Edward Zitron has been reading all of google’s internal emails that have been released as evidence in the DOJ’s antitrust case against google.
This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it.
The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem. Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads on Google properties, had called a “code yellow” for search revenue due to, and I quote, “steady weakness in the daily numbers” and a likeliness that it would end the quarter significantly behind.
HackerNews thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
MetaFilter thread: https://www.metafilter.com/203456/The-core-query-softness-continues-without-mitigation
Not to take up for his point, but windows 10 was in development years before Nadella. The only version of windows totally under his governance has been the disastrous windows 11. So I guess I have him to thank for finally giving me the kick in the pants to fully switch to Linux.
I guess the point I need to make is that Microsoft was not good before or during Nadella. There have been bright spots, but not enough for me to have then outweigh all the other crap pulled both during and before Nadella.
Windows is only a small part of MS.
Nadella gets a lot of/all the credit for Azure which is the only legit competition to AWS.
O365 has been great for their adoption too.
And then there’s all the “free” dev tools like GitHub (acquisition), typescript, vs code etc. which bolsters their image.
I can’t even imagine ms under Balmer giving away that much shit. Hell, I wanted to build apps for lumia and they wanted to charge me an arm and a leg just to get started. This was at a time when their store didn’t have anything going for itself.