[jjaksic]

When Nadella took over from Ballmer, he steered Microsoft in a better direction for a while. But by now he's become a lot worse. The biggest software company can no longer produce good software and its products are actively hostile to users. Nadella cares only about one thing, which is shoving AI everywhere and to everyone, at any cost. The irony is that he knows nothing about AI, how to build capable models or how to build useful AI products, nor does he have people who do. AI is his Metaverse: something he's singularity focused on, to the point of neglecting everything else, without any idea what to actually do with it.

[csdreamer7]

Nadella was the one who fired Microsoft's QA team for Windows. It took a while but those chickens finally came home to roost.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/1626871/microsoft-to-b...

This one youtuber, I forget his name, was fired as part of that layoff. He had a son with severe Autism and Microsoft's health benefits were very important to him.

[frde_me]

> He had a son with severe Autism and Microsoft's health benefits were very important to him.

This really sucks for him. Through should Microsoft _not_ layoff specific people due to health conditions? Is that something we require from companies?

[bsimpson]

There's a long-circulating mind virus that makes executives believe top-tier engineers don't need their software tested.

Google's QA is pitiful too.

[AstroNutt]

Jerry Berg is the person you're probably thinking of. His YouTube channel is Barnacules Nerdgasm.

He's a super smart programmer, but seems to be suffering from depression since Microsoft laid him off. He often talks about his issues when he livestreams Tech Talk on Saturdays.

[GuB-42]

Well, you have two distinct problems here.

One is Microsoft releasing shitty software.

The other is a deeper societal problem with healthcare and loyalty between companies and their employees.

For me, they are unrelated problems. In a welfare state, the QA team may have been reaffected to some other tasks within the company and have the health benefits provided by the state, but it wouldn't have made the software less shitty.

[SlightlyLeftPad]

Was he the reason shift-left hit mainstream? Recently, smaller non-faang companies followed suit and fired all the qa people. DevOps/SRE people are likely next.

[WalterBright]

COBRA enables one to continue with the employer's insurance for up to 18 months after a layoff.

[awesan]

People have forgotten this, but he did the same with Windows Phone for a while at the very start of his time as CEO. His motto was "cloud first, mobile first" where cloud meant Azure and mobile meant Windows Phone. After some time he gave up and they pivoted into the direction he is now well known for, which was to focus on good developer tooling regardless of OS.

[echelon]

GitHub and VSCode were smart ways to quickly recapture developer mindshare. They felt distinctly un-Microsoft with how open and multiplatform they were.

The Azure Linux friendliness play was essential and smart. Again, Microsoft felt like they were opening up to the world.

But they've backslidden. They've ceded Windows and gaming to their cloud and AI infra ambitions. They're not being friendly anymore.

Microsoft spent a lot of energy making Windows more consumer friendly, only to piss it away with Windows 11.

One evil thing they were doing that they've suddenly given up on: they spent a ton of money buying up gaming studios (highly anti-competitively) to win on the console front and to stymie Steam's ability to move off Windows. They wanted to make Windows/Xbox gaming the place everyone would be. They threw all of that away because AI became a bigger target.

They'll continue to win in enterprise, but they're losing consumer, gamer, and developer/IC support and mindshare. I've never seen so many people bitch about GitHub as in the last year. You'd swear it had became worse than Windows 7 at this point.

[justsomehnguy]

> "focus on good developer tooling"

So "developers, developers, developers"?

[its-summertime]

The ability to know that giving up might be the right path forwards, is very useful.

[coliveira]

People don't understand that this is MS culture. It doesn't mater the CEO. They'll always move to lock customers into the useless products they create.

[lofaszvanitt]

So the clunky user interface and experience and the jumbled and meaningless features locks you in somehow? Or what's the spiel here?

[joshribakoff]

I actually just had to independently tag him on LinkedIn after my son had an issue with his Minecraft account. Their account recovery flow directs you to call on the phone and then when you call on the phone, it directs you to use the account recovery flow. When we went to their Support page we received a stack trace from asp.net. After wasting several hours, we screenshot of the error and tagged him on LinkedIn and filed a credit card dispute.

In my LinkedIn post I questioned if they can’t be trusted with a $30 game license how can we trust them with a multi million dollar copilot rollout? I pointed out that it seems like this is more than just a lack of human support. It is a company that: does not care about their own brand, the up-time of their own systems, their own employees, or their customers.

I question if their goal is to simply extract money under unethical conditions. I question whether they expect the customer to just repeatedly purchased the game every time the company fails to deliver it. I also questioned to him why he has hiring managers bragging on LinkedIn that they expect people to output 1 million lines of code per month, so they can rewrite the operating system in rust, while their systems are off-line.

[YY4387268632]

I noticed an immediate dip in quality of the products when Nadella came into power. Even Windows 8, for all the faults of the Metro UX, felt like a complete product.

[ezst]

I feel the same, but in hindsight it makes a ton of sense once you consider that Microsoft customers have not, and for a very long time, been its end users. Instead, it's been those (mostly technically incompetent) FortuneXXX middle/top-managers and IT support department managers that they hooked on to Azure & al. via obscene service agreements (for no better cause than "everyone else is doing it anyway" and "nobody ever gets fired for placating MS stuff everywhere").

Microsoft is just profiteering off of their defacto monopoly, selling more is their only metric, the "what" is secondary.

[lexoj]

True, its insane how bad MS teams performs and is built and this is coming from a company that have written their own OS, Programming languages, frameworks etc.

[misiek08]

Today Microsoft didn’t write any OS and had only partial participation in programming language or framework. They open sourced .NET and in Windows 10 you can still see same behavior and internal as XP.

I wonder how many real top-tier engineers are there at Microsoft and how hard they have to work to prevent it from failing. It’s not uncommon in any bigger than probably 200 people company - the belief of having a lot of talents while having maybe 1% of the company capable of doing anything working.

[adabyron]

Nadella had it easy when he took over. Stock soared before he did anything. The only improvements seemed to be made by others using the CEO change to try & push a few better agendas.

Acquired podcast had Ballmer on this past year. Gives interesting take of how he was never a true CEO, always had Gates still running things.

I imagine Microsoft probably has about 5-10 CEOs running it right now. Nadella is just the face. Amy, Brad & Kathleen for sure. Would not be surprised if Bill still has a lot of say. Guthrie probably doesn't have enough say.

[pjmlp]

I miss Balmer in what concerns Windows development culture.

[burnte]

As someone who lived through a small portion of the internal mess that was Vista, I DO NOT miss him at all. I worked there 6 months and his bizarre management directives were obvious. Behind every single developer push was a lock-in push, too. Every "open" product had to have some form of lock in or vendor-only advantage. None of it was driving customer success, it was all about enforcement and lock-in from top down.

[wolvoleo]

He seemed to me like such a total d**k, sorry to say but the energy I got from him and the things he did (throwing chairs etc), brrr. Also his public shows were so hard and pushy. This is not ok even for a CEO. A toxic work environment is never acceptable.

If I had worked for MS I would have hated him and the company he forged. I don't like Nadella much (note, there's very few 'leaders' I like) but at least he seems to be a nice person.

[acka]

Developers, developers, developers, developers[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fcSviC7cRM

[Geste]

Not aiming at you specifically, but I am tired of seeing shitty behaviour that is dismissed as best as incompetence. I do not want to believe someone becomes the CEO of one of the strongest organization on earth without a strategy sixth sense. So, why would he be shoving AI everywhere ? What does he know that we don't about it ? Is it just plan surveillance ?

[solarkraft]

I think Hanlon‘s razor becomes a lot weaker the more the offender has to gain from their action.

Nadella is doing his job of shareholder value maximization quite well.

[mihaaly]

Concerning AI he is also cluless about how to use it well - or at all - for their non-AI product portfolio.

[renegade-otter]

For the big companies, you are no longer a customer - you are a source of training data. Windows feels like a data extraction platform at this point. Well, I am Steaming on Linux now. Have fun with your AI.

[cyanydeez]

It's definitely not ignorance of AI that is the problem. It's entirely enshittification and number goes up.

It's just exceedingly bizarre watching this AI stuff and not except that global capitalism is deranged dick measuring.