Why Nadella's Second Year as Microsoft CEO Will Be a Lot Harder

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-04/why-nadella-s-second-year-as-microsoft-ceo-will-be-a-lot-harder

103 55 11 years ago

The obvious thing left out is that Nadella's second year involves the release of Windows 10.

ZenoArrow• 11 years ago

Exactly. The second year is going to be a sales high just because of Windows 10, they'd have to try pretty hard to mess that up.

widowlark3• 11 years ago

Or re-release windows 8... Sales weren't so high on that release

deciplex• 11 years ago

they'd have to try pretty hard to mess that up

I agree, but I also think Microsoft stands ready to meet that challenge, if recent history is anything to go by.

josefresco3• 11 years ago

"He's hit all the low-hanging fruit -- that said, these things were not easy to do"

I don't think low hanging fruit means what Brad thinks it does.

colechristensen• 11 years ago

The lowest fruit can be 8 feet off the ground ;)

josefresco3• 11 years ago

Low hanging != lowest hanging - But we're splitting hairs here, no worries- just thought it was funny typical analyst speak.

at-fates-hands• 11 years ago

I had the same reaction. I always thought the saying meant low hanging fruit is always the easiest to get to since its. . you know. . hanging lower than the rest of the fruit on the tree.

Must be a generational misunderstanding.

weavie2• 11 years ago

"He has changed the way engineering teams are structured, largely eliminating testers to speed software releases,... "

What could possibly go wrong?

Ok.. the sentence continues :

"and adding data scientists and designers to the engineering teams to ensure all features are informed by rigorous testing and good design principles. "

I don't quite understand, how can data scientists help to catch bugs? Automated testing?

sp332• 11 years ago

It's a confused sentence, but I think it means he removed "testing" as a separate group of people, and made "testing" something inherent to the design process.

sbuk• 11 years ago

Agree totally, poor writing. It seems that Microsoft, under Mr Nadella's stewardship, are moving towards a more iterative design approach, which seems to be working well.

intended• 11 years ago

I hope that is what it means, because the alternative would be bizarre.

That said, I think Nadella will do a good job, and that many ideas that Ballmer had were starting to show their promise.

mark_l_watson2• 11 years ago

In other words, Microsoft is doing what Google and other companies do: have individual teams responsible for everything for their project(s): design, development, devops, testing. One team has responsibilities for a vertical slice of a system: build it, deploy it, be responsible for it.

AngrySkillzz• 11 years ago

I think the first testing refers to catching bugs, and the second refers to A/B and usability testing.

drzaiusapelord2• 11 years ago

This is probably why so many of the Windows Updates this year broke critical things, especially for enterprise. I feel Nadella is taking a "cheaper, faster" approach which is fine and dandy in the otherwise non-critical mobile space (mobile users are used to being treated like crap and having buggy releases) but in enterprise there's simply a higher standard of quality.

I'm not sure what this means for MS. At our shop we now have to overly-test all patches and then wait a minimum of 30 days to see what happens. This has saved our bacon several times under Nadella's MS when before we only had to do pretty casual testing of patches. This also means a lot of shops are no longer rushing to get security patches in because of his negligence and corner cutting. That means a less secure internet for all.

I really wish someone would step in and show Nadella that MS shouldnt just be an Apple-lite and that catering to enterprise should be MS's main goal, especially considering that's where almost all its revenue comes from. I'm sure playing Steve Jobs-lite is fun for Nadella, but its about time he grew up and started running with the big dogs. Frankly, I'm sick of the focus on mobile and other popular technology taking away from the core competencies that made some of these companies great. The recent actions and changes on OSX are disheartening as well. Or how the steam behind the Chromebook is more or less dead as Android eats the world.

Buying and updating an MS product shouldn't be a gamble. They're supposed to be the conservative and stable big brother to the industry. Ironically, its only now under new leadership that we have so much more incentive to move to FOSS products. Its the same amount of headaches, except with FOSS I have no licensing worries. Under Gates and Balmer, the commercial MS products were less headaches and delivered a fair amount of value. Now just installing an Exchange rollup is asking for a complete reimaging. We don't even bother with service packs anymore. Might as well roll out a new image with that cooked in. The fail rate on those is unacceptably high.

edit: why the downvotes? this echoes the sentiment at places like stackexchange and /r/sysadmin. testing at MS has gone to hell and everyone knows it. burying my comment does nothing to stop that reality. Its well known Nadella personally redid the QA and testing parts of MS and those outcomes have only gotten worse.

Jare• 11 years ago

Those are good points worth reading. What you describe is very much the feared outcome of removing SDETs before SDEs are ready to deliver tested and solid products in the new model. I have personally not suffered any troubles, but your experience does not surprise me one bit.

yuhong• 11 years ago

I guess for example that the http://support.microsoft.com/kb/3004394 Win7 fiasco comes from the update being only tested on machines with test roots installed, right? And Win8.0/Server2012 seems to be treated as second class with more than one bug affecting only that one, which reminds me of the odd support lifecycle where the server edition was treated as an older release but the client edition get treated as a older service pack.

pnathan• 11 years ago

Your comment harmonizes with the word on the 'street' from in-person conversations from MS employees & people who know them. Testing as a role evidently has been disintegrated and QA turned into SDEs in general. I believe the goal is to force quality onto the developers responsibility instead of making it QA's responsibility.

We'll see how that plays out; it sounds like the first iteration has been brutal.

pachydermic• 11 years ago

I think the problem for a business like MS is that, like you said, most of their revenue comes from enterprise. They already dominate that market. It's not enough to tread water - they have to grow! How can they really grow in a market which is definitely not chomping at the bit for change and are slow to adopt new products (even windows 7)? Where else can they grow? Apple is making so much goddamn money right now it's crazy - MS has to be thinking of ways to get a piece of that if they want to grow.

pixl97• 11 years ago

Buying and updating an MS product shouldn't be a gamble. They're supposed to be the conservative and stable big brother to the industry

You can tell who's young around here. In the distant past you could have put IBM or Novel in that same blank 20 years ago. It wasn't till around the release of server 2003 that anybody thought that.

Next, every product is a gamble these days. If you're connected to the net, you're at risk. Before exploits may have taken weeks or months to fully circulate, now 0-days are very common and other vendors release the exploit information they have on your products in 90 days or less.

Now just installing an Exchange rollup is asking for a complete reimaging

Again, I'm not sure when Exchange didn't explode in the past either.

josefresco3• 11 years ago

I actually think this is addressing a known or implied strength of Google - data driven decisions that effect design.

joshrivers• 11 years ago

Are there any detailed references out there to what Nadella has changed for QA?

joycey• 11 years ago

They are not eliminating testing. This was really bad wording. When I interviewed in Redmond with Microsoft, I was told that Microsoft used to hire SDE's (software development engineers) and SDET's (software development engineers in testing) as two distinct positions. Now, if you are hired as a "software engineer", you are responsible for writing software as well as writing tests. This was done to decrease friction between what used to be the "software development team" and the "QA testing team", and hopefully lead to faster software releases.

Silhouette2• 11 years ago

But if you're working on software that actually matters, you're supposed to have some friction between the people building it and the people testing it. This is otherwise known by terms such as "independent testing" and "lack of bias".

Moving fast and breaking stuff is OK if you're building a web service that doesn't really matter. If Facebook falls over, the productivity at a significant number of businesses probably goes up.

On the other hand, if yesterday's OS security patch stops everyone's PC from booting this morning, or if a new version of your e-mail server has a glitch that means half your company can't log in to read their mail or even that important messages from customers are actually being lost, that probably comes with a cost measured in large numbers of dollars per minute at a medium-sized business, or if you prefer, in careers per hour within the IT group.

weavie2• 11 years ago

A developer can test their own code, but they will only test it through the paths that they are aware of and thus coded for. An independent tester needs to be there to explore different avenues and try things that a developer wouldn't have thought of. Developers do think very differently to users.

robwilliams• 11 years ago

Microsoft employee here.

Microsoft somewhat recently implemented "Unified Engineering" company-wide, combining developers and testers.

I can assure you that testing is still done extensively.

aravan• 11 years ago

MS $2.5B acquisition to attract youths?

revscat• 11 years ago

The Mojang acquisition was likely a very smart move. I remember the day it happened was the same day that Apple announced the Apple Watch. While I was aware of the Watch, my kids were completely unaware of it, but both they and their friends were very aware that Microsoft had purchased Mojang. They were very concerned about it and it was the topic of much conversation that night.

If MS is able to utilize the popularity of Minecraft in the <18 set to their advantage...

perseusprime2• 11 years ago

I feel there is good and bad. I am glad he moved to a more data driven and agile culture. He is also empowering engineers in his organization. The bad is that they all suffer from the windows mindset and spend a great deal of time building for windows. With all the patents they own they literally own android and yet they are not willing to allow android apps on windows phone or surface pro 3. It feels like a slow march towards irrelevance.

untog4• 11 years ago

It's not really a case of "allowing" Android apps. It would take a monumental engineering effort.

perseusprime2• 11 years ago

Why is it monumental? Java runs on windows already and they are third parties like Bluestacks who have demonstrated running android apps on Windows.

shmerl4• 11 years ago

It wouldn't have been so monumental if instead of locking everything into Direct3D they'd used OpenGL instead. Here their own lock-in mentality will eventually bite them hard. If MS will outgrow their dinosaur lock-in approach, they can start supporting GL-Next on all of their platforms when it will come out.

mark_l_watson2• 11 years ago

Perhaps Microsoft is planning on dumping the Windows phone in favor of Android and iOS? The Office365 apps run well on my Android Note 4 phone and my iPad mini (and my MacBook Air).

I like Microsoft's new strategy, but I wonder about the financial aspects of it. Microsoft gets $100/year from my family, that is it, and everyone gets 1 terrabyte of OneDrive storage and all of the apps. Is this sustainable for a business? I don't know.

I bought a tiny Windows 8.1 laptop a few weeks ago mostly out of curiousity (HP Stream 11, direct from Microsoft so no crap-ware installed, price: $199). Except for it being slow running IntelliJ for Clojure/Java dev, it is such a cool little laptop. Windows is free on it because it is a low cost device. Considering that this laptop uses OneBox configured for few files being on the local drive, and most used dynamically from Microsoft's servers, how much money could they make selling me this device with the cost of running OneDrive? Not much.

JimmaDaRustla• 11 years ago

The Windows license is absolutely free on devices with an MSRP of $200 or less, which means they make nothing on it except maybe any apps you purchase.

bentcorner• 11 years ago

This is tricky. From a developer standpoint, if Android apps were to become first-class citizens on WP, it would make no sense to bother making WP-only apps.

api• 11 years ago

As things are going, I'm really pleased. This is the first time I've been excited about Microsoft since the middle 1990s.

widowlark3• 11 years ago

Agreed. I feel for the first time that Microsoft is bringing something unique and even innovative to the tech industry

DonCarlitos• 11 years ago

Nadella has surpassed expectations to date, he has a plan, and is implementing it in a rigorous and competent manner. I expect the next year will be a good one for the "ruffians from Redmond." And I just can't stress enough how important it was for Balmer to yield when he did. Steeped in the past and his old ways, he wasn't the new leadership the firm required. Nadella is just that.

Why Nadella's Second Year as Microsoft CEO Will Be a Lot Harder

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