As an ex-MSFT employee and somebody who actually got a chance to talk to Satya I found the letter to be very true to his personality. Excited to see what he does in Redmond.
Is he a conservative type of manager who will try to come-up with completely new kind of products or someone who will keep chasing Google in Apple in what they do best?
I think MS's strategy thus far has actually been pretty good. It's a company with good strategic vision mired in terrible execution.
WinPhone7 was a great product on paper - still is - that was released half-baked missing a great number of features that consumers expected to be standard. It was further undermined when Microsoft decided to cut the early adopters and run (WP7 phones that never got the WP7.5 update).
Hell, even the much-maligned Kin I think was a great idea. In an era with stupidly expensive data plans, the idea was to come up with a social-media-only (Twitter, Facebook, SMS) device coupled with a kid-compatible cheap monthly plan, based on the existing expertise of Danger. Then they decided to rewrite the whole tech stack, pushed the product way out of its launch window, and lost out on the core offering: cheap plans. What ended up launching was nowhere near what was envisioned.
I believe Windows 8 and the merging of touch and desktop was, and still is, a great idea. A platform that can seamlessly transform between mobile and desktop contexts can be incredibly powerful and reflects the combination of MS's traditional strengths in work-products and the newer consumer mobile space. Of course, the execution there was well off the mark - Metro was foisted upon the desktop context and was strictly inferior to what it tried to replace, and key productivity tools were removed in the name of unification.
MS gets the big picture, but they keep fucking up the details. Here's hoping Nadella can turn this around.
Honestly? Except for Bing, I've been pretty impressed with microsoft's "Chasing apple and google" offerings. Outlook.com, Sky^H^H^HOneDrive (and its related MS-office webapps), and the Windows Phone OS actually impressed me. Imho, WP8 provides a much more polished user experience than Android, although Android offers far more features and a far more mature market-place of course. And unlike Google, they've succeeded in a consistent UI styling across Web, Mobile, and Desktop.
The problem, of course, is just that Win8 is in a screwed up transition both in the UI and under-the-hood.
Yes, Microsoft has ADD - constant re-brandings and the MSDN-churn of new platforms are frustrating. But they've built a good family of products in their counterattack against Google/Android.
