I am skeptical of the fawning views the industry has about Satya. Microsoft has been “slaying” by using anticompetitive practices. They haven’t innovated much. They copied Slack and achieved scale by bundling it with office. They copied AWS and used their enterprise sales channel to push Azure onto captive Windows and Office licensers. They’re now abusing their market position by forcing PC manufacturers to include a proprietary Microsoft Copilot button, by injecting ads and Copilot all over Windows, and using other dark patterns (for example to push Edge over other browsers).
I definitely think Satya is a good leader, but I don’t know if he’s a great leader. He’s more like someone who has kept Microsoft going, in both the good and bad ways. It’s easy to enter all these markets by using your existing cash flow and access to users. It’s a totally different challenge to build something from scratch and survive without those advantages. I also think people unfamiliar with Microsoft’s past often ignore Ballmer’s contributions and instead give Satya credit. But Bing began under Ballmer, and Bing’s service infrastructure was the birthplace of Azure.
Microsoft does a lot less anticompetitive in 2024 than they did in the nineties. It's actually quite a lot of progress.
As much as the dark patterns are annoying, Satya also turned around Microsoft's complete inability to build software. It got so bad that virtually no progress was made on any Microsoft products from 2000 through 2010. Many of their developer tools today are... nice.
The stock price was the same in 1999 as in 2016. Today, it's up almost 10x.
No organization is perfect, and acknowledging everything Microsoft is doing wrong, it's a world of difference from Ballmer. Ballmer was on the far end of the incompetence spectrum, the abusive management style spectrum, and the hardball antitrust spectrum (which no longer even worked with real competition from mobile, iPad, and web apps). A lot of the reason you see so much praise is the comparison. It's easy to ignore Ballmer's contributions, since there weren't any. The ones you give are... a stretch.
Yeah I used to think highly of Satya but he really seems not to care about fair competition at all, training GitHub Copilot on everyone’s AI code then turning around and saying folks can’t use GitHub Copilot to write AI code, is monopolistic as heck.
Sadly it seems like Meta is also anticompetitive. I didn’t know about this, seems embarrassing:
“v. You will not use the Llama Materials or any output or results of the
Llama Materials to improve any other large language model (excluding Llama 2 or
derivative works thereof).”
Also even if you did use Llama for something, they could unilaterally pull the rug on you when you got 700 million years, AND anyone who thinks Meta broke their copyright loses their license. (Checking if you are still getting screwed is against the rules)
Therefore, Zuckerberg is accountable for explicitly anticompetitive conduct, I assumed an MMA fighter would appreciate the value of competition, go figure.
I definitely think Satya is a good leader, but I don’t know if he’s a great leader. He’s more like someone who has kept Microsoft going, in both the good and bad ways. It’s easy to enter all these markets by using your existing cash flow and access to users. It’s a totally different challenge to build something from scratch and survive without those advantages. I also think people unfamiliar with Microsoft’s past often ignore Ballmer’s contributions and instead give Satya credit. But Bing began under Ballmer, and Bing’s service infrastructure was the birthplace of Azure.