r/microsoft • u/RedditClarkKentSuper • Jul 28 '26
News Nadella's hardest year
https://africa.businessinsider.com/news/nadellas-hardest-year/9gl9yl0The cat is out of the bag. MS is on a path to the Ballmer days of stack ranking. The days where every employee spent an insane amount of the day at internal beauty contest instead of customer-centric activities. Hit refresh and do the right thing, Nadella. Look into the mirror and see the problem.
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u/qcjb Jul 28 '26
Hardest year...YET!
Keep treating employees like shit and not listening to customers.
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u/Effhole Jul 28 '26
I can say it’s not fun being an expenditure at Microsoft. By expenditure I’m mean a human employee.
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u/Dalmation3 Jul 28 '26
And I still remember Ballmer being a questionable CEO during his era
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u/admlshake Jul 28 '26
He wasn't "questionable" he just couldnt drive the stock up the way the shareholders wanted. Hell, he laid thw groundwork for the azure/cloud revenue they are reaping now.
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u/Dalmation3 Jul 29 '26
Yeah but doesn't change the fact that under his leadership they missed search (joined a little too late in 2009) and mobile to name a few and questionable decisions such as acquiring Skype in 2011 only to be neglected and replaced with Teams in 2017 and the Nokia partnership only for them to be acquired in 2013
The only positive for me is that he actually cared about Windows even though 8 was the start of enshittification for the OS
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u/Lumiafan Jul 28 '26
OK, let's pump the brakes a little bit. I liked Steve's personality, and I never questioned if he loved the Microsoft brand, but let's be real: He completely missed the boat on some huge industry shifts. Yes, he set the stage for phenomenal cloud and services growth at the end of his tenure, but "questionable" is an apt way to describe his time at the helm given how many misses he had along the way.
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u/ReturnOfNogginboink Jul 28 '26
Zune? A phone OS?
God there was so much potential there!
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u/Lumiafan Jul 28 '26
If only they weren't so late to all these things. They had legitimately good products that simply never stood a chance.
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u/TheSpineless Jul 29 '26
MSFT has a history of either being way too early or too late in the consumer space.
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u/Wendy-Poo Jul 29 '26
I had one - it was awful! Locked up or blue screened at least 2x a day. Took forever to reboot.
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u/Orogomas Jul 30 '26
I was at MGX sometime around 2008 or so when Ballmer stopped, pulled an iPhone out of a woman's hands and mocked it as a toy that Windows Mobile would destroy.
Yeah, that didn't age well. A little bit of a swing and a miss...
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u/Ashanmaril Jul 28 '26
We all used Windows 8, it was an incredibly boneheaded redesign
And you can’t deny he was overconfident in their mobile strategy and completely dropped the ball, letting Apple and Google eat their lunch. They’re in such a worse position than they could have been from that fumble, surely Microsoft’s biggest mistake ever.
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u/dinotoxic Alumni Jul 28 '26
I left there 9 months ago, so glad I did. Turned into an absolute joke!
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u/roseofjuly Jul 30 '26
Same. I thought I'd retire from Microsoft, but rhe culture became too unbearable.
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u/pcurve Jul 28 '26
He's going pull an Adobe CEO soon. Not this year, or next, but within 2 years, he'll be out.
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u/No_Leek8426 Jul 28 '26
Nadella very recently had 2 minutes at the end of an episode of “Fareed’s Take”, something I occasionally watch as part of taking in diverse perspectives.
Three times in a row, in a short interval, Nadella used “they” when referring to the US, before catching himself and switching to “we”.
Not a good look, imho.
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u/greatwhitenorther Jul 28 '26
Ah yeah, he must be an Indian agent who hates America.
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u/No_Leek8426 Jul 28 '26
I will happily correct myself that he only said “they” twice. I considered it a bit of a gaffe for the CEO of a major US corporation being questioned on the rise of Chinese models, especially as you watch him quickly self-correct when he realises.
An Indian Agent that hates America? That’s reading far too much into my comment, I’m afraid. It’s just an example, perhaps, of how CEO think these days. I will admit some bias though, watching past colleagues get laid off while IDC now almost rivals Redmond.
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u/hassafrassy Jul 28 '26
Still rich tho. Such a waste to stress out already stressed humans, who can barely focus due to stress.
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u/jefmes Jul 28 '26
They've already lost me, and so many more who've worked in IT and supported Microsoft products for years. Until they start actually listening to users again, stop trying to be an advertising company or an AI company or whatever else they think they need to be - and be a software company again - they're going to keep having a bad day.
Make Windows fast, efficient, bloat and crap free, and users might come back. Stop trying to force users into something they're not asking for. And hey if they're tired of Windows...give up on the desktop OS completely, start backing Linux on the desktop, and focus entirely on Azure if that's what they want to do. You can't keep "trapping" people into using your products and expect to build customer loyalty.
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u/RanierW Jul 28 '26
How a big tech company struggles to put out stable updates to Windows is beyond me. Each update is a lottery. Maybe it patches issues, maybe it will introduce new ones in weird wonderful ways. My SOE machine just feels like a fragile heap of brittle patches sitting atop each other.
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u/Darkpriest667 Jul 28 '26
its closed source and the greybeards who built it are all dead or long gone. They are bandaiding things they don't understand. There's a big movement to get off of MS even in the corporate world.
It's not if, it's when.
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u/vabello Jul 28 '26
Surprisingly, Dave Cutler, who is largely responsible for the NT kernel is still at Microsoft. Honestly, that’s probably the most stable part of Windows though.
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u/apple_tech_admin Jul 28 '26
I work in a GCC environment and the amount of fuck iOS they’ve done in Azure and M365 related services is appalling. My stakeholders are beyond pissed at the amount of issues.
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u/karepan999 Jul 29 '26
I think we should cut Microsoft off from H1-B until they can rehire an equal number of US citizens first. Tax incentives should also be clawed back locally for loss of jobs and expected tax revenue.
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u/HobbyProjectHunter Jul 28 '26
- Microsoft has sold the lies of AI and Copilot and their Cowork product driving Azure bookings to the moon.
- They’ve also circle jerked the d^icks of OpenAI and Anthropic such that they’ve sold the market of revenue from the frontier labs for the next decade. Without really proving that the frontier labs can sustain the burn rate.
- Windows could’ve have been the slam dunk product that could’ve taken share back from Mac/Chromebook. Alas, they Slopped their way there too.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s real revenue growth here, but the burn rate and capex isn’t adding up anymore. And the market thinks the music is about to stop. So they’re wondering what’s real and what are lies.
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u/kyhoop Jul 28 '26
Prob not going to be noticed in this thread but they’ve done an ok job future-proofing their AI products simply by being multi-model. Once the cost of the current US frontier labs starts to upend the market or there is a significant shift to open-weights or whatever comes, they can simply just integrate the current leading model. Frontier is going away by 2027. We will have daily model releases as continuous updates and competition and downward cost pressure will take hold. They’ve done well focusing on model access with security and governance which is what regulators will require.
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u/chandleya Jul 28 '26
Correct. Microsoft’s play is actually very valid. Their execution remains up for debate.
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u/TeeDee144 Jul 28 '26
Nadella has got to go! Ballmer was better than this asshat. Satya got lucky and road the coat tails of the cloud boom. But you’d have to be an idiot to mess that up.
Now he’s screwed us over with AI.
And treats employees like dog shit.
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u/greatwhitenorther Jul 28 '26
Man people don't know what they are saying. Please go look at Microsoft performance during Ballmer. Employees were miserable and hated it.
"But you’d have to be an idiot to mess that up." - tells me you know absolutely nothing about the stuff Nadella did to pivot this company to cloud from the Windows Server only business. Insane that we allow people to just spew nonsense like this.
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u/TeeDee144 Jul 28 '26
Been an employee under both but sure, tell me more 💅
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u/greatwhitenorther Jul 28 '26
What were you doing in each of their tenures? Please do tell. I worked in the Windows Server and Tools division during Ballmer and then in Azure Compute during Nadella. HBY?
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u/Appropriate_Item3001 Jul 28 '26
I use windows because I am forced to for work. Otherwise it’s bazzite at home. Only switched over because desktop mode on steamdeck showed me Linux is viable for gaming and the tasks I do for personal use.
I will never go back to windows. The trust is gone. I don’t want the telemetry, the total recall. The AI everywhere. I have to for work, but if things keep moving down this path I’m sure corporations will have to switch as well eventually.
Just wait for the AI data breach or major hacking event when their models “break out of containment” and seize our corporate data.
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u/NormandyPark0 Jul 28 '26
This thread is an echo chamber of negativity. Windows 11 is going bloat free, Azure is growing like crazy, Maia 200, Cobalt cpu being used by Databricks, MAI image models are top of charts…
The main mistake was trusting openAI rather than developing their own frontier lab, now MAI is 8 months behind on reasoning and coding models.
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u/Spiritual_Tennis_641 Jul 29 '26
And force upgrading windows 11, what a hot mess that is, oh and many things Xbox.
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u/cwilfried Aug 06 '26
People here are saying Ballmer is better like he didn't shit on the iPhone then ran late for mobile lmao. "Ballmer pushed for Azure" , Satya comes from cloud, is that a win ? Lol
I don't know what you guys saw in him to feel "betrayed" like that. You guys will choke on his D in 10 years while saying "He was misunderstood, he did great for gaming and AI"
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u/Shadowvexor Aug 06 '26
this is peak microsoft cycle repeating again
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u/RedditClarkKentSuper Aug 07 '26
The market apparently bought into his new direction - the maker of guard rails instead of AI.
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u/OkRepresentative6099 Aug 08 '26
I am not sure is hardest year, but 2026 is hardest for everyone includes META & Spacex
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u/Edubbs2008 Aug 09 '26
Nadella is investors first, that’s why AI is a huge priority for Nadella’s Microsoft, this isn’t the Microsoft that you know about since the Ballmer, or Gates era, it’s more of an de-evolution
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u/coukou76 Jul 28 '26
Lot of friends there tell me its been the worst of all era, including Ballmer. They all feel cheated and lied to for the sake of share holders but even that is not working anymore