6 ms·

Bill Gates built an amazing airplane. Steve Ballmer crashed it in the desert. Satya Nadella rallied the survivors, put it back together, and got it flying again

by yodon 7y ago

Bill Gates built an amazing airplane. Steve Ballmer crashed it in the desert. Satya Nadella rallied the survivors, put it back together, and got it flying again. Yes, he absolutely deserves the credit just as Ballmer absolutely deserves the blame.

saagarjha 7y ago
This is a very simplistic view, as the comment you're replying to has been trying to point out.
manigandham 7y ago
If you’re only looking at stock price then Ballmer did exceptionally well.
- bjg 7y ago
  Go look at the stock history, the moment Ballmer became CEO in 2000 the price stopped growing, lulled back down into the ~20-30's and stayed there until he stepped down in 2014. He did "exceptionally well" at keeping it where it was...
  - Dolores12 7y ago
    Correlation does not imply causation
  - mattrp 7y ago
    If you looked at historical p/e, the low for msft was the last year of ballmer. I think their p/e was 8... it was never a dog stock but an 8 is kind of like what you get if your p&g or coke. It’s not a growth stock anymore. That was about the time we started seeing the precursors to office365. So good things had started back then, but to assume a the role it has today where it’s equally a peer to Apple and google and not just relegated to be a waning player with a solid book in the enterprise (ie, sap, Oracle, etc) is quite an accomplishment. It’s as if msft finally did what gates and ballmer both failed to do: Become cool and strategic to an emerging / now dominant tech paradigm. It’s hard to give credit to one person ... credit goes to everyone there who not just went along with the pivot to cloud but took it to a whole new level.
  - tracker1 7y ago
    Doesn't MS pay dividends? Stock price alone isn't the whole story.
  - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
    > Go look at the stock history, the moment Ballmer became CEO in 2000 the price stopped growing Nah, not really. 2000 was the dot-com bust (which was the start of the death spiral for a lot of formerly high-flyers, including Sun Microsystems) and 2001 was the DoJ consent decree, which brought a lot of MS's attempts to expand to a screeching halt. Ballmer, while being thoroughly mediocre in a lot of ways, deserves at least some credit for not tanking MS in that era.
- phamilton 7y ago
  He did very well the day he stepped down. IIRC his personal net worth jumped like $700M as Microsoft rose 9% on the news of his retirement.
hylaride 7y ago
Actually, Ballmer did quite well at MS. He consistently increased earnings via Windows and Office during his tenure as CEO. He was a very good businessman. He was not, however, a product guy. Witness their failures with the Zune, mobile, early cloud computing. His problem was that he always tried to do what would be best for Microsoft and not the customer. You can get away with this if you already have an install base (windows/office), but with net new products people will look at what's best for them first. Even with developers developers developers he tried too hard to get people to use pure MS tech and made developing for the web on MS ugly if you using anything other than .NET. The result is a generation of developers on Macs and to a lesser extent linux. Funny enough, thinking of the customer is what MS did with the xbox and it worked out well enough.
- darkmighty 7y ago
  I feel that reflects quite well Steve Jobs vs Tim Cook as well. Jobs just wanted to make 'insanely great' products [for their users], with the side effect of profit, while Tim Cook is probably fixated on efficiency and Shareholder value. Apple has had record profits and performance, but most will tell it's not the same and its future is not so certain. It seems paradoxical that trying to maximize shareholder value at all costs could have the opposite effect long term; but think of it this way: almost every company in the world is fixated on profit -- that's not a differentiator. What makes the company is amazing products that people need, even depend upon -- once you have that, it is very hard to fail. Profit singlemindedness can definitely lead you astray, be fragile (of course, the 'user-oriented' robust strategy can be thought as ultimately also a form of profit seeking). What Nadella seems very competent at doing is also pleasing his workforce as an additional important stakeholder.
  - javajosh 7y ago
    Product development, especially in brand-new markets, requires a visionary with excellent taste, and the trust and respect of his team to revise with confidence. I can imagine what happened with Zune, cloud, etc is that (an enormously successful) MS assigned senior engineers to head up potentially prestigious new projects as professional rewards, but what they should have done was acquire-hire startup founders with fire in their belly (and strong vision) about the space. Ironically anyone with that much belly fire probably would have left MS to pursue it, basically disqualifying everyone left. :)
throwawaysea 7y ago
Actually Ballmer did many things correctly. There was an incorrect call / arrogance in approaching the mobile phone market a certain way, and delay in building something like their hardware organization. But I don't think this means Ballmer was a complete failure. Microsoft delivered stellar results in many dimensions during Ballmer's years as well.
statusquoantefa 7y ago
Ballmer built the amazing airplane that Bill Gates owned. Ballmer was there from close to the beginning, knew much more about business than Gates, and was intrumental.

by yodon 7y ago

saagarjha 7y ago

This is a very simplistic view, as the comment you're replying to has been trying to point out.

manigandham 7y ago

If you’re only looking at stock price then Ballmer did exceptionally well.

bjg 7y ago
Go look at the stock history, the moment Ballmer became CEO in 2000 the price stopped growing, lulled back down into the ~20-30's and stayed there until he stepped down in 2014. He did "exceptionally well" at keeping it where it was...
- Dolores12 7y ago
  Correlation does not imply causation
- mattrp 7y ago
  If you looked at historical p/e, the low for msft was the last year of ballmer. I think their p/e was 8... it was never a dog stock but an 8 is kind of like what you get if your p&g or coke. It’s not a growth stock anymore. That was about the time we started seeing the precursors to office365. So good things had started back then, but to assume a the role it has today where it’s equally a peer to Apple and google and not just relegated to be a waning player with a solid book in the enterprise (ie, sap, Oracle, etc) is quite an accomplishment. It’s as if msft finally did what gates and ballmer both failed to do: Become cool and strategic to an emerging / now dominant tech paradigm. It’s hard to give credit to one person ... credit goes to everyone there who not just went along with the pivot to cloud but took it to a whole new level.
- tracker1 7y ago
  Doesn't MS pay dividends? Stock price alone isn't the whole story.
- ThrowawayR2 7y ago
  > Go look at the stock history, the moment Ballmer became CEO in 2000 the price stopped growing Nah, not really. 2000 was the dot-com bust (which was the start of the death spiral for a lot of formerly high-flyers, including Sun Microsystems) and 2001 was the DoJ consent decree, which brought a lot of MS's attempts to expand to a screeching halt. Ballmer, while being thoroughly mediocre in a lot of ways, deserves at least some credit for not tanking MS in that era.
phamilton 7y ago
He did very well the day he stepped down. IIRC his personal net worth jumped like $700M as Microsoft rose 9% on the news of his retirement.

hylaride 7y ago

Actually, Ballmer did quite well at MS. He consistently increased earnings via Windows and Office during his tenure as CEO. He was a very good businessman. He was not, however, a product guy. Witness their failures with the Zune, mobile, early cloud computing. His problem was that he always tried to do what would be best for Microsoft and not the customer. You can get away with this if you already have an install base (windows/office), but with net new products people will look at what's best for them first. Even with developers developers developers he tried too hard to get people to use pure MS tech and made developing for the web on MS ugly if you using anything other than .NET. The result is a generation of developers on Macs and to a lesser extent linux. Funny enough, thinking of the customer is what MS did with the xbox and it worked out well enough.

darkmighty 7y ago
I feel that reflects quite well Steve Jobs vs Tim Cook as well. Jobs just wanted to make 'insanely great' products [for their users], with the side effect of profit, while Tim Cook is probably fixated on efficiency and Shareholder value. Apple has had record profits and performance, but most will tell it's not the same and its future is not so certain. It seems paradoxical that trying to maximize shareholder value at all costs could have the opposite effect long term; but think of it this way: almost every company in the world is fixated on profit -- that's not a differentiator. What makes the company is amazing products that people need, even depend upon -- once you have that, it is very hard to fail. Profit singlemindedness can definitely lead you astray, be fragile (of course, the 'user-oriented' robust strategy can be thought as ultimately also a form of profit seeking). What Nadella seems very competent at doing is also pleasing his workforce as an additional important stakeholder.
- javajosh 7y ago
  Product development, especially in brand-new markets, requires a visionary with excellent taste, and the trust and respect of his team to revise with confidence. I can imagine what happened with Zune, cloud, etc is that (an enormously successful) MS assigned senior engineers to head up potentially prestigious new projects as professional rewards, but what they should have done was acquire-hire startup founders with fire in their belly (and strong vision) about the space. Ironically anyone with that much belly fire probably would have left MS to pursue it, basically disqualifying everyone left. :)

throwawaysea 7y ago

Actually Ballmer did many things correctly. There was an incorrect call / arrogance in approaching the mobile phone market a certain way, and delay in building something like their hardware organization. But I don't think this means Ballmer was a complete failure. Microsoft delivered stellar results in many dimensions during Ballmer's years as well.

statusquoantefa 7y ago

Ballmer built the amazing airplane that Bill Gates owned. Ballmer was there from close to the beginning, knew much more about business than Gates, and was intrumental.