Successor of Ballmer at Microsoft

The much-publicized executive job in the tech industry for the past few days is the Chief of Microsoft. Since when Steve Ballmer announced his retirement next year, the industry is all vibe in guessing who might grab the role of leading one of the biggest tech companies.

Steve Ballmer

There has been few extended discussions and debates on who would be the "next-CEO" of Microsoft. A betting company in UK, Ladbrokes has also started a betting on the topic with a list of 25 potential candidates. Here I am going to pursue a similar discussion. These would be my views on few of the industry's big guns. I would also discuss few potential candidates for the role but why I think they might not fit the shoes.

Satya Nadella: Satya Nadella (Executive Vice President of Microsoft) is a MSFT veteran of more than 20 years and has turned around the cloud division of Microsoft. Though Mr. Nadella is a potential CEO candidate its hard to understand if Nadella has knowledge about the entire technology stack that Microsoft is dealing with.

Kevin Turner: Kevin Turner might not have been with Microsoft for long but as a COO he might have deep knowledge in things that are happening within Microsoft. Turner has an impressive track record of executing excellence and improving efficiency and driving customer satisfaction in his role at Microsoft. But Turner doesn't have a technical degree which might be considered as one downside in choosing him for the role of CEO.

Kevin Turner (left); Satya Nadella (right)

Tony Bates: Tony Bates is a string viable candidate for the role of Microsoft chief. He joined Microsoft because of the $8.5 billion skype acquisition. But soon Bates was promoted as executive vice president of Microsoft’s Business Development and Evangelism group. This role would have given Tony a good handle on most of the Microsoft partners, customers, developer community, etc. This is an important asset which he can bring to the table as a CEO of Microsoft.
These 3 are my top list of candidates from within Microsoft.

Tony Bates

There have been talks in the media that a Googler might be hired for the Microsoft chief role, the likes of Vic Gundotra is top on the list. Vic is an Ex-Microsoft general manager, but has been a Googler since 2007. Mr. Gundotra is currently responsible for the social division at Google. Though Vic has excelled as a great technologist within Google, his focus has been primarily with Software and Social networking which might be enough to handle the CEO role at Microsoft which has various other divisions which requires a turn around. Though Vic has tried to revolutionize the ecosystem of the Google social division, it might be hard for him to set strategic goals and achieve them at Microsoft which includes a huge array of technology stack.

Vic Gundotra

The other top candidates for the role would be Julie Larson-Green, head of Windows, Tami Reller, head marketing at Microsoft. Microsoft had recently restructured the executive team after the exit of Steven Sinofsky from Microsoft. So, it will be hard for one of these people to again get promoted to a different and more challenging role. Though if such a decision happens, Microsoft will be force to restructure different organizations again, which in my opinion might end up in chaos.

Microsoft is a tech mogul which is a big player in a variety of domains. So, it will become extremely hard for an outsider to get into the mood and start being productive right away. I am guessing, Microsoft will go for someone like Tony Bates from within Microsoft as a new boss. Nevertheless, I wont be surprised if the board appoints an interim CEO for sometime to search for a more ideal candidate. Anyways, the wait is going to be less than a year when Steve Ballmer bids adieu and Microsoft has a new CEO.

Google Drive vs MSFT Skydrive

Cloud storage has become an inevitable aspect for almost every individual. Considering the fact that there are various options available these day, it's pretty tedious to decide which option is best.

After analyzing both the cloud services for quite a while, an honest opinion is that, you can't really zero in to one as the best service. Let's compare Google Drive vs Microsoft's Skydrive here.

To compare both the services, I have considered 3 yardsticks to measure the accountability of each.



Editing:

When we start storing documents in cloud, we don't just store and share but we do consider editing them and expect it to hassle-free and non-tedious process. Google Drive and Microsoft's Skydrive both obviously provide the option of editing the documents. But Skydrive allows editing in the native format of the document but Drive expects you to convert the document to convert it into an intermediate format and then edit it. Since, Microsoft office is a clean solution for office uses, Skydrive provides a clean solution.

In my opinion Microsoft's Skydrive takes a top notch edge over Google Drive

Accessibility:

Accessibility is another important aspect which expect out of a cloud storage system. Both Google and Microsoft provide excellent options to share files. Google includes Drive perfectly to fit in its already existing strong ecosystem. Files sharing is extremely easy to friends and other who have a google account and use any other their product. However, editing can be possible only when the files is in Google format. Skydrive, allows you to share files with anyone even with someone who doesn't have a Skydrive account and editing can be done in a very intuitive manner.

Skydirve again scores over Google Drive

Syncing with Desktop Apps:

Drive and Skydrive have separate apps which would enable syncing with the cloud, however, Drive provides the ability to sync based on the folder that you would like to sync which is not available in Skydrive
 Besides that, Skydrive offers only 7GB of memory to its new users but Google offer 15 GB to its new users.

Points to Google Drive in this segment

Microsoft Skydrive scores 2-1 over Google Drive and is a definite WIN "especially" for people who make a living doing presentations and compiling documents.

Though Box and Dropbox has developed a huge fan following with the unique features, Skydrive is still worth a try. As a matter of fact having an additional free cloud-storage is always a benefit.

Process holding a file - Process Explorer and more

Its always annoying when we try to delete a file but find out that some process is holding that file which makes the deletion not possible. I have seen a lot of people restarting the PC to kill the process and then try to delete the file.

Process Explorer can come in very handy in identifying the process that is holding a particular file. The Process Explorer will also be useful in identifying the handles and DLLs processes that are opened. 

Downloading and installing the tool is very simple and can be done here. Once you open the Process Explorer, you will find all the processes that are currently running in the machine.

Process Explorer v15.31

If you need to find the process that is holding a file, goto Find -> Find Handle or DLL -> type the entire path of the file and hit search, the tool tell you the process that is preventing the file from deleting.

The Process Explorer displays various other information like, CPU, memory usage and I/O statistic. This can be compared to the task manager with exclusive sophistication.

Trying to delete a file from a piece of code will also encounter such problems and the process explorer could not be used in this situation. We need to kill the process that is holding the file and then try to delete the file.

   

Kill Process that is holding the file

This is the piece of code that can used to kill the process that is folding the file, <fileName>

Mark Pincus reports to Don Mattrick - Potential decision convolution

Zynga once again made, what could be a horrendous decision adding to the mess they are in right now. Zynga recently allured Don Mattrick, Head of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment division to lead operation in Zynga with a magnum $50 million deal, Mr Mattrick will also be a member of the board of directors. The worst part is here, the out-going CEO and founder Mark Pincus will be the Chief Product Officer and President of the board. So, as far as the org structure stands, Mark will be reporting to Don as a Chief Product Officer and Don in-turn will be reporting to the board where Mark is a Chairman. Who makes the final decision on products and strategies is the big question.

Don Mattrick (Left) and Mark Pincus (right)

                                                     

There is always a potential decision convolution in this scenario. The problem of difference in opinion could never be solved in such a structure. The final decision maker is one of the guys who actually has a difference in opinion and this can eventually result in dirty cold war.

The only way such a structure could work is when Mark and Don have had a good relationship running over a long period of time, which quite possibly is not the case. It will be very interesting to watch the strategical decision that Zynga takes in the near future and the involvement of Don and Mark in it. Mark is the founder and he might have definitive thoughts in leading the company towards one mission. When Don comes in to replace Mark as the CEO and still report to him at the board level, things might turn messy atleast at the early stage. Lets watch out for Zynga's strategical moves in turning around the company from being an underdog into a revenue generating machine...

TypeInitialization Exception was unhandled

"TypeInitialization Exception was unhandled"... This was a runtime exception which kept me worried for several hours... Couldn't really understand the actually reason for the RTE which started appearing all of a sudden in a project which was working fine for a long time...

Since it was a very high level exception, nailing down the source of the exception was tricky. To understand the source of the exception, IDE changes had to be made in .NET environment. Go to Debug -> Exception -> check all the "Thrown" exception. This will help in identifying the actually piece of code which throws this unhandled exception.

In my case, I had changed the location of the referenced dlls but the new location was not part of the project. As a result, the dlls were not able to load. Things always get tricky in .Net when you are trying to load a dll from a folder or sub-folder which isn't within the EXECUTABLE location. This would be an interesting read on the topic. But technically, this is just one reason for getting the "TypeInitialization Exception", but the way to probe the problem and get to the source of the same can be very similar to the one explained earlier.

Since, we are talking about this exception I would also like to highlight another reason for it. It may also occur when your "Configuration Manager" is set to "Any CPU" when it is supposed to be just "x86". I have personally not encountered this problem, but there are various posts on stackoverflow, which highlights this example.