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.

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>

Microsoft's all new Outlook

Microsoft today launched the all new email service "Outlook" (outlook.com). Microsoft has refurbished its old email service hotmail and gives an absolutely stunning interface. It has a very elegant, simple yet sophisticated interface. It gives a never assumed emailing experience. It has a different strategy to manage all your annoying newsletters which you subscribed out of curiosity.

Outlook also helps you to be "connected" (as VP of cloud services at MSFT calls it). You can see all the information from your social networking accounts and have that right on your email account and actually respond to your friend's comments or photos. Looks like MSFT is making its deal with Facebook count as much as possible. Not to forget "tagging your friends with Bing search" feature, which Microsoft introduced not very long ago.

Interview of Chris Jones, VP cloud services at Microsoft

Techcrunch indicated that Outlook comes with a 7 GB free cloud storage. Even before I logged in to check it out, I assumed MSFT is bringing in its already existing feature of 7 GB free storage it gives with Skydrive and I wasn't wrong. I had to look around for a while though, to learn how to access my Skydrive from outlook.com. However, it is neatly integrated with the email service. You can log-in to outlook.com using your existing Windows Live username or what Microsoft calls as Microsoft Passport. It need not necessarily be a @hotmail.com or a @outlook.com account which is a good thing as no one needs or wants to create a new email address for every email service. You can integrate any of your email accounts with outlook and use outlook.com forever (at least until yet another mind-blowing email service is made available).

Microsoft also promises to integrate skype with the new outlook, which means we will have a gmail video chat experience in outlook (without the delay though :)). The news comes out the day after gmail's announcement of  integrating Google Hangout with gmail (which didn't really make me a happy man). Hope the skype integration doesn't come at an expense of access speed to emails. Though, I feel MSFT has taken a while to get here, I should say it has got here in style. Have to wait and see what would be its strategy to pull Gmail users towards outlook.

The only thing that keeps me worried about this new Outlook is the irrelevant Bing ads in the side bar. I got an immediately reply from an Outlook representative for one of my techcrunch comments  saying "One of the core pillars of Outlook.com is that we don't read your email in order to show you ads. The Bing deals and offers on the right hand side of your inbox are based on the info you provide us; your gender, age, location etc. We're working hard to improve the relevancy of the Bing deals and offers you see, and these will improve over time, but we want to make sure that is not at the expense of your personal privacy. If you'd like to see more relevant Bing deals and offers make sure your account information is up to date with you age, gender, location etc." Though, I should respect the privacy policy of MSFT, I am wondering how could the quality of ads improve by just knowing a person's age, gender, location, etc. May be I am not paying much attention to the word "etc" here. :) Let's wait and watch the game.