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I agree that it's already happened, but I disagree it's Pichai's fault. A lot of the company direction/culture that was put in place before Pichai was the cause of G to seemingly be behind other tech companies in innovation. Pichai was left with one of the hardest companies to manage imo.

On the other hand, I truly believe Nadella was left with a golden basket. A lot of what Ballmer and Muglia left behind actually paved the path for what MSFT is today. Nadella has been excellent in executing the strategy, but in general I feel many people give him a lot more credit than he was responsible for.



I'm definitely not as savvy - can you expound on how the decisions that Ballmer and Muglia made paved the way for Nadella's success?


Yep, answered some points here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24004156


Every company at that level has the resources to execute. The CEO decides what to execute on, what to nurture. Ballmer got Mobile so wrong. Ballmer didn't push this much on cloud. Ballmer didn't get game streaming as an idea. Nadella is a god send for Microsoft. He's the best tech CEO and he's in house so knows how to get the ship moving.


Ballmer says/did some stupid stuff and it gets (rightfully) flamed for it but he guided Microsoft with many correct decisions during his time. Even Satya says so: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/16/satya-nadella-credits-ballme...

Ballmer pushed hard for Xbox, was a big proponent of cloud and, most importantly, placed a huge emphasis on enterprise customers. A lot of the fruits of his labor were reaped under Satya's tenure.

More interestingly, it could be argued the biggest cloud evangelist in Microsoft at the time was neither Ballmer nor Satya, but rather Bob Muglia (the SVP of the servers and tools division). Muglia was notoriously hated by Ballmer and prevented his probable rise to CEO (he was fired by Ballmer and his position was filled by Satya).




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