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Comment by karterk | Hacker News Reader

Satya saved Microsoft by doubling down on Azure and Cloud. Something that Balmer failed to do with Mobile.

Meanwhile he allowed desktop development to become a mess, he was the one killing mobile, and now Microsoft is dependent on Google and Apple for mobile endpoints, other than laptops.

He saved Microsoft's investers' pockets, but destroyed the soul of Windows, Windows Phone, the Nokia partnership, the Office suite, etc.

One could say he actually destroyed MSFT to build something new.

don't forget the tons of cash destroyed and resources trying to make bing competitive with google

The Office Suite is doing better than ever. I have no problem paying $129 a year for O365 with five users and each user can use it across Macs, Windows, iPhone, iPad and web. The iPad version with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse is actually pretty good.

And 1TB of storage per user.

It's not the ingress strategy, it's the egress one. How do you migrate 1TB of data OFF of OneDrive?

From your computer you attach a USB drive to your computer and move files like any other drive.

From an iPhone or iPad, you connect a USB drive to it using the USB C port, the USB drive shows up in the Files along with your OneDrive storage location and you move files to your drive.

The same way you would with GDrive, iCloud Drive or Dropbox

He saved Microsoft, but doomed the rest of us.

... by becoming OSS friendly, and especially Linux friendly. Prior to that Microsoft and Azure were irrelevant because nobody wanted to run their backends on Windows.

Azure always had a very large and devoted following of corps who were all in on Windows, even in the early days when everything Azure ran on Windows. They had a very deep fanbase which caused them to not see things from the Silicon Valley perspective

Yes, the same nerds who would balk at using Windows would have balked at using Azure, but when it was time to choose clouds, that foot that Microsoft had in the door with corporate paid off big time. Many people have the privilege of working detached from the corporate world, but that also leads to warped perceptions like that of Paul in 2007.

Yep, I do think Paul was presciently observing a powerful class of people who would end up making the decisions in big companies that would not end up being all in MS customers, but I also remember being shocked seeing the demand for Azure when it first released (we wrote add-on software for cloud deployments for the big 3 clouds, and some smaller ones)

Embrace, extend, extinguish

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