Ask HN: Is Satya Nadella the best tech CEO of last decade?

[oikawa_tooru]

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?

[suby]

You 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-b...

* More ads in Windows 11 start menu - 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://birchtree.me/blog/the-windows-11-trash-party/ 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.

[pchangr]

I think that given the declining share of profit coming from windows, it wouldn’t be surprising for me if it just gets worse.

[michelb]

Pretty 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.

[felixg3]

I‘m not sure if Microsoft ever cared about user privacy, being a major player in mass surveillance and data processing for the US government. Instead of selling out our data to a nation state, they are now engaging in surveillance capitalism, too.

If you care about privacy, there is only one option, and that’s Desktop Linux, albeit less than ideal in many use cases.

[uberman]

I 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.

[colanderman]

> 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

[flatiron]

WSL 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.

[zamnos]

> MS still lacks a industry leading 21st century consumer device

The XBox division doesn't count?

[voisin]

> 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?

[zamnos]

Balmer said it best, 'Developers, developers, developers!'

And then Microsoft bought Github.

[bm-rf]

Best yet is VSCode into a docker container on a remote host. Feels like magic!

[phkahler]

>> MS still lacks a industry leading 21st century consumer device

Oh but they have brought 21st century advertising and bullshit to windows devices!

[ASalazarMX]

Just 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]

> As an "older-school" dev

I assume this means "older-school Windows dev", as none of that is new in the UNIX world.

[qbasic_forever]

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.

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]

> 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?

[thefz]

> what is clearly the future platform for all computing

Dude. There are gonna still be servers, network infra, etc.

[goolz]

They also have control of a swath of the gaming sector and that is one of the biggest and fastest growing industries in the world. You are totally right I just think that should be considered.

[linguae]

There 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.

[duped]

Tim Cook quintupled the value of Apple and passed on a lot of the fads that other tech companies fell victim to.

[barelyauser]

Value for who? No innovation, just hoarding massive profits. Quintupled stock price for shareholders.

[1letterunixname]

He snatched failure from the jaws of success by ruining the cool. Accomplished fragile machines that routinely breakdown, are difficult to repair, and then have the gaul to demand piles of coin from users of said new systems under supposed warranty periods. He has no vision and continues to ride SJ's legacy without innovating. He should step down.

[jansan]

Apple was on a winning streak when Tim Cook took over, so it does not look that impressive. But it is hard to imagine how he could have done a better job. Maybe Apple could have created a better browser :)

[thefz]

The need of Apple fanboys to always have to plug in.

[gentleman11]

Didn’t he oversee turning windows into spyware?

In my mind, he’s the worst ceo of the last decade

[midoridensha]

Turning 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.

[tomstockmail]

Desktop windows is a dead end product. Extracting any value from the few that still use it is natural.

[endisneigh]

whether 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.

[CivBase]

What 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]

Nvidia'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.

[AzzieElbab]

Still waiting for an MS product that I would use voluntarily. Excel is good, VS-Code is OK. Not using either one atm

[bruce511]

Oh 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.)

[drcongo]

Hi Satya, thanks for posing this interesting question.

[blindriver]

I 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.

[easytiger]

What 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]

Microsoft 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-w...

[toast0]

> 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.

[osigurdson]

I'd say he is the best non-founder CEO perhaps ever.

[endisneigh]

Tim Cook and Apple have better stats by virtually every metric - also a non-founder.

[pell]

> 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”.

[AndrewKemendo]

You 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?

[raincom]

Tech Bullmarket masks failures of all tech CEOs.

[brodouevencode]

Nice try, Satya

[throw47463]

Lisa Su of AMD.

She made it relevant again.

[ipaddr]

Wouldn't that be pre-twitter Musk?

[blueflow]

> the majority dev environment in its chokehold

Is that so?

[mnd999]

I 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.

[tomnipotent]

The 2022 Stack Overflow survey has it at 75% market share.

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#most-popular-technolog...

[irrational]

Betteridge's law of headlines says, “no”.

[reportgunner]

I 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]

“Is there any CEO better than Satya Nadella?” The “law” is no such thing.

[bobleeswagger]

I 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.

[quadrifoliate]

Can we have an official policy against AI-written comments, please?

It is in the long-term interests of HN to not have this place be riddled with bland autogenerated comments.

[kweingar]

This is the problem with using AI tools without thinking. It reads like PR copy, repeats facts that everyone here knows, and doesn’t invite any discussion.

I’m glad that Dan has clarified that HN comments are not allowed to be copy/pasted LLM outputs, or we’d end up with a lot more non-comments like this.

[kastden]

Did ChatGPT write this?

[gopuck16]

This looks like ChatGPT copy-paste.

[1letterunixname]

Balmer was the worst, so anyone is better.