• reddig33@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Yes, let’s look at it. Great for the shareholder, not for the customer.

    • phone, dead
    • AR/VR product dead
    • non-Xbox peripherals, dead
    • App Store, a joke
    • other stores like books, music, and retail, closed or sold off
    • Edge now a bloated privacy invading Chrome clone
    • windows is now a crap ad-infested product that only runs on new hardware

    Somehow other companies in these spaces have not had problems making this stuff work. It’s obvious all Nadella is interested in is cloud based products with subscriptions. And while that might be insanely profitable, it’s driving the consumer space to Google, Apple, and Linux. All the creativity and inventiveness has been removed from Microsoft. Xbox somehow survives in spite of his leadership.

    • mightyfoolish@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      I have an issue with calling Edge “a bloated privacy invading Chrome clone”. It’s a “a bloated privacy invading Chrome repackage”, thank you.

    • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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      9 months ago

      phone, dead

      A product which, as interesting as it was, had sadly failed pretty resoundingly in the market under Ballmer’s leadership.

      AR/VR product dead

      As far as I’m aware, Hololens still exists? True it’s a product not getting as much attention as might have the potential to, but the same can be said for the entire VR market. Outside of a couple of very narrow fields, nobody has managed to get VR to really catch on the way the hype suggested it might back when Google Glass was a thing or when Hololens was first announced. (Who knows, maybe Apple will manage it with their product like how they made smartphones and tablets mainstream.)

      non-Xbox peripherals

      Honestly that seems like a real stretch. What exactly was their raison d’être? There are so many options for peripherals from companies that are better at it.

      App Store, a joke

      A joke when it was released under Ballmer. Still a joke today. That’s not a mark in Nadella’s favour, for sure, but nor can it really be counted against him.

      Edge now a bloated privacy invading Chrome clone

      Edge only existed under Nadella. Under Ballmer Microsoft still had Internet Explorer.

      Great for the shareholder, not for the customer

      Depends on what customer you’re talking about. As a software engineer, his tenure has been incredible. WSL is probably the single greatest thing to happen to Windows since '95. .NET Core and later simple .NET is such a huge improvement over the ancient .NET Framework for developing modern applications.

      As an RTS gamer, I suspect he probably didn’t have a lot of involvement here, but it was still under his leadership of Microsoft that we’ve seen the greatest era in Microsoft’s first-party gaming since the 1997–2007 period when the original trilogy + AoM were being released by Ensemble Studios.

      The creativity and inventiveness at Microsoft died under Ballmer. Nearly any Microsoft watcher will tell you he’s turned it around for the better not just in terms of business, but in terms of how it impacts the customer, as well.

      Personally I’ve been relatively disappointed with Microsoft over the last 2-ish years, but compared to the last half-decade or so of Ballmer, the first 8 years of Nadella’s tenure were impeccable.