Microsoft Appoints Kevin Scott as CTO | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Appoints Kevin Scott as CTO

news.microsoft.com

195 pointsghosh89 comments

From his "executive bio":

"Scott holds an M.S. in computer science from Wake Forest University, a B.S. in computer science from Lynchburg College, and is an all-but-dissertation drop out from the computer science Ph.D. program at the University of Virginia." [1]

Props for not trying to paper-over that last part.

[1] http://news.microsoft.com/exec/kevin-scott/

He does have 10 publications from his time as a PhD Student. https://dl.acm.org/author_page.cfm?id=81100544101

This one has more than 200 citations

https://scholar.google.nl/scholar?q=Retargetable+and+reconfi...

I don't think an ABD is seen as shameful, certainly not by most folks who have completed their PhDs.

I agree. Not shameful at all.

No, if you didn't graduate then you didn't graduate. Bragging about your drop-out status reminds me of Elizabeth Holmes.

It's not bragging, it's explaining where those years went. And doing publishable work does carry merit, thesis or no thesis.

When you say "drop-out from Hogwarts University" you are appropriating the Hogwarts brand to yourself. When you say "ABD PhD" you are misleading people into thinking that you're some kind of a PhD. This is doing unjustice to the people who actually did the work to get a PhD from said university. If you don't have a PhD, don't put the words PhD in your bio.

you realize a PhD isn't something you're just awarded for showing up for 4 years? depending on the circumstances, how much a dick your adviser is, w/e.. at some point any sane reasonable person not trying to dedicate their life to acadamia can and should absolutely abandon the program.

I think to "do injustice" to someone requires an actual causal relationship with the claimed victims.

Come on. It literally says "drop out" - no reasonable person could possibly believe the guy has a PhD, and being ABD is a hell of lot more than 99% of the population. Not to mention the fact that UVA is a good school generally so I can't imagine it's a cakewalk to even get admitted to their doctoral programs.

If he didn't mention an n-year gap in his background you'd say he was trying to hide the fact he was a drop out. You're just looking for something to complain about.

I finished my Bachelor's many years after I left school. I still had to list the school and the timeframe because otherwise I'd get questions about. I wasn't able to just say "I went to school but didn't graduate, but I don't want to appropriate the brand of my former university!" That's idiotic.

CV is bragging? I write in my CV what I did. When I studied something for few years and then dropped out for better opportunity, I write that in my CV.

Kind of interesting because I assume Microsoft has deep technical talent in operating system kernel and user space design.

But they chose someone who I assume must be a distributed computing ("web/cloud") guy instead. I guess that's where they see the bulk of their business being in the future.

I would think his role as CTO is less specifically about one field like distributed computing and more about creating a coherent vision over the whole of Microsoft which has been lacking for a long time .

Microsoft has a vision, it just had problems executing on it. Those who paid attention knew of what was coming these years because of their infamous 10 year vision and interim video releases they had. Terrible at execution and I hope this guy can help that.

I think Bill Gates achieved his vision which was put a computer on every persons desk running his OS. Its still a highly profitable company with pretty much a monopoly on desktops.

While that's nice, that's not saying Microsoft succeeded since the early 90s.

Microsoft's vision since attaining Bill Gates' "A computer on every desk..." has been this vague pen-computing drive that just won't seem to die. The latest iteration on his is the much-hyped and never-used ink notes feature in Edge Browser (deemed more important than Chrome-compatible extensions) and the otherwise outstanding Surface Studio desktop computer.

If I was a C-level at MS I'd push for "A computer in every palm, running Microsoft software" - they failed with Windows Phone but succeeded with Office 365 apps for iOS and Android. I would swallow MS' pride and release a custom Android-based OS and encourage OEMs to adopt it with favourable terms compared to Google Play's. I think that would sustain the company until the next big thing.

Oh, and research in self-driving cars. Everyone else is doing it ffs!

(And "Make the Windows Desktop Developer Experience Great Again(tm)!")

The "Ink" stuff in Windows 10 is part of the next update inked (har har har) "Creators Update" - its meant for enhancing the digital creator, publisher, writer and digital note taker with tools that make it stupid easy to use a pen to draw, note, clip, cut, trace, diagram.. It's been growing into edge - and I use it ALL the time to grab snippets from books on safarbooksonline and with ePubs coming to Edge and an ebook store, my use case gets even better. My wife uses pen for photoshop and adult coloring.. so different strokes for different folks.

As for chrome extensions.. MS makes it absurdly easy to port them: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platfor...

Regarding mobile devices, WIndows 10 is "Universal".. I don't know what the big delay is as a fan of the products - seems mostly developers obsessed with Apple really than MS not having a product and the last thing that MS needs to do is spread itself into ANOTHER OS - they already provide a robust "launcher" for android to bring in MS ecosystem. It's google that is generally playing hardball here and the world would be a better place if GOOGLE worked with MS and brought its ecosystem on par. I mean, it really sucks to enjoy to use edge and have google telling you on every one of their websites to switch to chrome with popups, sliders, notifications, alerts, text boxes and all sorts of crap making the experience suck..

as for self driving cars? its just an extension of the ecosystem.. i'm curious why you want MS in your pocket but not in your car

and lastly for Dev stuff.. MS owns that shit. The Windows Developer experience is a superb story and now with all their cross platform stuff you may just not be paying much attention.. MS development tools do Linux, Windows, OSX, Android, iOS, ARM & more..

also, edge extensions are generally chrome compatible.. (why doesn't google make their shit work with edge? or even win10?? eh eh? :)

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platfor...

BTW, I think the compute in every palm is already saturated to a degree and MS is doing long tail here but who knows.

Honest question: do Product owners report up through CTOs usually? I am not even sure how it works at a technology company (where the technology literally is the product).

I guess I ask this because I don't usually think of the CTO defining the product vision.. just the teams and tech to DELIVER the vision as defined by some product folks (obvious there is feedback both ways but..)

It depends but frequently in a tech company the CTO is the main product owner/"person with the vision". Execution is handled by a VP of Engineering (or lots of them when you're as big as MS)

If I were a kernel/os hacker at MS my end game would be to do something fun at MS Research, not head to CTO.

I 100% agree with you, but to be fair, if you are a kernel/os hacker at MS right now, you're probably having fun doing your thing already since the windows kernel has been going through several big revamps the past few years.

Such as Windows 10 running on ARM. I bet that was a big deal for many OS devs at MS.

Windows has been cross platform since NT 3.x days. What was really interesting for Windows on ARM was that ARM could run Win32 X86 apps with good speed.

(and I bet the same group of smart engineers also emulated PowerPC on X86 for BC games on the One)

This move puts Salesforce CRM squarely in Microsoft's sight.

More than Kevin's tech skills, this announcement reinforces that the identity of Microsoft B2B users and customer relationships will be strategically aligned around LinkedIn profiles.

Is Dynamics getting that much marketshare? I thought SFDC had things nailed up in the CRM space with distant 2nd/3rd place Oracle and SAP? [1]

[1] https://www.appsruntheworld.com/top-10-crm-software-vendors-...

Dynamics is beating Salesforce in SMB. Salesforce has nailed up enterprise.

It's a classic Innovators Dilemma for Salesforce. Could "good enough" Dynamics CRM move upmarket by integrating LinkedIn identities?

Got any figures for Dynamics beating Salesforce in SMB?

Seems like the multitude of CRM offerings (SugarCRM, Act, Goldmine, even Netsuite) in the SMB space would pose an issue for Microsoft if they were to go upmarket.

What they need to do is make a deal with Facebook. Solve the social component without necessarily ruining the widespread enterprise product.

OMG I just puked. The two worst products of all time, "integrated".

Note I'm not speaking for the engineering - but the user experience is just terrible on both LinkedIn and Dynamics.

The best engineers/programmers/hackers I know are nor very keen managerial positions and prefer architect or senior roles.

Was linkedin really known for their engineering? Honest question I don't recall ever hearing anything good or bad.

pretty much every big company in silicon valley is known for their engineering talent, since top talent just moves around from company to company (e.g: lots of ex-googlers, ex-facebook, etc).

Yes, they kind of overdid it in fact. They created Kafka, for example

A number of notable opensource projects in the big data space were started at LinkedIn. Kafka is probably the most prominent example but there are others too. So I'd say they're fairly known for their engineering. You definitely don't get good projects like that coming out of a company without really good engineers making them.

Yes, for starters they wrote things like Kafka and Samza there @ LinkedIn. I consider this post required reading for anyone wanting to build serious business distributed data pipelines, and guess where it came from? :)

https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-wha...

Microsoft's technology portfolio & research /far outstrips/ anything LinkedIn did or would encounter.

I'd guess that this appointment is Cloud/Azure related.

Sure, and it is also likely 100x the size. That wasn't the original question, the question was what has LinkedIn done engineering wise. I'd say Kafka was a pretty smashing success having met all of Neha, Jun, and Jay Kreps and talked Kafka with them.

Thanks for the link. I noticed their idea of "unified log" in a diagram about 45% of the way down. Does anyone know if this is the same thing talked about in the forthcoming Manning book "Unified Log Processing"?

https://www.manning.com/books/unified-log-processing

Hey clumysmurf - author of the book here; yes indeed, the book is heavily influenced by Jay Kreps' LinkedIn paper.

Voldemort was pretty influential too, even though it has been eclipsed by Cassandra.

Kafka, Samza, Databus, etc. LinkedIn is pretty capable when it comes to engineering. From what I've seen, most people's beef with LI tends to be product-related

World class engineers (especially data eng) who built some amazing open source things, but internally was a mess.

The reason LinkedIn is a terrible product is because it was mired internally by chronically poor engineering leadership and product politics. Nothing ever got shipped. This new rollout is nice but 5 years too late.

I'm really hoping the MSFT buy will change things, as I really believe in the product and there are some great engineers there.

The only nugget that sticks in my mind was the massive password hack a few years ago.

I wonder if Linkedin has a lot of MS tech in their stack? If so, and MS wants to push further into consumer facing services in the cloud, I can see why this appointment might make sense.

I think it should be noted that LinkedIn was recently acquired by Microsoft just last month. https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/08/microsoft-officially-close...

edit: link

The acquisition was ~6 months ago (June 2016). Last month was the close of the acquisition - post domestic and international regulatory approval.

"Empowering people" is Satya's favorite word. Looks like every Microsoft executive is using this now lol.

It's actually the company motto

The PR mentions he'll continue to serve on the LinkedIn executive team, so does that mean he'll continue to be based in MV? That'll be quite a change! (and challenge for him, I assume).

Who is he replacing?

That's the best part of the news. I don't think people really recall the ex-CTO of MS.

What does a CTO in Microsoft do ?

This is insanely tough job to have, but honestly, fantastic place to influence technology.

I wish someone is crazy enough and give me such job :).

We wish that you are crazy enough to ask for such jobs and work on any barriers towards them :)

This is why I leave HN for a few weeks every once in awhile. People in this thread shitting all over the guy, meanwhile back in their own lives, they still have to argue with project managers over the "right" way to get code done.

The crabs are reaching out of the bucket hard today.

There has always been an attitude of cynicism that tries to masquerade as wisdom around these parts.

An absolute goldmine for http://reddit.com/r/iamverysmart/ material.

There's a reason /r/ProgrammingCirclejerk is basically /r/HackerNews

That sub is kind of a heat check against the hype of pretty much everything these days.

They could change the name to /r/ShitHNSays

Unfortunately good technical conversation and that often come together and I don't want to tune out a large part of my industry.

Wow, that is really hard to read.

Err, they are not disjoint concepts.

We HN users overdo the criticism, but what exactly led you to say that? These are the top comments in the thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13475414 "props"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13475184 "interesting"

and:

Was linkedin really known for their engineering? Honest question I don't recall ever hearing anything good or bad.

What would a thread look like that wasn't "shitting all over the guy"?

Engineering wise, they've been a pretty interesting company... they were relatively early (large company) adopters of using the same views (via node) for client/server rendering via JS.

They've also done some unscrupulous things, even if interesting tech wise (the email proxy on iOS, and WTF they are even doing on iOS today and weren't blacklisted is beyond me). I do think he/they could have some positive impacts internally in terms of a lot of the integrations coming into Office365 today. Who knows though.

Judging from the work so far on Office365, and how great VS Code and Azure all around are doing, I'm not entirely certain they need to change too much. I'm more leery about LinkedIn's really spammy culture leaking into the really cool things coming out of MS, on top of privacy complains already surrounding windows 10.

Not sure why you're being downvoted, it's sort of common knowledge that LinkedIn used really shady dark patterns in order to increase user acquisition.

>I'm more leery about LinkedIn's really spammy culture leaking into the really cool things coming out of MS, on top of privacy complains already surrounding windows 10.

Windows has a lot of business users and is a consumer product; now i would guess that the privacy issues don't quite help with the business audience - but i guess that's a major cash cow; Anybody care to explain how they happen to put a major revenue source in jeopardy? I mean as a software company they aren't too much into targeted advertising anyway, so what do they do with all the data that they are gathering?

i don't know much about business, please enlighten me.

Well, my understanding is most of the telemetry data concerns application launches and crashes... so they, in effect know which software you are installing, and how it is doing overall. Not to mention other potential tracking information (software piracy trends). This allows them to intercede and know what areas to invest in internally.

The pro and enterprise versions allow you to disable pretty much all of this. The Home version is less able. A lot of the additional data is leaked by using cortana for searches.

That said, I'm not too paranoid about it, but I do understand why others may well be. Also, MS has been doing everything it can, including relatively great pricing to move SMBs to their hosted solutions for AD and Office365 packages. Which I can see as appealing for MS and SMBs. The more recent workspace/scheduling applications added to o365 show this direction, and integrating with LinkedIn cements this a little bit.

Who knows how it will work out in the end... I've been specifically pushing Docker Cloud simply because it can target multiple cloud systems for deploy, instead of the walling in from AWS/GC/Azure in terms of a lot of their own Docker tooling support. In the end, you're paying someone. How much you pay and what you get out of it will vary. But you are paying.

Kafka, Samza and a lot of other projects

Don't presume to know anything about the lives of people commenting here. Also, that's an ad hominem attack so it's not really valid anyway.

Assuming something isn't valid because it contains a fallacy is in and of itself a fallacy. Ad hominems are used all the time in extremely valid ways.

Take what he said in spirit, instead of literally.

It is invalid because the ad hominem is the entire content of the comment. There is no content other than the attack on HNers.

Well that's clearly false to everyone else, and again, is kind of irrelevant.

Nerds never seem to catch on that dismissing criticism as an ad-hominem is itself an ad-hominem.

I wouldn't necessarily say so. Rightfully pointing out that someone has made a statement which doesn't add anything to the discussion or support their argument is a valid counter to ad-hominem attacks which aren't automatically themselves ad-hominem.

Further, it's not an ad hominem to insult somebody while arguing with them. It's only an ad hominem if the insult is the basis of your argument.

The entire basis of the argument I am replying to is that people shouldn't be criticizing because "meanwhile back in their own lives, they still have to argue with project managers over the "right" way to get code done."

So that is the very definition of an ad hominem. The comment had no actual rebuttal to said 'shitting' that it was attacking.

Looking at the top few comment threads, I don't see much shitting going on in non-downvoted comments at least, rather valid questions and answers on who this guy is and why he was selected CTO (a position more like chief visionary). Having worked for Microsoft myself, these decisions, and more importantly their consequences, always seem to be opaque unless you are somehow in the know.

For a company the size and breadth of MS, what does CTO even mean though?

I can say as someone who was removed from a CTO position for being "too technical" is a very good question!

[NB In hindsight it was probably the right thing to happen - but finding out during a sales presentation to a customer probably wasn't a great idea...]

You can never go wrong by defending a senior tech executive on HN.

He will be out in 2 years or less. The problem with Microsoft is it has a massive old boys network. Once Ye Olde Microsoft mafia moves in, people who haven't been with the company for 15-20 years tend to move out, irrespective of their position. This is also why all Microsoft acquisitions where old boys network was allowed to intrude (basically all but Skype) have been promptly run into the ground within 2-3 years after acquisition.

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