@satyanadella has done so well that I love MS products more than I love Apple products nowadays - especially software wise. The entire MS office suite and windows has been made so beautiful and fluid in the last few years. His tenure has seen exponential improvements in products.
I personally loved Windows mobile OS and thought it had so much potential. I still stand by the fact that Windows mobile OS was the most beautiful looking OS on mobiles ever (even beating Apple's ios). Had Ballmer only open sourced the development and opened the platform up for
developers across the world, and not constrained them with C# and the native windows development stack, Windows OS on phones would be the world leader now. It's so sad that just a miss in timing had resulted in Android being the defacto standard now.
From Word to Excel to OneNote (my favorite) - today, the Office suite apps have seen drastic UX improvements as well as functional improvements. The first best thing Satya did was to focus on MacOS and make all their office suite apps work well with MacOS and iOS.
Letting the losers go, letting go of Nokia, shutting down the mobile division (as sad as it is), and focusing on Microsoft's strengths - which is enterprise, is what has made Satya a force to reckon with. Look at the acquisitions he's made with MS in the last few years!
Earlier, Microsoft acquiring a product would mean death to that product, much like Yahoo. Or atleast, the product would get so messed up, and MS had imbecile engineers/leaders who had no clue how to integrate the acquisition seamlessly.
Today, the kind of products they acquire and borrow features or fully integrate from are amazing. Also, they no longer mess up acquisitions like they used to, and have given standalone independence for quite a few acquisitions they have made. Their biggest being Github & Linkedin
Also, one of the strategic and brilliant move they made, although late to the party was getting their own hardware and getting it right this time. They started with Surface tablet, and if you look at the kind of constant and consistent improvements they have made to surface
version after version, year after year - you can't help but be absolutely amazed. Surface laptops are hands down among the top 3 hardwares for Windows based system. Surface tablets are also amazing. These guys are slowly building an ecosystem of products following Apple's
footsteps, for both enterprise and personal users, and are slowly and sneakily becoming better and better. Most other companies and leaders are not paying as much attention to Microsoft as they do to Google or Apple or Amazon. This is an advantage for Microsoft.
It would be no wonder if they get back into smartphones again, this time with a much better Windows based OS (making sure developers across the world pitch in for creating wonderful apps). Enterprise wise, many companies are far behind MS in competition, but Google is catching up
Although Google tried to offer office suite type of products with their own system, I don't think anything can beat MS Office at its game. Years of experience crafting and refining the business applications definitely puts MS with a strategic competitive advantage.
Apple is slowly becoming irrelevant. Tim Cook is a war-time CEO. He's saved a lot of cash, led the company into Covid with a proper war chest, has managed the company quite well, but no strategic and creative innovations have come out of Apple. They have been behind for a while.
Apple's main competitor is not Microsoft, but Samsung. I think Smartphones account for most of the revenues by Apple, and Samsung has gotten way better in the flagship arena. I don't like Pixel much, but Pixel is a competition too.
While Apple, Google, Amazon, etc., are warring each other in tech dominance, the advantage MS has is its relative invisibility. Going forward, we can see MS led by Satya make strategic moves in creating a stronghold in the enterprise arena.
MS will also be sneakily improving their retail consumer facing OS, mobile/laptop/tablets based devices and system, and a whole suite of applications that they are responsible for. Their constant and consistent improvements and bets may not show much now, I agree.
But, this process that Satya has put Microsoft under, will make it an unassailable opponent, that surprisingly got way better without anyone noticing - in the next decade. So, my bet is on @Microsoft for the next decade.
