5 ms·
Funny and satirical as it is, [1] completely changed my opinion of Steve Ballmer for the positive. > Steve Ballmer. You open the door to his enormous grinning
by donatj 10y ago
Funny and satirical as it is, [1] completely changed my opinion of Steve Ballmer for the positive.
> Steve Ballmer. You open the door to his enormous grinning face, and before you know it he’s in the hall handing over a bottle of something cheap (but with such confidence you don’t notice) and he’s giving you the handshake of your life. Then he’s in. Loving it. Loving the music. Loving the food and drink. He’s going up to everyone, saying hello. And after a while you realize he’s started balling “thanks for coming, great to see you man!” to your guests. By the end of the evening it’s his party and everybody had a great time. That’s Steve Ballmer.
https://medium.com/packt-publishing/how-to-be-like-steve-ballmer-cf4c9803d74c https://medium.com/packt-publishing/how-to-be-like-steve-bal...
- astronautjones 10y ago> handing over a bottle of something cheap (but with such confidence you don’t notice) Three commas?
- polyomino 10y agoThat's Mark Cuban
- plaguuuuuu 10y agoThat was a really strange article
- SamReidHughes 10y agoOne thing that gets wrong is calling Gates the genius. Ballmer is the smarter of the two.
- westoncb 10y agoCould you elaborate on that?
- SamReidHughes 10y agohttps://youtube.com/watch?v=Mn1N0ssZsUs https://youtube.com/watch?v=Mn1N0ssZsUs
- nhebb 10y agoHe was featured on the A&E show Biography, and one of his high school math teachers said that Ballmer never once got a math problem wrong, which I found incredible in the true sense of the word.
- vanderZwan 10y agoDid he emphasise the "once"? Crucial bit of info here ;)
- ido 10y agoThen why did Microsoft stagnate under his leadership, once Gates left?
- jedberg 10y agoCOOs don't make good CEOs in general. They are great at executing someone else's vision, but not great at coming up with one on their own.
- moomin 10y agoI'm not saying Microsoft didn't need a change by the end of Ballmer's reign, but it is seriously underrated. Yes there were many mis-steps, especially in the consumer space, but he never put a foot wrong in the enterprise space and got a lock few would have credited would be possible with a Windows-server-only strategy.
- jedberg 10y agoBallmer did a great job keeping the ship going for sure. He just failed to turn into the wind. :)
- sangnoir 10y agoBecause intelligence by itself does not assure success. I'm not a Balmer/Microsoft fan, but 'stagnated' isn't the word I'd use to describe Microsoft in Balmer's era: they missed mobile and got into search late, but they did extremely well in other areas.
- ido 10y agoHe stepped in in 2000, with microsoft being the top dog of the tech world, and left in 2014 with them not even being one of the "big four". Right now Apple, Amazon, Google & HP are all bigger (in terms of revenue) than Microsoft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_information_technology_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_informatio...
- ddispaltro 10y agoThis is probably one of my favorite blog posts ever.
- princeb 10y ago"non genius" seems like a funny way to describe a person who outperformed gates on the putnam