I'm a .NET developer and I'm very pleased with the direction the tech stack is heading, but man. Microsoft Teams is so much worse than Slack.
The UI is so much less intuitive, but worse, they haven't figured out scrolling. I can't scroll quickly through chat history -- it's always loading -- meaning it's much harder to get the information I want. On the other hand, maybe Slack takes up so much memory because it pre-loads everything.
But even more damningly, there are fewer emojis. Sometimes there is no emoji for what I am feeling.
Huh, I didn't even realize Teams had a custom emoji picker. I've been mostly using the Windows emoji keyboard in teams, which gives you the full Unicode emoji set, and now kaomoji, at the press of Win+. or Win+; (whichever is more convenient on your keyboard layout)
(I learned about it from Insider blogs as they were adding the hardware keyboard shortcuts/experience to Windows builds. [It's been on the soft keyboards for tablet/mobile UX for much longer.])
Is it just me or it became more difficult to search words in a chat?
When I try to find something in a chat I would give up if it was written more than a week ago, as you mention scroll is really bad/slow and searching doesn’t help, so I end up asking the person if he/she remembers the thing I’m looking for.
At my last workplace it was fun choosing oddly specific reaction emojis for comments.
Like I loaded a gif of a dumpster fire and used it as emoji. I uploaded a picture of my face to use as an emoji. I uploaded the "It's free real estate!" guy.
Yes, I'm 33, my coworkers were younger but I have the meme knowledge of someone 2/3rds my age due to endless reddit scrolling, thank you. I can keep up with the kids.
That's great, that's fun. What's the business value of using gifs in business discussion though? I thought they were almost exclusively used for emotional expression only.
I am both bemused and somewhat concerned that you seems to hold the belief that "business discussions" are conducted outside of the realm of "emotional expression".
I'm 44... and most of this isn't really all that new... sure, now we have unicode characters instead of :-) but this stuff started all the way back in the 80's.
That badly breaks the site guideline against insinuations of astroturfing and we ban accounts that do that. Would you please review them and follow the rules?
There's an odd bubble on HN where people are so deep into their Linux or Mac universes that they think Microsoft has faded into obscurity, when in fact they're the strongest tech company around.
What a lot of people here do think is that Microsoft has lost the technology leadership role that they once had. I've been programming for two+ decades, and there was a time when Microsoft could allude to something and the entire industry would race to try to not be left behind. A lot of people on here are too young to remember this, but it cannot be overstated how absolutely dominant Microsoft was in tech. Their earnings were much less, but their influence was absolute, and those technet and MSDN discs were the holy information conduit for the industry.
Now...the company has its corner, but that's it. They provide a lot of valuable products that obviously make them a tonne of money, and they've been executing fantastically, but if you're a Linux or Mac developer who never touches a single Microsoft product, and pays no heed to whatever Microsoft is talking about or doing, you're probably perfectly fine doing that.
IBM created the PC, and was influential in a lot of critical areas. Now they are just...there. They make revenue pushing up towards Microsoft levels, but you can safely completely ignore them.
> Now...the company has its corner, but that's it.
Microsoft is the most diversified tech company of the top tech companies. They have cloud, software, hardware, game consoles, search engine, development tools.
> if you're a Linux or Mac developer who never touches a single Microsoft product, and pays no heed to whatever Microsoft is talking about or doing, you're probably perfectly fine doing that.
The interesting thing now is that you can be a Linux or Mac developer and actually be able to use many Microsoft products. VS code is my favorite editor or any platform (actually I use it more on Linux than on Windows). I'm working on a project right now in .NET that will run as well on a Raspberry Pi as it does on Windows.
I think that the market grown so significantly that no company is ever going to have the tech leadership that Microsoft had in the 90's and early 2000's. But I think Microsoft is positioning themselves to great things after fumbling though the last 5-10 years.
By corner I didn't mean niche. I meant that they're a vendor at the market, they aren't the vendor, or a central vendor. You might go over and peruse their wares, or maybe you won't.
"They have cloud, software, hardware, game consoles, search engine, development tools."
IBM did exactly the same thing.
And FWIW, the overwhelming bulk of Microsoft's revenue comes from enterprise sales of Office and Windows. They make money on exactly the same things they made money on 20 years ago, but the pie is so much bigger they make a lot more of it.
> I meant that they're a vendor at the market, they aren't the vendor, or a central vendor.
Depends. In corporate environments, which is still a massive market, they are the central vendor. At it seems they're actually making even more headway there. Microsoft hasn't really lost influence, it's just the market is so much bigger now that influence isn't total. And they're making in-roads in those other markets.
Microsoft missed out on mobile but that's a new market rather than a loss of their existing market. And now that's a growth opportunity for them.
> IBM did exactly the same thing.
I think you're point is to say that Microsoft is the new IBM but I don't think that follows. IBM has always been IBM even when they owned much more of the market. Even Microsoft hated working with them.
> And FWIW, the overwhelming bulk of Microsoft's revenue comes from enterprise sales of Office and Windows.
Are you saying that Microsoft is not a central vendor for cloud? If so, how?
And about the overwhelming bulk of their revenue veing from the same sources as 20 years ago, it seems their operating revenue is 60% cloud services, admittedly a lot of that is office 365 but let's not forget azure revenue which although lumped together in statements must be huge.
Huh, I just found an article [1] which puts Microsoft Azure solidly at #2, behind AWS. It's interesting, I did not realize this was the case. But I do wonder how they calculated that if Azure numbers aren't public.
> The growth rates for FY19 were, Q1: 76%, Q2: 76%, Q3: 73% and all the way down to 64% this quarter.
Must be nice having 64% growth be a worrying number.
Microsoft went all in marketing Azure, this isn't too surprising to me. They don't mess around when they launch products/services. Their marketing to corporate CTO/CIOs is a well tuned machine.
They even tried to hit up startup devs which didn't go over as well.
> Microsoft is the most diversified tech company of the top tech companies. They have cloud, software, hardware, game consoles, search engine, development tools.
I think Amazon is probably far more diversified than Microsoft. Unless they are so diversified that they aren't even considered a "tech" company anymore.
Microsoft is the most diversified tech company of the top tech companies. They have cloud, software, hardware, game consoles, search engine, development tools.
And none of those make significant amounts of profit besides cloud, Office, and Windows
Bing and gaming alone makes almost as much as Windows. Devices and LinkedIn makes half as much as Windows and a 1/3 the revenue of Office. These aren't peanuts.
Why? Revenue without profit is meaningless. If their profitable segments stop making money then what is there to fund operations or the none profitable segments?
Anyone can sell $1.00 for $0.95 as long as they have a means of getting money from other sources.
If linkedin revenue means they have a third of all marketshare in that vertical, and they use linkedin to add value to their core services, and attract people shopping for bundles, linkedins worth to microsoft is more than just revenue. It could easily be a loss leader just like roast chicken, to get you in the grocery store, and away from shopping at Salesforce.
I wasn’t questioning LinkedIn as much as gaming and Bing. But diversification based on revenue doesn’t decrease risk. If in the unlikely event that Windows and Office profits crater, revenue without profit won’t help.
I completely agree and I actually said in the “unlikely event”, but that doesn’t negate the fact that having a lime of business that isn’t profitable doesn’t help the company from a decreased risk stand point.
I don’t know, I work in the public sector where we have been in bed with Microsoft for decades and I don’t think their monopoly on non-tech enterprise has ever been stronger. There is really no alternative to Office365 that wouldn’t cost us billions in non-tech areas because our 5000 users don’t know how not to use it and we don’t know how to manage them without Active Directory and ADFS.
I think your description of them on the development front is accurate. But I think that’s on purpose. With Azure they don’t really care if we use .Net anymore because that’s not what they need us to do to sell us cloud. Node very quickly became a first class citizen in Azure for instance, integrating well with stuff like application insights and other Azure DevOps features. Sure we could take our Node apps to AWS, but that doesn’t really make sense when we’re already buying into the Microsoft cloud with Office365.
I’m sure tech-heavy companies can afford to ignore Microsoft, but the public sector of Europe is a billion dollar industry for tech companies and Microsoft owns it.
What I do appreciate is how much effort MS has put into improving various application platforms and making sure they run well everywhere (mostly). I use Windows, Mac and Linux regularly and appreciate everything that runs everywhere mostly the same.
As to Azure cloud, they are okay and probably worth it in some circles. I think AD and O365 in Azure are absolutely worth it. I'm, however, unsure if Azure as a whole is as worth it. It looks like k8s is winning the core infrastructure war and allows you to do things wherever you want. And while I think Azure Storage services are absolutely great to work with compared to competing cloud offerings, they are all a bit of a lock in.
Best to stay as close to open and portable as possible, or go all in on a single cloud. Everyone's use case is different.
One of Azure’s big selling points is “not amazon” which hols a lot of appeal for retail and other enterprise clients. “Good enough” will get you miles along in that segment.
Well, MS makes the platform/tools so that others can do cool stuff with it. So even if you don't touch a MS product, because of the massive scale of the platform, you're probably right in the middle of stuff created using MS tech. Maybe your company accountant does taxes on windows or your ATM runs some gimped version of Windows (shudder! :)), or maybe the movie you saw was post processed on some windows machine, or maybe the factory that built stuff you use daily uses windows software for their SCADA system, or in our case all of our equipment (biotech) is controlled through windows software, etc.
I think that "technology" especially languages and toolkits and such are super overrated. They're just a means to an end. The functionality contained in the executable in what matters to the actual end-user, not the technology or the platform. And all this is ofcourse super obvious and many companies get this. And yet I don't think any company comes close to providing the level of backwards compatibility and platform stability of Windows. Just a couple of months ago, one of our older WinXP PCs shit the bed, and we replaced it with a W10 box. I was kinda half-expecting the software compatibility for 20 year old software to be a complete shitshow, but we ran the setup and everything just worked out of the box. Thats just once anecdote of course, and there is nothing technical that prevents other platforms from doing the same, except that people don't want to work on boring tasks like keeping stuff working and ticking along, because it doesn't challenge them. But I think that is the secret sauce that makes them the big bucks.
> IBM created the PC, and was influential in a lot of critical areas. Now they are just...there. They make revenue pushing up towards Microsoft levels, but you can safely completely ignore them.
You can? I assume you don't work in Global2000 Enterprise IT?
Everyone has its corner. Apple is irrelevant in web. Google in enterprise. Oracle in mobile. We can't expect one company to dominate all markets. That's not possible, not to say unhealthy for innovation.
I feel like you could make an even bigger argument in favor of Apple here. Not only do they build an entire competing software stack, but they manufacture their own hardware as well.
No, their business is consumer electronics. Those consumer devices contain (and are built with) tech, but the tech is not the product itself. This is in comparison with MS, which for the most part sells tech.
In what universe are bleeding-edge electronic devices like cell phones, laptops, headphones, and streaming media boxes not technology products? You seem to have a pointlessly narrow view of tech that's basically exclusively limited to software.
I mean, Apple is at the point where they're designing multiple custom chips: a general-purpose CPU (A12X), a SiP (S4) an ARM SoC (T2), a wireless-focused SoC (W3), and an audio-focused SoC (H1).
Is Intel not a "mega tech company"? They have 75% the market cap of Microsoft, and virtually all of their revenue is from producing silicon.
Is Intel not a "mega tech company"? They have 75% the market cap of Microsoft, and virtually all of their revenue is from producing silicon.
Ironically this is exactly the point you miss - Intel's business it to produce and sells silicone. Intel's cohorts are AMD, ARM and NVIDIA, and they are all technology companies who's business is the development and sell of technology.
Apple produces consumer electronics, and though in many cases it also designs and produces some internal technology components, their business is not in any way dependent on selling that tech in itself. In fact it's arguable that the main influence on whether an apple component is developed in house or outsourced is economical/logistical and not tech based at all. Apple's cohorts are Sony, Samsung, LG etc, all consumer electronics providers.
Technology means "the application of knowledge." A lever isnt tech per say by itself, its a tool. But knowing how to use a lever, and applying leverage to create force is technology.
A better word to use is tools. Microsoft and Apple both sell tools but Apple tools are a fashionable consumer tool sold at retail, and Microsoft are business tools sold to enterprise.
Google and Facebook give away free tools in exchange for attention.
Netflix more correctly fits your example, they dont create public tools used to accomplish something else, their tools are built internally. Same with Uber.
You cant buy our rent Uber or Netflix for your own use. You can lease Outlook and buy an iPhone. With Outlook and your iPhone you can talk to your best friends (not just talk to Microsoft and Apple.) Microsoft and Apples tools are a means to an end.
With Netflix I cant buy their tool and use it to host video for my friends. I cant buy or lease Uber tech to start my own taxi network.
I responded to someone here the other day who couldn't fathom how macOS is restricted compared to other desktop OSes.
Given that you can't install it on anything but one brand of hardware and you can't even change the color of the mouse pointer/cursor from black to any other color that you desire (as you can on just about every other major desktop OS)... I think some of these people are just victims of marketing and a small but loud minority.
Isn't the world more fun if people can customize their computers? Weird and zany cursors add some flavor. Let people be people. In other words, should everyone live in an IKEA catalog house?
> Also, you can't change any of the UI colours. The major feature of the last release was that you could change the UI from grey to black. So, now 2 colours to choose from.
None of this is true.
How is the current state of GUI customization in Windows? Last time I checked, you couldn't even set a custom wallpaper without paying money.
'Unregistered' as in pirated? I think they embed a warning message into the background for pirated Windows and that is probably why you can't change it.
Microsoft is saying 'Hey, we know you pirated this copy. Instead of locking it down, we're just going to put this un-dismissable nag message here.'
What is not true? macOS gives you two options for general UI appearance: Light (Grey/White) and Dark (Black), with Dark being a recent addition. There are more subtle changes like folder color and, but overall customized options are minimal.
Given that you need to buy an Apple computer to run macOS in the first place, this is a pretty pointless argument. Windows licenses come with prebuild PCs, too.
I wish I were in that bubble. At the company I work, Windows desktops are the standard and the workplace uses a product called Vidyo for video conferencing. Vidyo doesn't run on any open source desktop... or maybe it does, but I've given up trying.
Most corporate offices today are deeply locked into MS Office. They could theoretically switch to a different office suite, but nothing else is fully compatible with MS's proprietary formats. More to the point, no other company is putting serious resources into developing a more appealing product. Google's effort seems half-hearted and Adobe never seems to have bothered.
In some ways the current situation feels like a regression to the 90's and early 2000's.
Apple is still the "tall poppy" that people feel the need to cut down.
When Microsoft's money gets posted they get applauded as if they're the underdog, but whenever Apple's profits are posted many people try to point out how it must because they're doing this and that wrong.
It has nothing to do with being the "tall poppy". It has something to do with the public image of the company. Microsoft has created a massive amount of goodwill by doing incredible things for communities. Apple on the other hand is doing one fail after the other and isn't listening to customers.
I have heard of it. I have also heard of this little thing called change. afaik Microsoft hasn't recently done anything like embrace, extend and extinguish.
> but, i'll bite - what incredible things for communities have they done?
Visual studio code. .NET core. Making visual studio free. WSL, joining the linux foundation, typescript. I could go on...
Yes those were the last generation were the keyboards are fine. No one uses computers older then 3 years here so we have large issues with having to send back macbooks multiple times a year.
I generally judge a company on what they have done recently not what they did 4 years ago.
> Yes those were the last generation were the keyboards are fine.
No, those were the ones with the first-generation butterfly mechanism, and they have gotten better since then.
No one I know has had to return a MacBook. Even the one from 2011 that I sold to a friend around 5 years ago, which is still being happily used by his children.
I'd imagine most HNers are aware that MS owns the world's social code platform as well as the hottest general purpose editor. That mind share counts for an awful lot compared to like, 3 years ago.
don't forgot Linkedin and, to a certain degree, Minecraft.
It's fun seeing them like Disney with all those different brands and universes where they could squeeze out a ton of interesting things and immediately have a big market waiting. They have access to developers, to job seekers, can push certifications for their own cloud, to enterprise, to classrooms, to great hardware engineers and to minecraft to introduce upcoming AR/VR hardware with. One of the perhaps best brands for this (after pokemon?)
Believing and pretending that McDs and Walmart are dying off and unpopular is a different thing though.
Or things like "Everyone I know is switching to Whole Foods from Walmart, this means Whole Foods will take over in a year's time and Walmart will die off".
Yeah that's not true... Amazon's net income for the last quarter (ending on May 31 2019) was 3.561B, while Walmart's net income for the last quarter (ending on April 31 2019) was $3.842B
If you don't want products and services from Microsoft, Walmart and McDonald's, all 3 companies who don't seem to advertise much- do you find yourself buying products from big advertisers?
I don't find these companies low quality, so I'm wondering what would make you avoid them.
I'm not sure where you get the impression that these three companies don't advertise much.
In any case, nobody should have to patronize a company if they don't want to, whatever their motivation. The problem with the big tech companies is that one so frequently doesn't have a choice. I may not want to buy from MS, but some bit of hardware I'd like to use only supports Windows drivers and some bit of paperwork I need to fill out is distributed as a Word doc whose formatting doesn't render correctly outside of MS Office.
In all fairness, one can avoid Walmart and McDonalds if one wants to, but Google and Facebook are as hard to avoid as Microsoft.
Not hard until you want to become involved in an organization that happens to use Facebook as their primary platform for broadcasting information. Or maybe you really would like to see photos of your newborn niece or nephew. Depends on your situation.
The baby pictures are an issue. I had to make it clear that if they didn't text or e-mail me the photos, I would miss them. Also that I didn't want to miss them, but I was OK with it. Finally, I asked them to also add them to a Google Photos shared album for the family.
It's worked out well enough. Eliminating Google sounds too painful to me, so I'm glad my family agreed to share their photos on Google's platform for me.
I absolutely find McDs pretty low quality. I'm not saying they're bad, or people that eat there are. I do shop at Walmart and do use Windows at work.
It just depends on my given needs for a given thing. As to Windows, I'd rather be on linux or mac, but there are a couple things I work on that are core to the business absolutely tethered to windows.
McDonalds spends over 1.5B a year in advertising. Thats the most in advertising spend of any restaurant, with Taco Bell in second at a third of McD, and Dominos, Subway, and Burger King at a fifth.
this article isn't about buying microsoft products and you've exactly missed the point of the person to whom you're responding: do you want to own shares of mcdonalds, walmart, microsoft? i do.
Microsoft is also getting some love because they've been doing right by the open source community and haven't ruined Github yet, nor does it look like they're going to.
> they've been doing right by the open source community
MS's newer efforts like VS Code are certainly encouraging. This doesn't change the fundamental issue that much of the world relies on desktop software that only runs on Windows and an office suite that's only compatible with MS Office. These may not seem like much to the HN crowd, but we aren't representative of the economy at large.
It's not a good thing, that MS is only gaining more power. Their monopolies are bad, like Windows on the desktop. Displacing them is not easy due to entrenched control that MS has over many markets.
A lot of people here are not going to like this comment -
I have started inversing company sentiments that I find at HN :-). There is a lot of negativity here about Apple. It's almost like the company is doomed. But then, Apple reports great earnings and stock goes up :-).
This might be one of those situations where the signals you see here are way too early to act on yet. For example, AMD in 2017 was a good long term investment, but I falsely expected their stock value to shoot from ~$13/share to ~$20/share much faster than it did.
Working at companies and coffee shops in the Bay Area you see an overwhelming majority of Macs (mostly Macbooks). You can almost forget that Windows exists.
This is mostly true for me. I've been using Linux exclusively on all devices since 2002ish, so largely know nothing about Windows or Office happenings. I do use VSCode, which is great. I wish Microsoft would take my money for an Office that works on Linux. It's great software, but I refuse to use Windows to use it. Not out of spite for Windows or anything, it would just be foreign to me.
It's quietly more converged with desktop functionality than a lot of people have noticed (especially with the fact that most recent components being built directly in React Native there is a ton of codeshare between desktop, mobile, and web these days according to Office team presentations). In some ways the web is at least slightly ahead of the desktop apps (the "Simplified Ribbon" transition has mostly already occurred for all the web apps, but it is still in progress on an app-by-app basis on desktop).
I get a strange "OpenOffice/LibreOffice knock off trapped in some alternate 90s" vibe from Google Docs and I've never quite used Google Docs enough to detest it, but every time I am asked to use it I find it's off-putting feeling for a web app.
I've used the web PowerPoint to present from in a pinch, and I've used the web Word to write from in a similar pinch, and other than obvious native control distinctions I think in most circumstances I'd be hard pressed to tell you the difference between the iOS/Android versions of Office applications and their web counterparts shrunk to that form factor. Sometimes the same can be said between web and desktop, though ironically right now the "Simplified Ribbon" gives web away immediately right now for the Big 3 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint). Microsoft has been doing a good job converging the experiences and all the platforms still feel like "Office" to me, at least.
I think I still prefer to use the desktop versions day-to-day over web, but I don't know how much of that is just inertia that I always have them installed anyway. But I do wonder sometimes if I were to experiment with another run at a Linux only system in my life if I'd feel the web Office was sufficient for most of my needs. (Hence my curiosity if you'd tried it.)
Gotcha. Thanks for the writeup, I'll give it a go.
I don't do too much with Word, either, mainly Excel I suppose. Sometimes I'll write a script to output a CSV and want to visualize and play with the data. OpenOffice is awful, especially Calc. Last time I tried doing the above I couldn't even figure out how to sort. Not that it doesn't exist, but it sure wasn't obvious.
As for using Linux day to day, go for it! When I started, it wasn't easy. Mainly because you had a lot of SWF out there still, and everything say, like video calling, was an EXE. These days, with the rise of the web based everything, it's a cinch. As much as I despise Electron on principle, it's been amazing for the Linux community. Now we have VSCode, Slack, etc. Nothing requires an EXE anymore, even gotomeeting believe it or not. My biggest pain point was email. Evolution is OK, but not great. I just started using OWA and it gets me by.
Microsoft ie growing because they do the unglamorous work better than the others. They may not be hip and trendy with the cool kids but they know how to make money from established markets.
I'll try to give a very probably incorrect answer with relevance to Linux.
NET includes the common language runtime which can take code from any of the NET languages (C#, F# and VB or any language which compiles to IL) and run it in a managed environment like the JVM.
In addition it has a huge (and I'm my opinion brilliant) standard library.
Since Microsoft started NET Core (which is fully open source) it has been possible to build and run NET on multiple platforms. As of the latest version (3) they also ported WPF and Winforms to NET Core but crucially these parts will not run outside of Windows. Full Windows only Framework as opposed to Core has continued to exist on its own release schedule in order to support all the legacy Windows only stuff. The latest plan seems to be to unite Core and Framework in the next version with cross platform for non desktop parts preserved. However for Web apps and command line tools current Core's all cross platform and surprisingly performant. Open source has really helped Core in performance terms, I've seen some tests put Kestrel (Core Web server) in the top 5 servers.
Microsoft has faded into obscurity. Windows is a small percentage of computer devices when you include phones and tablets where more time is spent. No one could start a business today and get funding making Windows software.
When was the last time someone worried about getting crushed by Microsoft?
Sure they still make a lot of money but they are not by any means an industry leader.
I’ve been mostly an MS developer for 20 years but even I saw the writing on the wall and started running away from Windows only development a couple of years ago.
MS has a really appealing mix of business and IT pro products and they've been very clever in how they tie O365, Azure and VSTS together from a marketing perspective. That being said, while all their products are "fine" I don't really love any of them and a few downright suck. O365 was miserable failure at my last shop. It's so bloated with features, that it becomes slow and unusable. They have nothing that Google or Amazon don't do better. I'd also say that between the three of them, I haven't seen a single decent professional services rep.
We were using G-Suite at my previous place, which was on a hiring spree of sales and marketing guys/gals, and pretty much everybody that came in said they'd rather have MS products.
Are they better? Maybe, Maybe not. I can almost guarantee that G-suite covered most of their needs but they were just used to MS products and it was easier to bite the bullet and use MS that hear them gripe continuously.
Lost productivity has a cost too
FWIW, I think G-Suite is probably good enough for 80-90% of users.
The problem is that every user has a different 10-15% of features that aren't covered by G-Suite... and o365 is definitively better than G-Suite. Setup an inbound email list, for example. I've tried both a few times, and consistently the experience with o365 is better.
I want to like google's offering, they just don't seem to care much about actual user experience or cohesion in features and configuration. As much as Teams isn't as good as slack in a lot of ways, it's better than gsuite... as okay as gmail and gcalendar are, outlook (even web) is just so much better.
The spreadsheet stuff is almost on par, MS has better integrations. The doc stuff is significantly better in o365 word.
G Suite would have to drop closer to $2/user/month to really be a value alternative even.
I don't have a clear stance on whether O365 is "better" than G-Suite, either, but the lock-in is real.
For non-technical business users, having a deep expertise in Excel (and knowing all the hotkeys) is really tough to pivot from. Powerpoint is also pretty similar- once you're an expert, you don't want to relearn on a different application (whether or not it's better on a few criteria)
I'd guess that. Gmail has maybe 10% of the features Outlook does. I really dislike it as an email service, especially since they've killed Inbox which at least made it a bit more tolerable.
It doesn’t make sense to me that Satya Nadella makes 10x less than Sundar Pichai. Last I saw Satya made about 20M and Sundar was making 200M. Given Microsoft performance vs google I don’t get it.
Why does anyone make 200M? IMO literally nobody contributes enough value to society to outweigh the negative externalities of one person controlling so much wealth.
The idea of having some government comittee or mob deciding my value to society and then taking what they feel is undeserved is infinitely scarier than some people doing disproportionately well.
And let's be clear, there is no other way to implement a policy like this because the criteria is totally subjective.
> And let's be clear, there is no other way to implement a policy like this because the criteria is totally subjective.
There is a way to implement this in an objective way. Simply heavily tax everybody who earns over a threshold amount. No judgement about what it is that they are doing. It doesn't matter.
> There is a way to implement this in an objective way...
No. The post above you refers to assigning value, what you're suggesting is the opposite. So it definitely isn't "a way to implement this". It's a way to implement something completely different.
Yeah I agree with you. That’s why it’s “probably unavoidable.” But it’s still not “okay” to me that money=power instead of money=value of contribution. There’s just no getting around it, one way or another, because it’s ultimately always a subjective exercise.
I think it's fair to say that compensation is unlikely to be correlated with the actual value brought to the business. At best, correlated with perceived value by whoever sets the salary, in this case the board?
Not saying it could never happen, but in addition to being the architect of a renaissance at one of the biggest, must well-known companies in the world, Satya is also a mcrosoftie from pretty much birth. I think it would take a lot more than gobs of money to make him jump.
You make $200M when without you the company would be significantly more than $200M less profitable.
Here we have someone of tomorrow they went to the Board and said, “I’m going to need $200M a year in comp to stay on” they would be insane to turn him down.
If you look at what Microsoft has accomplished under Nadella’s leadership, the level of operating profit and growth, he should absolutely be worth $200M to Microsoft and shareholders of Microsoft.
It’s not about the number of hours you work. There is a non-linearity when someone can look at a situation and see a solution, or devise a plan, or organize a strategy, or forge a partnership, or foresee an acquisition, that without that person in that position, the company would miss out on potentially $Billions of opportunity. You pay a lot of money if you can get the right person in the room to make those company-crucial decisions correctly.
At some point enough money is enough. "Mo' money, mo' problems" said Biggie. And salary isn't the whole point, perhaps he has some really, really nice golden parachute or is hoarding options, I dunno.
To his credit, Pichai rejected significant stock awards [1].
Seems genuine to me, though I wonder what Mrs. Pichai's face looked like when he floated it heh.
I'd be interested in hearing HN's experiences about Azure and how it stacks up against AWS and GCP.
What I've been seeing in enterprise settings is that companies that are
already using Windows Virtual Desktops feel more comfortable using Azure vs the competition.
From using both, my recommendation is AWS for anything Node-based, Azure for anything else. GCP is severely lacking to both and has never struck me as a serious contender, but maybe there are industries that benefit from the simplicity.
I like the control AWS gives you, but it is overwhelming at times. On Azure, everything feels easier to find, and there is not such a steep learning curve. I can set up a site, a repo, my CI/CD pipeline, and a DB within minutes, complete with qa, staging and production deployment cycles, telemetry, and alerts. The reason I wouldn't recommend Node-based deployments with this flow is because Visual Studio and VSTS does not play well with node, feels like it is constantly fighting you to use anything but Node, but for a project in React and an ASP Net Core server, it's incredibly seamless.
Meanwhile on AWS, I feel like the control of VMs is a lot better to control. It is more intuitive to set up load balancing schemes on AWS, and the CDN makes just enough more sense than Azure CDN to make me prefer it, but it can't beat the productivity gains I have in Azure, though I feel I just don't have the right use cases to benefit from whatever imrpovements AWS offers.
All in all, at this point, you don't lose by choosing either AWS or Azure, other than spending time to learn how AWS services are integrates and what parts of the ecosystem is relevant, so I am not surprised MS is benefiting greatly from Azure.
GCP has made some great improvements, and in my opinion has the most intuitive interface for developing cloud apps (ESPECIALLY when compared to an interface like AWS).
Agree on the interface vs AWS.
I still think the way all of the big providers deal with things is way overcomplicated & GCP's web console is inconsistent in terms of the exposed functionality across products like Spanner, BiqQuery & BigTable etc., but I agree it's still the cleanest interface of the big cloud providers from what I've seen.
VS plays nicely with Node, although I can't speak for VSTS. But I've only been playing around, and haven't tried setting up any CI/CD with VSTS or GitHub. The biggest hassle with using VS and publishing to Azure is that you need to use an Azure Node template.
Azure has solid integration with most Microsoft products. The more of a Microsoft tech stack a company already has, the easier a sell it is. If you're using .NET, Azure is easier to set up and easier to maintain. If you're not already on the Microsoft side of the fence, I'm not sure how they compare, but I suspect AWS is better--although we did have that story a while back about how Azure runs more Linux than Windows Server.
These numbers are great, with one caveat: the Teams thing. Several place I work or consult for use Office 365, not for its web app but for its desktop app (pay a fixed sum per month per user, and get access to the latest version word/excel, which is great).
As any user of this product can attest, for a couple of months now, Teams has been pushed through the Office 365 updater, causing it to
1. install by itself (even though I consider it a separate product, but hey it's not strictly evil just yet, at least I can understand that it get installed, just like say Publisher even though the user may not use it it's part of the suite's single installer)
2. Open a nag screen after boot that mixes up Teams and your Office 365 account and keep doing it until the users make a Teams account, usually linked to his Office 365 account. Ignoring and closing it is not enough, as it will nag you after every reboot until you pleases it with an offrand of registration.
That one is pure freaking evil because either I get called to deal with it (which is a total waste of my time and my customer's money), or people deal with it on their own and end up with each their own account for which they won't remember the password and will forever claim that "no I didn't create it I've never seen that before".
3. If you uninstall Teams, there is a separate tool that gets installed behind your back, called "Teams Machine Wide installer", that will reinstall it without asking and you will be nagged after reboot again. As you can guess from the name, it's not normal Office 365 behavior, it's specific for Teams, and it's separate from the Teams install itself.
To the product manager that let this thing happen: seriously, screw you. O365 installer used to be super clear and trustworthy, and now you've ruined it. Don't push auto-reinstall behind the admin's back.
So yeah, when it says
> It also has had a great year with Teams and has shown real momentum. Teams now claims 13 million users, 30% more than Slack
I think those numbers are complete bullshit, and if anything they're disapointing. Teams may or may not be a great tool, but the way Office users are being turned into Teams users without them really asking for it only to then claim a high number of users doesn't inspire any confidence to me.
Beside that, I'm a massive user of Microsoft's products, have been for a long time, and the great results are deserved on all front (as long as you give Windows 10 a pass of "O&O ShutUp 10" to remove the layer of crapware)
If they created an account after the nag screen then Team is launched, relaunch automatically at start, with a connected account. Not sure if they count it as DAU, but they probably could.
Also, if they're not doing this to cheat their number so it's even worse, the primary point of my comment was about the crap they're pulling, not the effect it may have on their numbers.
I hate installs like that. I actually prefer teams, though I really wish they'd use the Android UX for reply vs new posts in a channel for chat.
Also, really hate that there is not official Teams app for Linux. I mean WTF, it's an electron app, and MS pretty much setup the gold standards for cross-platform electron app support. There are a couple unofficial apps, but still, this one is stupid.
I happen to really prefer o365 vs competitors, the value is seriously there, and google should cut their prices to 1/3 or so if they want to compete at a value level.
Microsoft has really made some dark technological implementations in recent years. Sadly, it’d probably take another decade of this stuff before they faced any real pushback.
One thing Microsoft has really nailed, is the location diversity of Azure datacenters. They have multiple locations in South Africa and UAE, while also having regions in multiple cities across Australia, Japan and India. If I wanted to launch a worldwide product, why would I want to go with AWS, Google or IBM?
Many cloud customers have regulatory or business requirements that their data be held within particular regions or national boundaries. It should also help somewhat with latency, though in most cases CDN points of presence will be more critical.
Except, those regulatory or business requirements also have business continuity and disaster recovery requirements from those same regulators, and Azure's region design is far inferior than alternatives.
MSFT employee here, Teams sucks balls. I have only barely used Slack but when I joined the company everyone was using SfB which blew dead goats.
Teams is much better than that. But the search is bad, I agree on scrolling, its atrocious. But man, I have a big gripe with search. Never do I get the results I want. People search is even worse. Adding a new person to chat with somehow takes more clicks than necessary. It will only show a limited number of people whom you conversed with when you scrolled down.
The higher MAU numbers are just because it comes pre-packaged with O365 subscription. Difficult to discern how much traction it would get if it stood on its own.
So does Q4 for Microsoft refer to April-June? And does 2020 refer to calendar year 2020 or business year? I find that somewhat confusing, and the article doesn't expand on it at all.
I can’t imagine fiscal year starting July 1 has changed since I worked there and paid attention to such things. Can’t help on whether TFA refers to fiscal or calendar 2020.
Yes, the Microsoft fiscal year starts on July 1, so Q4 2019 was April-June, and fiscal year 2020 (for which they're discussing expectations) just started.
A lot of stuff you'd expect like AI, ML, HCI, cloud computing, security, but also stuff like acoustics, social media impacts of computing, biology and medicine, etc.
They do a serious amount of pure research. If you haven't before, it's interesting to browse https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research and see just how broad it is.
>In 2020, we expect to see Microsoft double down in three key areas to further differentiate from the leading tech giants: AI and ML (across the entire platform), data (infinitely expandable, cost-effective, and supportive of ODI), and modern workplace (productivity software)
What's so profitable about these areas? I see them as a potential black hole.
The UI is so much less intuitive, but worse, they haven't figured out scrolling. I can't scroll quickly through chat history -- it's always loading -- meaning it's much harder to get the information I want. On the other hand, maybe Slack takes up so much memory because it pre-loads everything.
But even more damningly, there are fewer emojis. Sometimes there is no emoji for what I am feeling.