Some examples that I've seen posted to HN over the past few months
* Microsoft Edge leaks browser history to Bing - https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/25/23697532/microsoft-edge-b...
* More ads in Windows 11 start menu - https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/17/microsoft_windows_sta...
* Absolute junk shoved into the Windows UI - https://thomasbandt.com/the-day-windows-died? https://birchtree.me/blog/the-windows-11-trash-party/ https://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-keeps-feeding-tabl...
Windows is in a boiling frog situation. It's been slowly accumulating dark patterns and anti-features like mandatory online-only accounts, while at the same time losing quality of life features like the ability to move your taskbar or to not combine apps in the taskbar.
I should be using Windows today. I grew up on Windows, I learned to program on Windows, I had a very difficult and bumpy transition in getting off of Windows. But I had to leave their ecosystem because they have absolutely no respect for the user, and at this point I do not trust them. I want to reiterate that these are recent things, I'm not mad at them for what they did in the 90's here.
They aren't treating Windows as a serious tool for getting shit done, they're treating it as a data-mine and advertising opportunity.
MS still lacks a industry leading 21st century consumer device and Nadella has not been able to change that but his bets on cloud computing, embracing of Linux and open source and the rise of VSCode are something to behold.
As an "older-school" dev, I am constantly amazed that I can open a linux prompt on windows or do VSCode work with a local gui on a remote computer or inside a docker container.
A lot of this damage was done under Balmer, but IMHO Nadella has a lot of blame too. Microsoft has gone from domination of computing platforms and making money on every single device sale to competing for scraps in someone else's app store (making that someone else money!) as they sell office apps and such ported to platforms they don't control anymore.
I think there isn't more outrage or unrest about this failure from Microsoft shareholders since Azure and other service growth has kept dollars flowing in and the share price up. But Microsoft is nowhere near their 90s peak of total control over consumer computing.
In my mind, he’s the worst ceo of the last decade
I consider MS's record under Nadella to be a mixed bag. Azure is probably Nadella's biggest success, but it's hard to come up with any other significant market in which MS has excelled under Nadella where they were not previously dominant.
From a user perspective, many MS products I use have improved and many have changed in ways I would consider to be detrimental. VS Code is probably the only new MS product that I've started using regularly - and I'd only consider it to be a minor improvement over Sublime Text for my use cases.
So let me summarise - clearly not, because they don't make a consumer/device (aka phone). Only phone companies can have a best CEO. Then again Apple doesn't have a successful cloud platform, Google doesn't make cars, Amazon's rockets aren't very useful, SpaceX doesn't make a phone, Tesla -is- a phone (the best "mobile" phone ever?). What about social media, ad-platform, AI?
Clearly deciding it based on product is absurd.
Equally we could debate the merits of owning an OS, or an Office platform, or a streaming service.
We could base it on innovation, stock price and growth, market cap, employee numbers, cash in the bank, acquisitions, willingness to kill projects, ability to smoke weed. We could define it as having laid off no-one ever.
All of which is to say, there's no "best" to begin with. There are thousands of companies,of every scale, which have done well by some metric, which have survived rocky roads, which have provided value to society, to customers, to employees.
My hat is off to all if them. Their success keeps food on the table, and roofs over heads.
Asking which is best, without define criteria is hopeless because clearly all companies have strengths and weaknesses. We might as well puck which sport is "best". (Where the right answer is golf because, um, that's what I like. And because more 80+ year-olds do golf than everything else combined. They're experienced enough to know.)
Windows 11 is a laughing stock to many and it isn't exactly flying off the shelves.
Microsoft is a hot mess and Nadella is a trader the same way Pichai is at Google.
Same for Tim Cook.
Look back at news articles for the past year and watch how fast Nadella pivoted from "the metaverse" to GPT.
Stock buybacks make CEOs look impressive if you don't know about stock buybacks.
https://money.usnews.com/investing/articles/s-p-500-stocks-w...
Microsoft was still growing under Ballmer. Windows was far away from “dying”.
Then you can sample across CEOs and then measure Nadella based on that
Do you have such criteria and data?
She made it relevant again.
Is that so?