6 ms·

>The Microsoft of the 2000s, under Steve Ballmer, was almost exactly the opposite (of gates). >Bruised and battered by the consent decree handed down by the Do

>The Microsoft of the 2000s, under Steve Ballmer, was almost exactly the opposite (of gates). >Bruised and battered by the consent decree handed down by the DoJ for the very same ambition that brought it to dominance, Ballmer’s Microsoft was sales-forward and CAUTIOUS. >It was... nervously clutching its pearls at the approach of Google in its rearview mirror People bash Steve Ballmer for missing Search, Social Networking, Smart phones, Tablets and one other thing. They claim he had his head far up his rear end to see the competiton. He's called a buffoon and other names but ignore the fact that... Microsoft was Caged. Had it's wings clipped. Had a huge target on its back. In case you did't know, any complaint by say Google in its early days and Microsoft would have been broken up! This is the real reason behind's Ballmer's failure. Gates hated politics, kept Washington at arms length and that cost them. In fact, if Gates had lobbied just a little bit, there would have been no case at all. And that's why Google's lobbying like crazy cos it's life actually depends on it.

duaoebg 7y ago
Ballmer is a buffoon. Even if we are to accept that MS was caged. I remember being at a launch party during an internship. Suddenly half the people ran out of the massive tent. I thought it must have been a fire, I ran out too, grabbed someone and asked why the mass exodus. Their reply was that Ballmer just went on stage. With that response I figured I have to see this. I went back in and recorded it. I was not disappointed, the performance was very cringe worthy. I do hope MS becomes a nice place for women to work, as a white guy I hated it so hopefully in the future they can do better.
- vezycash 7y ago
  Well that "buffoon" trippled Microsoft's earnings and doubled profits. But let these new growth areas slide because of the antitrust suit. If the market judged Microsoft by its earnings, it's stock would have been up. The internet, mobile was the blockchain and AI of the era.
  - mc32 7y ago
    I can’t judge whether he was a good CEO or not, but, goodness, that dude lived the company. He was an exuberant uninhibited promoter. More than Evangelizer. The guy didn’t care what people said behind his back when he got all sweaty, nope, he was there to promote the company. A great cheerleader for the team.
    - bitwize 7y ago
      "I've got just four words: I. Love. This. Company. YEEEEEAAAAAAHHHH!"
    - rasz 7y ago
      Used car salesman.
  - georgeecollins 7y ago
    Yeah, but the stock didn't go up from when he started to when he finished, which is evidence that the growth that happened during his tenure was all anticipated before he began. Good decisions can reap benefits years in the future, bad ones can take a decade to come to roost. You can say that Apple sales grew during John Scully's tenure. But it is kind of obvious that the company was exploiting a prior period of innovation while failing to innovate (Newton, Pink etc.). He inherited a company that was incredibly powerful and that power only diminished during his tenure.
    - basch 7y ago
      The same applies now to their success. Satya is executing Ballmer's One Microsoft plan. He absolutely deserves credit for some of the reorg he initiated before he stepped away. Combining Office 365, Active Directory, Intune, and Windows 10 Enterprise into a single Microsoft 365 bundle is the icing on that holistic product line effort. https://www.theverge.com/2013/7/11/4514160/steve-ballmers-reorganization-memo https://www.theverge.com/2013/7/11/4514160/steve-ballmers-re... Also of interest in that memo is Amy Hood being put in charge of the Finance Group (truthfully she had already been CFO a couple months when the One Microsoft memo came out), which Satya appears to be getting credit for in the original article. She was appointed CFO a year before Nadella became CEO.
- dbancajas 7y ago
  > ong the voices Microsoft needs to hear the most. Apparently, Microsoft has dipped only a single toe in the river that flows to the future." reply what did he perform? can you expound more?
random_19980 7y ago
>>This is the real reason behind's Ballmer's failure. Yes, I am sure it had nothing to do with him lacking the basic vision one would expect in any tech CEO and saying idiotic things like "no one would buy such an expensive phone" (about the iPhone). If you look like a buffoon, you act like a buffoon, and you talk like a buffoon...
- theandrewbailey 7y ago
  It sounds like he had to say/believe that to keep the lawyers away.
- hinkley 7y ago
  Ballmer may be the best example of a Shaved Gorilla currently living, but I think he became the official scapegoat of Microsoft when they put him in charge. Things were already going horribly wrong, and they put a despot in charge to soak up the blame for all of the terrible things his peers, subordinates and predecessors were already cocking up. The next person has a comparatively easy job of leading a Renaissance, assuming he didn't manage to run it into the ground in the interim. Which he nearly did. I really miss http://minimsft.blogspot.com/ http://minimsft.blogspot.com/ and not just for the schadenfreude. There was quite a bit of wisdom to be extracted from hindsight is 20/20 commentary, when you're an outside observer.
- throwaway0889 7y ago
  > saying idiotic things like "no one would buy such an expensive phone" (about the iPhone). This is something that people keep saying but he way actually right and at this point this is just an Internet meme. I remember that moment. The iPhone costed $800 with a phone plan. Insane. Nobody does that even today, so in that regard he was right. Only after the iPhone 3 and $200 phone with a contract did it ever start selling.
  - solidasparagus 7y ago
    The original iPhone did $745M in revenue before the iPhone 3G was released (not 100% sure if that the one you're talking about since there was never a phone called the iPhone 3). Not exactly 'nobody'...
com2kid 7y ago
> Microsoft was Caged. Had it's wings clipped. Had a huge target on its back. In case you did't know, any complaint by say Google in its early days and Microsoft would have been broken up! So much this. During orientation on my first day a representative from legal came in and told us, among other things, what types of metaphors we were allowed to use in emails. "No football metaphors, no explicit or implied violence, we do not 'crush the competition', we 'work hard to show customers how good our products are'." Hard to get a team amped up about working in an exciting new space when you are literally not allowed to get a team amped up. Then again, right before the iPhone launched, a market research report went around the mobile division that showed "consumers in the US will never pay for their phones, they are too addicted to free subsidized cell phone deals." Long ago when I was just a couple years in, I was "corrected" when I said we should stop shipping bad keyboards and relying on OEMs to make the keyboard not bad. Someone rather senior told me that wasn't the reason at all as to why we were shipping a sub-par keyboard. I never was told exactly why Windows Mobile 6.x shipped poor quality on screen keyboards.
- tytso 7y ago
  You can amp up a team by challenging them to give the very best possible user experience, so that your customers loves your product. Exhorting the team to "crush the competition" or "dominate the market" is not necessarily the best way to amp up a team. In fact, I'd argue it's the worst possible way, since that means that playing dirty patent troll tricks or financing things like the SCO lawsuit is a legitimate way to "win", as opposed to winning by delighting the user.
  - com2kid 7y ago
    > Exhorting the team to "crush the competition" I worked on a consumer product in a highly competitive space. Our competition released products that dropped frames and had laggy UIs. The discussion wasn't "We're going to make a smoother UI so our users have a wonderful and pleasant experience." it was "Hah, how the hell, they have literally 20x the CPU power, a GPU, over 1000x the RAM, and they are dropping frames? Let's show'em how its done!" In certain domains, and when trying to perform at certain levels, you need every single human emotion you can draw on to get enough energy to find the motivation to do amazing work. Is that needed 99% of the time? Nope. But MS sure as hell could have used someone pissed off about their mobile experience being terrible about, oh, say, 3 years earlier than what did happen. Another example. Gmail launched 2004. Imagine if 2002 a senior leader at Microsoft had burst into a meeting of the Hotmail leadership team and started shouting "Why the hell do other email providers even still exist? And why the fuck do I have to still delete emails every couple of days? I want every other free email provider out of business right asap. Lose money on it, I don't care, just make us the best!" But instead, someone at Google got upset about the same problem and made a product that completely dominated the entire consumer email market. If you go into a competitive space (especially consumer!) with the idea of "we'll look at the market research and do what is needed to establish a place for ourselves" then no one cares about you. "We're going to make a product that makes everyone else on the market look like incompetent jerks" is an actual mission statement that can be used to get things done. The competition has a painful first run experience? Yours isn't better, it is perfect. Why? Because screw the competition. Your competitors have fat profit margins? Yours are razor thin, because screw the competition. There product has an industrial design comes in black and ugly grey, you have designer colors, because screw the competition. If you are a multi-billion dollar company, and you have the resources to do everything better than anyone else in the field, then you either perform at that level, or you lose. The iPhone launch was to be a tour de force of this ideology. "They have ugly plastic buttons sticking out everywhere, we have metal and glass. They have a crappy joke of a keyboard, we'll reinvent the entire idea of an on screen keyboard. They have a shitty sales experience in stores? We'll partner with one carrier, and train the living daylights out of their sales people. Their UI is hard to use? We'll launch a world wide ad campaign where we show subtly people how to use the device during the ad." I was at MS at the time. The idea there was "We'll let our OEM partners decide on how best to differentiate their product, they are after all the ones doing the main value ad and we rely on them for manufacturing." Apple said screw that entire model, they just made it themselves, and they made it amazing. There is an incredible energy on teams motivated by the ethos of doing the best and steam rolling the competition through sheer excellence. I'm not advocating for dirty business practices, but holy hell, telling your engineers "do good enough" is going to get you "good enough." When they wake up and go to work and the entire office is saying "we're going to make a product that puts everyone else to shame", you get a great product.

duaoebg 7y ago

Ballmer is a buffoon. Even if we are to accept that MS was caged. I remember being at a launch party during an internship. Suddenly half the people ran out of the massive tent. I thought it must have been a fire, I ran out too, grabbed someone and asked why the mass exodus. Their reply was that Ballmer just went on stage. With that response I figured I have to see this. I went back in and recorded it. I was not disappointed, the performance was very cringe worthy. I do hope MS becomes a nice place for women to work, as a white guy I hated it so hopefully in the future they can do better.

vezycash 7y ago
Well that "buffoon" trippled Microsoft's earnings and doubled profits. But let these new growth areas slide because of the antitrust suit. If the market judged Microsoft by its earnings, it's stock would have been up. The internet, mobile was the blockchain and AI of the era.
- mc32 7y ago
  I can’t judge whether he was a good CEO or not, but, goodness, that dude lived the company. He was an exuberant uninhibited promoter. More than Evangelizer. The guy didn’t care what people said behind his back when he got all sweaty, nope, he was there to promote the company. A great cheerleader for the team.
  - bitwize 7y ago
    "I've got just four words: I. Love. This. Company. YEEEEEAAAAAAHHHH!"
  - rasz 7y ago
    Used car salesman.
- georgeecollins 7y ago
  Yeah, but the stock didn't go up from when he started to when he finished, which is evidence that the growth that happened during his tenure was all anticipated before he began. Good decisions can reap benefits years in the future, bad ones can take a decade to come to roost. You can say that Apple sales grew during John Scully's tenure. But it is kind of obvious that the company was exploiting a prior period of innovation while failing to innovate (Newton, Pink etc.). He inherited a company that was incredibly powerful and that power only diminished during his tenure.
  - basch 7y ago
    The same applies now to their success. Satya is executing Ballmer's One Microsoft plan. He absolutely deserves credit for some of the reorg he initiated before he stepped away. Combining Office 365, Active Directory, Intune, and Windows 10 Enterprise into a single Microsoft 365 bundle is the icing on that holistic product line effort. https://www.theverge.com/2013/7/11/4514160/steve-ballmers-reorganization-memo https://www.theverge.com/2013/7/11/4514160/steve-ballmers-re... Also of interest in that memo is Amy Hood being put in charge of the Finance Group (truthfully she had already been CFO a couple months when the One Microsoft memo came out), which Satya appears to be getting credit for in the original article. She was appointed CFO a year before Nadella became CEO.
dbancajas 7y ago
> ong the voices Microsoft needs to hear the most. Apparently, Microsoft has dipped only a single toe in the river that flows to the future." reply what did he perform? can you expound more?

random_19980 7y ago

>>This is the real reason behind's Ballmer's failure. Yes, I am sure it had nothing to do with him lacking the basic vision one would expect in any tech CEO and saying idiotic things like "no one would buy such an expensive phone" (about the iPhone). If you look like a buffoon, you act like a buffoon, and you talk like a buffoon...

theandrewbailey 7y ago
It sounds like he had to say/believe that to keep the lawyers away.
hinkley 7y ago
Ballmer may be the best example of a Shaved Gorilla currently living, but I think he became the official scapegoat of Microsoft when they put him in charge. Things were already going horribly wrong, and they put a despot in charge to soak up the blame for all of the terrible things his peers, subordinates and predecessors were already cocking up. The next person has a comparatively easy job of leading a Renaissance, assuming he didn't manage to run it into the ground in the interim. Which he nearly did. I really miss http://minimsft.blogspot.com/ http://minimsft.blogspot.com/ and not just for the schadenfreude. There was quite a bit of wisdom to be extracted from hindsight is 20/20 commentary, when you're an outside observer.
throwaway0889 7y ago
> saying idiotic things like "no one would buy such an expensive phone" (about the iPhone). This is something that people keep saying but he way actually right and at this point this is just an Internet meme. I remember that moment. The iPhone costed $800 with a phone plan. Insane. Nobody does that even today, so in that regard he was right. Only after the iPhone 3 and $200 phone with a contract did it ever start selling.
- solidasparagus 7y ago
  The original iPhone did $745M in revenue before the iPhone 3G was released (not 100% sure if that the one you're talking about since there was never a phone called the iPhone 3). Not exactly 'nobody'...

com2kid 7y ago

> Microsoft was Caged. Had it's wings clipped. Had a huge target on its back. In case you did't know, any complaint by say Google in its early days and Microsoft would have been broken up! So much this. During orientation on my first day a representative from legal came in and told us, among other things, what types of metaphors we were allowed to use in emails. "No football metaphors, no explicit or implied violence, we do not 'crush the competition', we 'work hard to show customers how good our products are'." Hard to get a team amped up about working in an exciting new space when you are literally not allowed to get a team amped up. Then again, right before the iPhone launched, a market research report went around the mobile division that showed "consumers in the US will never pay for their phones, they are too addicted to free subsidized cell phone deals." Long ago when I was just a couple years in, I was "corrected" when I said we should stop shipping bad keyboards and relying on OEMs to make the keyboard not bad. Someone rather senior told me that wasn't the reason at all as to why we were shipping a sub-par keyboard. I never was told exactly why Windows Mobile 6.x shipped poor quality on screen keyboards.

tytso 7y ago
You can amp up a team by challenging them to give the very best possible user experience, so that your customers loves your product. Exhorting the team to "crush the competition" or "dominate the market" is not necessarily the best way to amp up a team. In fact, I'd argue it's the worst possible way, since that means that playing dirty patent troll tricks or financing things like the SCO lawsuit is a legitimate way to "win", as opposed to winning by delighting the user.
- com2kid 7y ago
  > Exhorting the team to "crush the competition" I worked on a consumer product in a highly competitive space. Our competition released products that dropped frames and had laggy UIs. The discussion wasn't "We're going to make a smoother UI so our users have a wonderful and pleasant experience." it was "Hah, how the hell, they have literally 20x the CPU power, a GPU, over 1000x the RAM, and they are dropping frames? Let's show'em how its done!" In certain domains, and when trying to perform at certain levels, you need every single human emotion you can draw on to get enough energy to find the motivation to do amazing work. Is that needed 99% of the time? Nope. But MS sure as hell could have used someone pissed off about their mobile experience being terrible about, oh, say, 3 years earlier than what did happen. Another example. Gmail launched 2004. Imagine if 2002 a senior leader at Microsoft had burst into a meeting of the Hotmail leadership team and started shouting "Why the hell do other email providers even still exist? And why the fuck do I have to still delete emails every couple of days? I want every other free email provider out of business right asap. Lose money on it, I don't care, just make us the best!" But instead, someone at Google got upset about the same problem and made a product that completely dominated the entire consumer email market. If you go into a competitive space (especially consumer!) with the idea of "we'll look at the market research and do what is needed to establish a place for ourselves" then no one cares about you. "We're going to make a product that makes everyone else on the market look like incompetent jerks" is an actual mission statement that can be used to get things done. The competition has a painful first run experience? Yours isn't better, it is perfect. Why? Because screw the competition. Your competitors have fat profit margins? Yours are razor thin, because screw the competition. There product has an industrial design comes in black and ugly grey, you have designer colors, because screw the competition. If you are a multi-billion dollar company, and you have the resources to do everything better than anyone else in the field, then you either perform at that level, or you lose. The iPhone launch was to be a tour de force of this ideology. "They have ugly plastic buttons sticking out everywhere, we have metal and glass. They have a crappy joke of a keyboard, we'll reinvent the entire idea of an on screen keyboard. They have a shitty sales experience in stores? We'll partner with one carrier, and train the living daylights out of their sales people. Their UI is hard to use? We'll launch a world wide ad campaign where we show subtly people how to use the device during the ad." I was at MS at the time. The idea there was "We'll let our OEM partners decide on how best to differentiate their product, they are after all the ones doing the main value ad and we rely on them for manufacturing." Apple said screw that entire model, they just made it themselves, and they made it amazing. There is an incredible energy on teams motivated by the ethos of doing the best and steam rolling the competition through sheer excellence. I'm not advocating for dirty business practices, but holy hell, telling your engineers "do good enough" is going to get you "good enough." When they wake up and go to work and the entire office is saying "we're going to make a product that puts everyone else to shame", you get a great product.