced later in the year that Nadella took over. [1] Not sure whether he had anything to do with it.) What an about-face from 2000-era Microsoft's embrace-extend-extinguish approach. Remember Visual J++? If you'd told me then I'd be willingly programming on a Microsoft toolchain 20 years later I would not have believed you. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET#History
- __d 3y agoYou might think it's an about-face. I suggest that it's actually just a better executed embrace.
- ASalazarMX 3y agoJust having Ballmer out had a positive effect. He wasn't a visionary, and Microsoft stagnated during his lead. It was like keeping only the bad side of Bill Gates.
- steve1977 3y ago> As an "older-school" dev I assume this means "older-school Windows dev", as none of that is new in the UNIX world.
- bobleeswagger 3y agoI don't care what Microsoft turned around, what they did to stagnate and gatekeep technology in the 90's is unforgivable, and always will be.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- endisneigh 3y agowhether you are using profit or market cap it's clear Apple, and therefore Tim Cook, is the winner. add to the fact that Apple clearly has been the most responsible in terms of keeping costs under control and therefore not having layoffs or other cost cutting measures now, says it all.
- duped 3y agoTim Cook quintupled the value of Apple and passed on a lot of the fads that other tech companies fell victim to.
- barelyauser 3y agoValue for who? No innovation, just hoarding massive profits. Quintupled stock price for shareholders.
- VirusNewbie 3y agoI can't live without my airpods. There aren't many things that I would buy immediately if they were destroyed. Airpods alone are a multibillion dollar company. So i'd say that's innovation.
- Traubenfuchs 3y agoTo many, that's probably the foremost goal of a CEO, no?
- barelyauser 3y agoMany? To the shareholders it is. But as a consumer I prefer innovation and not money hoarding. Shareholders think otherwise.
- dustedcodes 3y agoThe Apple Silicon chips are a massive innovation which have just massively changed the laptop landscape. People are buying new MacBooks left and right because they can do all their work on a tiny laptop now which doesn't run hot and has a battery like an iPad.
- arvinsim 3y agoAs much as I am impressed by Apple Silicon, I haven't seen the buying habits of people I know change. Windows laptop owners still continue to buy windows laptops.
- meerita 3y ago[flagged]
- kastden 3y agoDid ChatGPT write this?
- formerly_proven 3y agoYes
- throwaway2203 3y agoAlmost certainly
- HackeNewsFan234 3y agoI think so. I asked ChatGTP "Is Satya Nadella the best tech CEO of last decade?". The response was: It is difficult to definitively say whether Satya Nadella is the best tech CEO of the last decade as there have been many successful and influential CEOs in the tech industry over the past ten years. However, Nadella has certainly made a significant impact on Microsoft and the tech industry as a whole since taking over as CEO in 2014. Under Nadella's leadership, Microsoft has shifted its focus from being primarily a software company to being a more cloud-focused and diversified technology company. He has also overseen the acquisition of LinkedIn and GitHub, two major players in their respective industries. Additionally, Nadella has placed a strong emphasis on artificial intelligence and machine learning, which have become increasingly important in the tech industry. Overall, Nadella's leadership and vision have helped Microsoft become one of the most valuable companies in the world, and he has been recognized for his achievements with numerous awards and accolades. However, whether he is the best tech CEO of the last decade is subjective and open to interpretation.
- meerita 3y agoIt changed the last part a bit.
- 3y ago
- blindriver 3y agoI think his flexibility to not make Windows first gave his engineers new life. Not being forced into a set of predictable actions based on ideology and being flexibly minded to let his engineer follow the best path is why Microsoft has risen from its decades of stagnation. He didn't lead with fear the same way Sundar is leading Google.
- irrational 3y agoBetteridge's law of headlines says, “no”.
- reportgunner 3y agoI love you. I fail to remember the name of this phenomenon and I spend 3 minutes googling for it every time I see a headline that is a question.
- LadyCailin 3y ago“Is there any CEO better than Satya Nadella?” The “law” is no such thing.
- irrational 3y agoOf course it’s a thing. It even has a Wikipedia article. You might not agree with it, but that’s not the same as it not being a thing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headline...
- LadyCailin 3y agoAs it says in the article you yourself linked, it is an adage, not a law. My point is, this is not a generalizable thing, so comments using this to defend their response is not useful.
- zeroonetwothree 3y agoThat isn’t a headline though
- gentleman11 3y agoDidn’t he oversee turning windows into spyware? In my mind, he’s the worst ceo of the last decade
- tomstockmail 3y agoDesktop windows is a dead end product. Extracting any value from the few that still use it is natural.
- phkahler 3y agoWindows is a platform for everything else Microsoft rents. Driving people away from it will hopefully work one of these days ;-)
- midoridensha 3y agoTurning Windows into spyware is working out very financially for MS, so doing so makes him an excellent CEO. Your personal feelings about the company's products are irrelevant; only their financial performance is important. If you don't like the product, you're free to not buy it, and use something else. There are many alternatives.
- gentleman11 3y agoNo there isn’t. That’s what a monopoly is. I can’t not use windows. I need it for work
- midoridensha 3y agoSorry, that's BS. You made a choice to work at a job that uses Windows. You could work someplace else. At my job, I can't not use Linux. If I refuse to use Linux, I get fired, because all our work is done on that. Your job is exactly the same: they chose, for whatever reasons, to use Windows for their IT infrastructure. You chose to take that job. If not using Windows was important to you, you would have asked about this before taking the job, and declined, and looked for a job that uses the OS you prefer. There's tons of jobs out there that require using either Linux or Mac. There might even be a few still using z/OS. Part of working at a real job is using whatever tools they require you to use. I don't care much for Confluence, but I use it because my company requires it.
- dev_0 3y ago[dead]
- blueflow 3y ago> the majority dev environment in its chokehold Is that so?
- mnd999 3y agoI still don’t understand why VSCode is so popular. I don’t like it very much. I’ll stick with IntellliJ for Java / Scala and Neovim for everything else.
- daveed 3y agoIt's fast, easy for beginners, and free. That's pretty good to start with.
- tomnipotent 3y agoThe 2022 Stack Overflow survey has it at 75% market share. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#most-popular-technologies-new-collab-tools https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#most-popular-technolog...
- blueflow 3y agoRelying on stack overflow data is biased towards badly documented technologies, which Microsoft Products usually are.
- tomnipotent 3y ago> is biased towards badly documented technologies What a nonsensical, unverifiable statement. Stack Overflow is for better or worse a statistically valid sample of programmers from around the world.
- qbasic_forever 3y agoMicrosoft completely lost mobile. Like not just a few goofy phones like Kin, they just straight up have no relevance or marketshare or anything in what is clearly the future platform for all computing. A lot of this damage was done under Balmer, but IMHO Nadella has a lot of blame too. Microsoft has gone from domination of computing platforms and making money on every single device sale to competing for scraps in someone else's app store (making that someone else money!) as they sell office apps and such ported to platforms they don't control anymore. I think there isn't more outrage or unrest about this failure from Microsoft shareholders since Azure and other service growth has kept dollars flowing in and the share price up. But Microsoft is nowhere near their 90s peak of total control over consumer computing.
- voisin 3y ago> Microsoft completely lost mobile. Like not just a few goofy phones like Kin, they just straight up have no relevance or marketshare or anything in what is clearly the future platform for all computing. Lost on mobile hardware and OS but their software (office, outlook, OneDrive) is extremely popular on mobile, no?
- qbasic_forever 3y agoThe more popular those apps the more money Microsoft is paying Apple and Google to sell the apps in their stores. Nothing is stopping Apple or Google from shaking MS down for more dollars by bumping up app store profit sharing splits. I have to imagine being forced to play by someone else's rules and live in their ecosystem would have completely enraged 90's era Microsoft led by Bill Gates--he would have moved heaven and earth to own the platform and all the dollars consumers spend.
- DanielHB 3y ago> Nothing is stopping Apple or Google from shaking MS down for more dollars by bumping up app store profit sharing splits The government is stopping this kind of thing, anti trust, monopolies and all that. It is only getting worse for these platform owners
- osigurdson 3y agoI'd say he is the best non-founder CEO perhaps ever.
- endisneigh 3y agoTim Cook and Apple have better stats by virtually every metric - also a non-founder.
- osigurdson 3y agoI don't think Tim Cook has had much impact on Apple however.
- pell 3y agoHe has lead Apple after Jobs died which is no small task. He oversaw the iPhone market which has been growing continuously under his leadership. He started and grew Apple’s services division, launched Apple Watch, AirPods and the Apple Silicon transition which have all been massively successful by any metric. I don’t understand how Tim Cook’s tenure can be considered not impactful.
- osigurdson 3y agoI agree with "Apple Silicon transition". Everything else is obvious / organic growth.
- __d 3y agoAirPods?
- johnfn 3y agoI think the metric that matters is delta vs a hypothetical other CEO. It's really really hard for me to imagine Apple flubbing a launch of headphones or earbuds. I think that's why AirPods are less impressive, even though they've been a wonderful success and a great product.
- pell 3y ago> He turned around an almost dying windows to become this Kraken that has the majority dev environment in its chokehold. Microsoft was still growing under Ballmer. Windows was far away from “dying”.
- linguae 3y agoThere are many ways of defining "best." There's not only "best" in terms of the bottom line, but also "best" in terms of their stewardship of the product line and customer satisfaction. Personally I am very fond of Lisa Su's leadership of AMD. AMD's offerings have become very compelling under her tenure; I love my Ryzen 3900 machine. She would make a strong contender for best tech CEO of the 2010s, in my opinion. Another strong contender would be Jensen Huang of NVIDIA.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoYou need to define the measurable criteria during the evaluation time period Then you can sample across CEOs and then measure Nadella based on that Do you have such criteria and data?
- AzzieElbab 3y agoStill waiting for an MS product that I would use voluntarily. Excel is good, VS-Code is OK. Not using either one atm
- suby 3y agoYou say that Windows is a Kraken, but it's been on a downward slide in my mind. I don't think Nadella gets enough flak for what is happening to Windows and Microsoft's attitude towards respecting users / privacy in general. Some examples that I've seen posted to HN over the past few months * Microsoft Edge leaks browser history to Bing - https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/25/23697532/microsoft-edge-browser-url-leak-bing-privacy https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/25/23697532/microsoft-edge-b... * More ads in Windows 11 start menu - https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/17/microsoft_windows_start_ads/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/17/microsoft_windows_sta... * Absolute junk shoved into the Windows UI - https://thomasbandt.com/the-day-windows-died https://thomasbandt.com/the-day-windows-died? https://birchtree.me/blog/the-windows-11-trash-party/ https://birchtree.me/blog/the-windows-11-trash-party/ https://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-keeps-feeding-tabloid-news https://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-keeps-feeding-tabl... Windows is in a boiling frog situation. It's been slowly accumulating dark patterns and anti-features like mandatory online-only accounts, while at the same time losing quality of life features like the ability to move your taskbar or to not combine apps in the taskbar. I should be using Windows today. I grew up on Windows, I learned to program on Windows, I had a very difficult and bumpy transition in getting off of Windows. But I had to leave their ecosystem because they have absolutely no respect for the user, and at this point I do not trust them. I want to reiterate that these are recent things, I'm not mad at them for what they did in the 90's here. They aren't treating Windows as a serious tool for getting shit done, they're treating it as a data-mine and advertising opportunity.
- michelb 3y agoPretty sure Windows is on the path to no longer being interesting and necessary for Microsoft. Either they come up with a brand new iteration, or everything will go to the web.
- bathtub365 3y agoWhat are people going to run on their computers?
- 3y ago
- CivBase 3y agoWhat exactly is the metric for "best" here? I consider MS's record under Nadella to be a mixed bag. Azure is probably Nadella's biggest success, but it's hard to come up with any other significant market in which MS has excelled under Nadella where they were not previously dominant. From a user perspective, many MS products I use have improved and many have changed in ways I would consider to be detrimental. VS Code is probably the only new MS product that I've started using regularly - and I'd only consider it to be a minor improvement over Sublime Text for my use cases.
- Teslazar 3y agoNvidia's CEO Jensen Huang has an impressive track record. They are positioned incredibly well right now with the AI boom and demand for their AI technology which they've been developing for many years.
- DueDilligence 3y ago[dead]
- 1letterunixname 3y agoBalmer was the worst, so anyone is better.
- raincom 3y agoTech Bullmarket masks failures of all tech CEOs.
- brodouevencode 3y agoNice try, Satya
- easytiger 3y agoWhat did you think was going to happen to Microsoft's embedded and deeply moated monopoly? It was just going to go away? It was bedded in. Anyone who has used office in the enterprise environment over the last 15 years can tell you it wasn't a strategy or software quality that got them here.
- tdsanchez 3y agoMicrosoft SHOULD be a leader in mobile and instead they just pivot from one tech hype to the next. Windows 11 is a laughing stock to many and it isn't exactly flying off the shelves. Microsoft is a hot mess and Nadella is a trader the same way Pichai is at Google. Same for Tim Cook. Look back at news articles for the past year and watch how fast Nadella pivoted from "the metaverse" to GPT. Stock buybacks make CEOs look impressive if you don't know about stock buybacks. https://money.usnews.com/investing/articles/s-p-500-stocks-with-the-biggest-stock-buybacks https://money.usnews.com/investing/articles/s-p-500-stocks-w...
- toast0 3y ago> Microsoft SHOULD be a leader in mobile and instead they just pivot from one tech hype to the next. They are, they had flat UI and dark mode years before anyone else. I imagine iOS and Android will get live tiles one of these days, too.
- throw47463 3y agoLisa Su of AMD. She made it relevant again.
- ipaddr 3y agoWouldn't that be pre-twitter Musk?
- bruce511 3y agoOh dear. You asked an honest open-ended question, but failed to define any criteria for being "best". So let me summarise - clearly not, because they don't make a consumer/device (aka phone). Only phone companies can have a best CEO. Then again Apple doesn't have a successful cloud platform, Google doesn't make cars, Amazon's rockets aren't very useful, SpaceX doesn't make a phone, Tesla -is- a phone (the best "mobile" phone ever?). What about social media, ad-platform, AI? Clearly deciding it based on product is absurd. Equally we could debate the merits of owning an OS, or an Office platform, or a streaming service. We could base it on innovation, stock price and growth, market cap, employee numbers, cash in the bank, acquisitions, willingness to kill projects, ability to smoke weed. We could define it as having laid off no-one ever. All of which is to say, there's no "best" to begin with. There are thousands of companies,of every scale, which have done well by some metric, which have survived rocky roads, which have provided value to society, to customers, to employees. My hat is off to all if them. Their success keeps food on the table, and roofs over heads. Asking which is best, without define criteria is hopeless because clearly all companies have strengths and weaknesses. We might as well puck which sport is "best". (Where the right answer is golf because, um, that's what I like. And because more 80+ year-olds do golf than everything else combined. They're experienced enough to know.)