Microsoft's Longtime Windows Boss Terry Myerson To Leave the Company Amid a Huge Executive Reorganization (businessinsider.com) 130
Terry Myerson, Microsoft's executive vice president of Windows and a long-time leader at Microsoft, is leaving the company, the company said today. The news comes as part of a big reshuffling of the company's executive leadership. From a report: "His strong contributions to Microsoft over 21 years from leading Exchange to leading Windows 10 leave a real legacy. I want to thank Terry for his leadership on my team and across Microsoft," wrote Nadella in an e-mail to employees announcing the changes. As part of the reorganization, Rajesh Jha, the executive VP of Microsoft Office products, will be expanding his responsibilities to encompass Myerson's role when he leaves in "the coming months." Jha will become the leader of a group called "Experiences & Devices," bringing Windows and Office under a single banner. "The purpose of this team is to instill a unifying product ethos across our end-user experiences and devices," writes Nadella. "Computing experiences are evolving to include multiple senses and are no longer bound to one device at a time but increasingly spanning many as we move from home to work and on the go."
Re:All The Best, Terry (Score:5, Interesting)
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I have done the needful.
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more people speak Hindi than speak English.
Re:All The Best, Terry (Score:5, Insightful)
Companies ruined or almost ruined by Indians (Score:1)
Companies ruined or almost ruined by Indians
Adaptec - Indian CEO Subramanian Sundaresh fired.
AIG (signed outsourcing deal in 2007 in Europe with Accenture Indian frauds, collapsed in 2009)
AirBus (Qantas plane plunged 650 feet injuring passengers when its computer system written by India disengaged the auto-pilot).
Apple - R&D CLOSED in India in 2006.
Apple - Foreign guest worker "Helen" Hung Ma caused the disastrous MobileMe product rollout.
Australia's National Australia Bank (Outsourced jobs to India in
Re:All The Best, Terry (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:All The Best, Terry (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, that's the reason I commented....this is not uncommon to see happen.
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That happened everywhere I've ever worked. My first job out of college was in Seattle in 1986. We hired an India VP of Engineering, and within a year the twenty white programmers besides myself were all fired or driven out. In many places where I worked, it was demoralizing to not be allowed vacation time, but the Indian guys all got 2 or more weeks a year off to go back to India. Eventually that gets to you. I haven't had a full week off as of next month in 25 years.
One big difference is culture. Th
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Yeah that happens here too. You're discouraged from taking long vacations, especially if it's at a critical time, but the Indian guys can take off for almost a month to go back to India. If it's ever questioned there's always some sort of sob story (he needs to go back and take care of a sick relative or he needs to go back and attend to family business). Funny enough,
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Re: All The Best, Terry (Score:2)
Land of the free, home of the burned-out?
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is NOT competent, IMO. (Score:3)
Apparently Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wants people who are as lacking in social, managerial, and technical ability as he is. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is NOT competent. The entire board of directors and top management of Microsoft should be replaced, in my opinion.
One area of extreme incompetence: Somehow, shockingly, managers at Microsoft
The CEO is supposed to coordinate. (Score:2)
Microsoft has suffered a HUGE LOSS OF RESPECT because of making Windows 10 into spyware [networkworld.com].
One of the many, many articles: 17 Windows 10 problems - and how to fix them [itpro.co.uk] (Dec. 1, 2017). There have been MANY terrible problems since then. One example: Windows 10 bug: Microsoft fixes issue that broke USB, built-in cameras, keyboards [zdnet.com] (Mar. 6, 2018)
Do you see any competence in that?
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Sounds like a move to make all MS leadership Indian as much as anything else....?
All of Microsoft will soon be doing the needful.
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Working so far.
Microsoft has done an about-face under Nadella and is finding a very profitable niche in business services. They're bigger than google in cloud services and are still the king of desktop productivity.
Microsoft's biggest problem is Microsoft. For decades they've depended on the classic office-windows pro-windows server triad and their entire profitable business was built around it.
And it's a boat anchor. It's loaded with upfront costs, staffing costs. Maintenance costs. Real estate costs. Powe
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And it's a boat anchor. It's loaded with upfront costs, staffing costs. Maintenance costs. Real estate costs. Power costs. Hardware depreciation. Inventory. Hell even needing a server room is a pain in the ass.
It's only mildly popular because people are obsessed with cash flow and right now. Still way cheaper in the long run for many vs. going with any of the major hosting providers. That's just a fact.
If hosting outfits could somehow successfully leverage economies of scale and pass it on such that it were actually cheaper than DYI that would be one thing. The reality is virtually all of the hardware and software systems are universal commodities. There is very little to be gained when you need to actually
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"Nothing is holding this back but microsoft,"
Do you really expect MS to just drop their legacy products and services and move all their resources into a totally product line? They will support their desktop and server products until they are no longer profitable and not a minute sooner. They are fortunate to have such a long standing cash cow because it has enabled them to invest in other technologies and even take loses on the products or services that didn't pan out for one reason or another. And MS is sl
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And don't y'all go go off dismissing this observation. Let's call it like it is.
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> I guess shut up, keep your head down and toe the party is all you need to become an executive at a place like Microsoft or Google. No actual skill needed.
Isn't that either the:
* Peter Principle [wikipedia.org] aka "managers rise to the level of their incompetence" or
* Dilbert Principle [wikipedia.org] aka "companies tend to systematically promote their least competent employees to management in order to limit the amount of damage they can do"
I think it eventually happens to any big company.
Unifying product ethos (Score:4)
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I have a hard time seeing that. They fucked office good and hard about a decade back when they introduced that god damned ribbon interface. It's only stubbornness and institutional inertia that allows it to still be on there.
For mouse users, it increases the distance you have to drag the mouse in order to get options. For those that use hotkeys it makes it far, far harder to locate things to find the hotkey for. It's a really great example of how not to create a working interface.
The worst thing though is t
Re: Unifying product ethos (Score:2)
And yet somehow millions of people manage to use it just fine
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Alternative translation:
We are going back to leveraging our Windows monopoly at the expense of all other initiatives.
Wonder what this is truely about (Score:5, Interesting)
Seeing the usual canned non-responses always makes me wonder what the real story is. Is Terry responsible for the idiotic strategy that made Windows 10 the most hated version of windows ever?
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Re:Wonder what this is truely about (Score:5, Interesting)
This is about having one group responsible for Windows and Office so that as revenue moves from perpetual license to subscription services the Windows division chief doesn't get gutted for falling revenue. Apparently one of the biggest problems at MS is the fiefdoms of various product lines. By making larger groups all report up to one management chain you can stop some of the infighting that has been slowing down progress for a long time. MS senior leadership has seen the writing on the wall and PC sales growth is done for, the future is the next billion users and more mobile and cloud, reorganizing the company to allow that transition to happen more smoothly is a smart forward looking move.
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YOU might not like the cloud/subscription model but apparently enough of MS's customers like the model and their offerings that their revenue and profits have taken off since launching Azure and O365 after having been pretty much flat for a decade.
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It happens all over the place. Recently, I recommended an iPhone SE to someone with smartphone needs but rather limited ones. The question was then: I never heard of the SE, but the X is the newest one, isn't it? Shouldn't I get that instead. (My reply was: if you want to spend 1000€, go ahead. )
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One of the reasons that PC sales growth has slowed probably involves multiple factors. First, almost everyone (individuals and workers) who wants or needs a PC already has one. If the PC is reasonably new there's really no need to upgrade as it's very reliable and a new one won't be much faster. One improvement that's been realized is the advent of silicon base storage media for PCs which makes boot up almost instantaneous and may be more reliable than drives with spinning disks. With the advent of on prem
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MS senior leadership has seen the writing on the wall and PC sales growth is done for
You make it sound as if this is visionary. More accurate would be to say MS senior leadership is madly adjusting for year on year falling sales from OEMs.
The writing isn't on the wall anymore, that was 5 years ago.
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To be fair, what I get if I buy a standard Windows PC today will be a worse experience than what I got 6 years ago if I bought a new PC with Windows 7, regardless of any new hardware changes. I would welcome a machine that can cope with bigger and higher-resolution screens, larger and faster disks, a faster CPU with more cores, faster and more reliable networking, and so on. Maybe not everyone needs those things, but I would find all of them useful. But if the price is putting up with an unreliable, untrust
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To be fair, what I get if I buy a standard Windows PC today will be a worse experience than what I got 6 years ago if I bought a new PC with Windows 7
Depends on how you define the experience. If you are talking privacy and all that then yes, very much so. If you're talking administering settings then I agree even more. Fortunately the former is blocked by simple tools, and the latter is something I rarely spend any time doing. Under the hood though Windows 10 has many advances over 7 in speed, security, memory management etc.
It's a shame they work against the user though, however most people don't consider that in any way part of the "experience" thanks
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Yes, I'm talking primarily about privacy and reliability aspects. If Windows will deploy automatic, opaque updates on its own schedule and will send arbitrary information home to the mothership, then both for me personally and also for my businesses, nothing else matters because we already have two deal-breakers.
It's all very regrettable. I appreciated a lot of what Microsoft used to make, but sadly the Microsoft of recent years has proven to be a greater risk than any external threat I have yet encountered
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Correction: 10 years ago that would have been a smart, forward looking move. Now it's just yielding to the plainly obvious.
You don't get credit for saying the tide is coming in when you wait until your ankles are wet.
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I'd assume he has done his time for whatever horrendous crime he committed and is being let out on compassionate grounds.
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I doubt that was even his choices, I imagine he was forced from above into a lot of this and this ousting is likely as a result of him arguing with the direction windows has been going.
I guess we find out if the direction changes substationally or even more directly goes down this dumpster.
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Fuck off and take your tablet boned with you. The keyboard allows for much faster processing except in Windows 10.
I believe they thought it wasn't unified enough across desktops and tablets and what Nadella says is basically that.
If I touch a mouse at work you've failed.
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Windows 8 was the worse for me, and the whole desktop/mobile UI convergence bullshit needs to finally come to an end.
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Is Terry responsible for the idiotic strategy that made Windows 10 the most hated version of windows ever?
You should read a Microsoft Annual report some time. You may notice that consumer's feelings are not mentioned at all. What is meantioned is that Windows revenue was down 16%, and that was driven by a 16% decline in OEM computer sales.
So they produced a shitshow that spies on all users, harvesting an awesome amount of data with no negative effect on the bottom line what so ever. If this was about what Terry did to Windows then he would be given a medal, bonus and a huge promotion all at once.
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Re:Wonder what this is truely about (Score:5, Insightful)
>However, the disdain for Windows 10 isn't because people dislike it. Rather they disliked the various methods that MS employed to force Windows 10 onto people.
I Disagree. I dislike the way they've split system settings between two different sets of menus, one very similar to the older Win7 settings and a new set in a new set of windows with new names and that "flat" look. The older, more useful settings are sometimes only accessible through the newer windows, which makes no sense and requires extra clicks to get where I want.
This wouldn't be so bad if the search system worked, but Win10's Start menu search is garbage. Sometimes it feels like you have to type the full, exact name of what you want when previously the first half a word would bring up the desired option. Sometimes you can type the exact name of a program and Win10 search can't find it.
Speaking of the Start Menu, why has MS insisted on putting an enormous amount of crap into it? Some of that stuff is removable, but many of the Windows features are locked in there and cannot be removed. In addition to that the insistence on an alphabetised layout with large breaks between sections just takes up unneccesary space, unlike the old system which could arrange them but had no gaps.
So yes, their forcing Win10 on people is objectionable, but Win10 itself isn't perfect either. And before someone says "get this third party extension which fixes it", that simply reinforces the fact that they broke something which was perfectly fine to the point that there are now third party extensions which return it to the way it was.
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Reasonable criticisms, especially compared to, say, Windows 7, but these are changes that Windows 10 inherited from Windows 8(.1).
Mind you, they're still incredibly annoying. And the way Windows 10 begs me to use Edge instead of whatever browser I happen to be using, and keeps insisting that my life would be so much better if I'd only use Cortana, makes me really really wish that the application for which I have to use Windows ran on, well, anything else.
But as far as Windows goes, the base OS, what I note
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Re:Wonder what this is truely about (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, also Windows 8/8.1.
For Windows 10, the telemetry is unacceptable. Apart from that, it acts ok (I of course prefer other desktop environments).
The update situation is ugly, however. It's all 'Windows 10', but are you on 1507? 1803? LSTB? CBB? A device that was supported for Windows 10 (1507) might not work with Windows 10 (1803). You may still get updates to Windows 10 1507, but it won't act the same as windows 10 1803 and if you try to reinstall it you might fail because your windows 10 media isn't the same windows 10 as you need.
This is pretty much a branding failure more than a technical failure, but there are technical implications of pretending things are simpler than they are.
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The update situation is ugly, however. It's all 'Windows 10', but are you on 1507? 1803? LSTB? CBB? A device that was supported for Windows 10 (1507) might not work with Windows 10 (1803)
You have a gift for understatement. While I can delay updates for my W10 Pro laptop, I have another inexpensive laptop running W10 Home. I use it at morning breakfast. That's the only place I use it. So last week I went to shut it down in preparation for leaving, and it installed an update. It had been downloading updates over a insecure wifi connection! This is as unnaceptable as screwing a horse. Unless you're another horse of course.
But some how or another, that kind of crap has to stop.
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This is as unnaceptable as screwing a horse. Unless you're another horse of course.
But it's OK to jerk them off and steal their sperm? Humans have a keenly unique sense of what is deemed to be acceptable behavior.
What exactly is your point? This is the most bizzare howaboutism I've ever heard. The closest thing I can pars out of it is that you are standing up for humans screwing horses.
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What kind of Internet connection would you prefer to have it use to download updates? You may trust your local network, but that network's connections to the wider Internet should not be inherently trustworthy. Even if you more or less trust your ISP, do you really know all the networks that packets traverse on their way to the server? This is why things like https and package signing were invented. As long as the update was properly signed (in this case by Microsoft, but most Linux distributions do the
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What kind of Internet connection would you prefer to have it use to download updates? You may trust your local network, but that network's connections to the wider Internet should not be inherently trustworthy. Even if you more or less trust your ISP, do you really know all the networks that packets traverse on their way to the server?
This is like saying that since I cannot personally verify all of the paths any internet connection might take, nothing is trustworthy.
While that isn't incorrect, it is a rabbit hole that ends up with the person never using a computer again.
At least at home, I have a whole lot of protection. At that wifi spot I go to every morning? Only what is on my computer.
This is why things like https and package signing were invented. As long as the update was properly signed (in this case by Microsoft, but most Linux distributions do the same thing for their packages) and the signature is verified before applying (and this is really important), then it doesn't matter what network it was used to download it.
At least as far as security is concerned. If it downloaded a large amount of data through a cell phone hotspot causing a large bill, that could certainly be a problem!
The mere existence of turning off downloading of updates over metered connection switch on the computer is a symptom of the problem.
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> windows 10 media isn't the same windows 10 as you need.
It is a disaster. I don't even have the highest level of MSDN access, and for Windows 10 there are 99 different ISOs you can download. For Server 2016, there are 11 different ISOs. I've downloaded the wrong one more than once. It is a branding disaster.
Another Microsoft reorganization (Score:3)
It must be Thursday.
Whoa! Let me get my reorg boots. (Score:2, Funny)
http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-10-30
Was A Technical Leader (Score:3)
Myerson was a solid dev leader. He was "acquired" when Microsoft bought his analytics startup. Now he is being replaced by an established app/cloud guy. I do not see this as a positive indication, but it is consistent with Nadella's overall direction for the company.
I have no idea what it was like to work with him personally, so maybe it's something like that. But if decision reflects the corporate direction, then the telemetry/data issues with Windows 10 will probably grow.
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I do not see this as a positive indication
Indication of what? Given the insane amount of money Microsoft currently makes from cloud services it really only makes sense.
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Indication of what? Given the insane amount of money Microsoft currently makes from cloud services it really only makes sense.
I am interested in secure operating systems that respect user privacy and function properly offline. The integration of cloud services and telemetry are contrary to this desire, and, therefore, this decision is not a positive indicator of their future decisions for me.
Obviously the company is going to do whatever they believe will make money. That doesn't mean it's in the users' best interests.
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When I got my current laptop, I opened up Minesweeper, and immediately saw that I could purchase a version without ads. That was a shock. I think my Minesweeper days may be over.
It's only shuffling a deck full of jokers (Score:2)
The only way Microsoft could reorganize properly is if they split vertically. The only way they could improve is by a total rewrite using decent coding standards and published APIs. None of which is likely under any administration.
Somewhere, Ballmer is throwing a chair (Score:2)
Over yet another move away from "Windows Uber Alles"...
Yay! (Score:2)
Great, now we'll get *yet another* GUI API that is *really* universal, this time we mean it!
Wait, what? (Score:2)
So, Windows 10 is the least odious from a usability standpoint (leaving privacy aside for a moment) of the last four releases [1], and they ax the Windows boss? It's almost like Microsoft wants their users to suffer.
[1] I'm counting 8.1 as a major release, as it was marketed as such, even though it changed the UI in only the most trivial fashion.