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Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

• kstrauser 2y ago
  [flagged]
• voidfunc 2y ago
  Baller was the right CEO for 90s Microsoft up through about 2002. He was the wrong CEO for 2010-onward Microsoft but it took a chunk of years for the board to realize that.
  • drewcoo 2y ago
    Gates was CEO during the 90s.
• lysace 2y ago
  Wow, gotta love the recent MS fanfic. Ballmer was just an average sales jock along for the ride. Edit: Seems like I was proven wrong. Assumptions are... assumptions :).
  • FanaHOVA 2y ago
    I don't have a strong opinion on his tenure at MSFT, but I don't know many sales jocks with a 1600 SAT score and a degree in applied math from Harvard.
    • mixmastamyk 2y ago
      Effective sales and marketing is more dependent on math than most people realize.
      • lysace 2y ago
        ...how? I get that it correlates with intelligence, but with math, specifically?
        • mixmastamyk 2y ago
          Lots of metrics to analyze and statistics to crunch. Knowing where to focus the schmoozing is as important as the schmoozing itself.
          • lysace 2y ago
            :-)
    • lysace 2y ago
      Good point. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2002/6/4/personable-ballmer-leads-college-extracurriculars-microsoft/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2002/6/4/personable-ballm... > In high school, Ballmer scored a 1600 on his SATs and was a National Merit Scholar. Would the Crimson verify this or just trust the claim?
      • vlovich123 2y ago
        He's listed on their page: https://www.nationalmerit.org/s/1758/interior.aspx?sid=1758&gid=2&pgid=416 https://www.nationalmerit.org/s/1758/interior.aspx?sid=1758&...
        • lysace 2y ago
          Thumbs up.
  • itsoktocry 2y ago
    >Ballmer was just an average sales jock along for the ride. Classic "nerd" prejudice; Ballmer was not dumb.
    • wetpaws 2y ago
      [dead]
• mixmastamyk 2y ago
  I disagree. Tech companies need tech leadership, and Ballmer didn't have the chops for that, or imagination either. He got some deals done, I'm sure. How so? Missed mobile after working on it for a decade+ previously. Despite developers⁴ they didn't implement a decent terminal until a few years ago, thirty years late. Enough said. It's probably better for the industry Ballmer was mediocre or worse. I'm often forced to do business with Microsoft already. His horrible deal to buy Yahoo would have improved the playing field further.
• maxk42 2y ago
  I'm not going to give it up for him.
• OtomotO 2y ago
  Ah, rose colored glasses never get old :) He was a CEO, that much can be said. The rest is up for debate.
• bmitc 2y ago
  Isn't it pretty well documented that he made several decisions that turned out to not pan out and then were nearly immediately reversed by the current CEO that turned out to be massive successes? That doesn't scream "underrated".
  • RandomThoughts3 2y ago
    It’s so well documented you can’t even come with an actual one while writing your comment.
• exabrial 2y ago
  No he wasn’t haha. The only thing he did was slide the company sideways via pre existing illegal monopoly. In fact, they lost most of their monopoly under his supervision . At no point did the quality of their products improve, and that’s evidenced with this year’s massive massive Windows outage, or Garmins mega ransomware, out a hundred other people who’ve been hacked via Windows. If you’re running Windows for anything, it’s only a matter of when, not if.
  • abirch 2y ago
    I remember when he retired and the MSFT jumped. Satya is underrated.
    • parl_match 2y ago
      Satya's tenure has seen the fall of Xbox, the lost relevance of Windows. While moving to a services model is going to be very lucrative for them, they risk competitors offering swap-out models.
      • readyplayernull 2y ago
        Recall Recall??
      • p1necone 2y ago
        Gamepass and the lack of first party exclusives both seem like moves to kill the console in the long term, but as of now it's still a serious competitor to playstation and switch no?
        • Sakos 2y ago
          In which region? It's basically irrelevant outside the US.
        • noirbot 2y ago
          Nintendo's always been on its own for these sorts of things, but even the folks I know with an XBox just use their Playstation these days if they have both. XBox just isn't really in the conversation any more. That could totally change in another generation of consoles, but their position wasn't great coming into this generation and it doesn't feel like it's gotten any better. Basic numbers I've been seeing on a quick search has PS5 almost doubling the Series X sales.
• loloquwowndueo 2y ago
  Developers, developers, developers, developers.
  • walrus01 2y ago
    YARRRRGGHHHHH!!!!!!
  • dhaavi 2y ago
    Scrolled through all the comments to find this and upvote.
• suprjami 2y ago
  We did get the Developers music video: https://youtu.be/rRm0NDo1CiY https://youtu.be/rRm0NDo1CiY and for that I'm thankful.
  • walrus01 2y ago
    And Domokun Developers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7ZDH45OAt8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7ZDH45OAt8
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• bigstrat2003 2y ago
  I think that a lot of people are commenting here without actually reading the article. The article lays out a concrete (and imo pretty persuasive) argument as to why the author thinks that Ballmer was a decent CEO. You should really read it, but the TLDR is: * Some of the big feathers in Microsoft's cap today (O365 and Azure) started during Ballmer's tenure * While the company had plenty of failed initiatives during his time, what matters in the end is that the hits made up for the misses in terms of profit, and they did * Metrics like revenue and so on were all positive during his tenure Frankly, unless the author is factually incorrect on these points (which I don't have the knowledge to assert either way), I think it's a good argument.
  • chucke1992 2y ago
    He was a good CFO type of a leader. Unlike a lot of other companies like Intel or Boeing, that were run by CFOs, he did not last long enough to run MSFT into the ground due to being too late to modern trends. Sure he build the foundation, but he was not smart enough to lead the path forward. With him MSFT would have never reached top 3 most valuable companies - I would say it would be at 500-600b maybe at best. Even with Azure and Office, he was too much into "bundle with Windows" type of guy. Similar to how he was saying that touchscreen would never work as businesses needed buttons to type. I think with Satya, they would have tried multi touch screen at least for sure. By and large, Ballmer was not the very open minded person. And his attempt to buy Yahoo...Oof.
    • RandomThoughts3 2y ago
      > Unlike a lot of other companies like Intel or Boeing, that were run by CFOs, he did not last long enough to run MSFT into the ground due to being too late to modern trends. How can you right this in good faith while replying to a comment laying out to you that Microsoft most successful investments a decade later were all started by Ballmer and that he took a lot of risks with R&D? > Even with Azure and Office, he was too much into "bundle with Windows" type of guy. Seriously? Ballmer started Office365 you know. Also the Microsoft Phone with, you know, touch screens. The sheer amount of historical revionism in this thread even in the face of hard facts is mind numbing. Honestly, even discarding all the rest, Ballmer would deserve more respect than he gets there for getting Microsoft out of the antitrust lawsuits alone.
• underdeserver 2y ago
  I read the entire article, and I love how virtually every comment here is what Dan wrote about.
  • underdeserver 2y ago
    Also, I agree with the gist of the article, in that a lot of Nadella's success is stuff that takes more than 3-4 years to execute. Ballmer, or Microsoft under Ballmer, had to have been laying the groundwork for Azure, TypeScript and VS code before they took off under Nadella.
    • ytoawwhra92 2y ago
      > Ballmer, or Microsoft under Ballmer, had to have been laying the groundwork for Azure, TypeScript and VS code before they took off under Nadella. More specifically: Nadella under Ballmer laid the groundwork for those things. Dan lists three big wins for Ballmer: Bing, Azure, Office365. Nadella led Bing and Azure. Not sure where Office365 sat in the org chart, but even if he wasn't managing it a _lot_ of services at Microsoft at that time relied on technology that was developed in Bing and Azure. He was promoted for good reason.
      • underdeserver 2y ago
        Good point. I wasn't aware of that, and I think it should have been mentioned in the blog post.
    • al_borland 2y ago
      But weren't those the areas Nadella was over before becoming CEO? One could argue that Nadella was laying his own groundwork.
• RyJones 2y ago
  If Microsoft had just tracked the market while he was CEO: what is the delta in market cap? His vision destroyed multiple Enrons of shareholder value.
• colonCapitalDee 2y ago
  > Even Bing, widely considered a failure, on last reported revenue and current P/E ratio, would be 12th most valuable tech company in the world, between Tencent and ASML. A tiny slice of the search market (4% IIRC) is worth this much? Incredible. Everyone knows Google is swimming in money, but I guess it never really computed for me that managing to grab a tiny slice of the search market would be so valuable. If I was making a guess prior to reading this, my intuition would have been that Bing was some kind of loss leader. Shows what I know! Hah
  • greggyb 2y ago
    Bing Ads is big business. Digital marketing is enormous. Google and Facebook have larger portions of the pie, but a sliver of a huge pie is still a lot of pie.
  • legitster 2y ago
    There are a lot of services that just repackage and resell Bing! DuckDuckGo being probably the most successful example. Which, to OP's point, is a testament to the particular style of business that Ballmer was good at - building enterprise and partner channels.
• dilyevsky 2y ago
  Is there a name for this phenomenon when past leaders are viewed in a better light than they objectively deserved? I see this in politics a lot (eg Dubya) but in business too.
  • bydo 2y ago
    Hagiography?
  • unfunco 2y ago
    Rosy retrospection? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection
  • ralegh 2y ago
    I think this is a facet of human memory - eg thinking childhood was better than it was because the bad/boring parts aren’t memorable. I also get this with anxious/stressful periods of time, which are overwhelmingly bad at the time but very quickly forgotten.
• hermanradtke 2y ago
  > Much like Gary Bernhardt's talk, which was panned because he made the problem statement and solution so obvious that people didn't realize they'd learned something non-trivial I really want to see this video, but I cannot find it anywhere. I checked https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcGKfGEEONaDvuLDFFKRfzbsaBuVVXdYa https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcGKfGEEONaDvuLDFFKRf... but I believe Gary asks that his videos not be shown (which I am fine with). I also checked https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks but I do not see it there either. Should I be looking somewhere else?
  • hyperhopper 2y ago
    His "using you're types good" talk being censored is my go-to example for how "cancel culture" and "wokeness" has gone too far, a good useful talk not meant to be harmful to anybody, with no evidence that anybody was hurt by it, is removed from the world for the far reaching fear that one day some person might not be happy about it. The fact that years later people still want to learn from it and nobody has every talked about it being an issue shows we have gone too far as a society on the side of caution and never doing anything that wouldn't stand up to a fortune 10 HR exec panel.
    • spookie 2y ago
      What was "wrong" about the talk exactly?
      • hyperhopper 2y ago
        He effectively pretended to be dumb. And that included using the wrong "you're" and very simple dialects of English and mannerisms which he thought could potentially be seen as disparaging some groups. I think it was so generic and so clearly a joke it would be insane to pretend it was making fun of a group that existed in real life. For reference in the talk he also listed strongly typed languages as "weekly typed", static as dynamic, and had a MacBook on stage display a BSOD. The talk was comedic genius and a fun tongue in cheek commentary on the industry in 8 minutes. But it has been deemed to dangerous to society to be allowed to exist.
• _fsql 2y ago
  The only thing missing from the article was to say that Ballmer loved Linux and open source but that he was misunderstood lol. Ballmer was a fucking despot and a piece of shit. That article is an ode to the disgusting despotism that Microsoft had.
  • hinkley 2y ago
    Ballmer was a gorilla in an expensive suit.
• pram 2y ago
  I don't think Ballmer was underrated as CEO personally (windows phone lol) but goddamn he's the platonic ideal of a hype guy. The amount of energy and enthusiasm emanating from him is always incredible. I'd at least say theres a good chance he was instrumental in Microsoft being as successful as it was.
• edm0nd 2y ago
  Bill Gates: can jump over an office chair - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxaCOHT0pmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxaCOHT0pmI Steve Ballmer: developers developers developers developers developers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs Two of my favorite videos haha
  • fnord123 2y ago
    > Steve Ballmer: developers developers developers developers developers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs If you haven't seen the remix, here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gI_HGDgG7c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gI_HGDgG7c
  • oaththrowaway 2y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GM4Lt5k24s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GM4Lt5k24s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgPt6mvjr5Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgPt6mvjr5Q Here's a few more to add to your favorites
    • edm0nd 2y ago
      this basketball one is glorious!
  • rightbyte 2y ago
    That chair jump is actually kinda impressive...
  • gattilorenz 2y ago
    Steve Ballmer: REVERSI! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgJS2tQPGKQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgJS2tQPGKQ
• chucke1992 2y ago
  The problem with Ballmer is that he missed a lot of opportunities. Satya is much better in that regard.
  • RandomThoughts3 2y ago
    Is he? What did he start? Most of MS current successes were launched under Ballmer most notably Azure. Satya has been good with acquisitions but what else?
    • chucke1992 2y ago
      But here is the thing - launching the initiative means nothing. Satya is able to expand and develop it. Like with Ballmer we certainly would not have got O365 to iOS for example. It would be 100% bundled one way or another to Windows services or something or browser or whatever. Even with Azure we would not have got such aggressive expansion and attempts to push services across Windows and Linux or playing with Open Source platforms like K8S. I think Ballmer was closer to the modern Google who is hell-bent on not using anything Windows. Ballmer's attempt to buy Yahoo and disregard for touch screen phones is what defined his legacy. He was a good CFO who knew how to run business, but not a great CEO. > Satya has been good with acquisitions but what else? Ability to buy right things is important too. Like Ballmer wanted to buy Yahoo, while Satya bought Github. One cost 80b, while another created a whole foundation for Copilot push. Linkedin purchase was great and with OpenAI I am 100% sure that Ballmer would have missed AI train (like AWS did).
      • RandomThoughts3 2y ago
        > Ballmer's attempt to buy Yahoo and disregard for touch screen phones is what defined his legacy. You are weirdly obsessed with that but Ballmer actually started Bing and bought Nokia to make touchscreen phones. I think you are extremely biased to the point of being entirely disconnected from the facts at hand. > Ability to buy right things is important too. Ballmer bought Skype and launched the foundation of what would become Teams - you know - arguably the most important corporate piece of software after Covid.
• bawolff 2y ago
  > One part of the plan to kill Google was to redirect users who typed google.com into their address bar to MSN search. Crazy they were ever considering this.
  • gitaarik 2y ago
    It's Microsoft
    • everfrustrated 2y ago
      Folks have forgotten how truly aggressive Microsoft was pre-antitrust days.
      • gitaarik 2y ago
        I guess I'm getting old :P
• RandomThoughts3 2y ago
  It’s funny how all the comments here are falling in the trap described in the beginning of the article of disliking Ballmer because he comes from the sales side and they can’t fathom someone not coming from the tech side leading a tech company. What’s undeniable in the article is that Ballmer literally built what remains Microsoft best asset even before being a CEO there: it’s incredibly good relationship with its corporate customers. Honestly, it’s really what sets Microsoft apart for me. When you do deal with them as a corporate customer, you really get the feeling that they understand the way things work in a big corp IT department and will be reliable and predictable.
  • kjs3 2y ago
    When you do deal with them as a corporate customer, you really get the feeling that they understand the way things work in a big corp IT department and will be reliable and predictable. Just got done negotiating our E5 license last year and omfg is this laugh-out-loud untrue. Don't even get me started on how we have to check the Azure websites before every meeting with our M$ counterparts to figure out what Azure services they've changed the name of since the last call. But yes, completely agree it's the corporate customers that are the wind beneath their sales. But it's because they understand that for almost any large corp IT department on the planet, telling the 85% of their employees who don't give a steaming crap what the nerds think about Windows or Ballmer, "you have to dump Excel & Word and learn something else"[1] is not a hill any of them are willing to die on. We have people that won't use Excel on a Mac because once they found a place where it didn't work exactly like the Windows version. [1] No. LibreOffice is not the answer.
    • RandomThoughts3 2y ago
      > We have people that won't use Excel on a Mac because once they found a place where it didn't work exactly like the Windows version. Then again, Excel on a Mac is significantly inferior to the Windows version to be honest. > Don't even get me started on how we have to check the Azure websites before every meeting with our M$ counterparts to figure out what Azure services they've changed the name of since the last call. Not my experience at all and we spend millions of dollars a year with them.
• KaoruAoiShiho 2y ago
  He's underrated in the sense that a lot of CEOs of his era completely destroyed their companies, see Intel, GE, GM, Yahoo, etc and he didn't. So that's already a win, he set up the company in a decent position so that when someone with more vision takes over they'll have something to work with, even if he didn't have the talent to pull things off himself. He had a couple of wins (Azure, Office 365) along with many many losses, and they're good enough to secure him a 6/10 on my ratings.
  • greggyb 2y ago
    If you trust the article, then Azure and O365 are each, independently, easily Fortune 100 companies if separated. These "couple of wins along with many many losses" are some of the most valuable products in the world. Imagine a VC fund that invested in a few dozen product companies, two of which were Azure and O365. Is that a 6/10 VC company? Why is the logic different for a CEO making bets for a company's next several decades?
    • KaoruAoiShiho 2y ago
      Because the company has more strategic resources than a VC, and has need to defend existing businesses. MS should've been able to simply just extend their OS monopoly into all platforms and all architectures, but they didn't, and to a vast swath of the world have become irrelevant, and worse, have lost their ability to become relevant. It's a decline from being the monopolist to simply a player, sure they executed well in enterprise sales and was fast in picking up OpenAI, but they have lost the ability to use their strategic resources to save xbox, help azure overcome competition, or push a mixer or Surface or whatever. Edit: For people who don't understand the last sentence think about the way that O365 was able to help MS push Teams to stave off Zoom and others despite being objectively trash. MS should've been able to keep control of the internet, but they lost their moat to Google (Chrome), and the same story for various consumer products. Bing was a decent win but with a better consumer story they should've also been able to threaten social and youtube and so on. But now they're completely irrelevant there.
      • 2y ago
• amadeuspagel 2y ago
  Mostly agree, but curious about the claim that Bing is profitable: how does that account for being the default search engine in the windows start menu and microsoft edge?
  • junto 2y ago
    I hate to say this but I’ve been using Bing for two years now on my corporate notebook and it’s pretty good. I could change it to Google if I want to, but quite honestly since Google’s search results have gone so spammy, I haven’t seen the need to switch.
• cheaprentalyeti 2y ago
  "To sum it up, for the past twenty years, people having been dunking on Ballmer for being a buffoon who doesn't understand tech and who was, at best, some kind of bean counter who knew how to keep the lights on but didn't know how to foster innovation and caused Microsoft to fall behind in every important market." It's important to keep the lights on while waiting for the next new development to take off. I think it's an undervalued skill.
  • noen 2y ago
    He didn’t keep the lights on while waiting for new development to take off. He actively lost 40+ billion dollars on horrible acquisitions, and actively stifled internal innovation to ensure existing product lines weren’t threatened. On the sales side he streamlined Microsoft into a single monolithic sales motion that killed dozens of products before they started because the target customer/market didn’t fit the EA model. This included Azure that took nearly a decade after his departure to unwind so the sales force could actually sell consumption based products and services. I honestly can’t think of anything substantially positive he achieved in his tenure other than promoting Satya and Scott G and a handful of others. All of the contemporary media reports don’t know about the laundry list of near sighted, anti competitive, anti innovation shit he put on the company.
    • RandomThoughts3 2y ago
      > I honestly can’t think of anything substantially positive he achieved in his tenure other than promoting Satya and Scott G and a handful of others. Ok, but apart from fostering a great generation of new executives, investing in currently extremely profitable products and business lines, streamlining our sales operations and getting us out of these life threatening antitrust cases, what did Steve Ballmer ever do for us?
• fnord123 2y ago
  A rare miss by Mr. Luu. > Ballmer wins... 2010: Microsoft creates Azure The Azure project was run by Nadella before he became CEO. And it succeeded despite Ballmer. Azure was seen as the Microsoft cloud, where people ran Windows Servers. But Microsoft had long lost the battle for the server space to Linux. When Ballmer stepped aside, only then could Nadella drop the limiters and push the Microsoft <3 Linux perspective to get the message out that Azure is a home for Linux workloads too.
  • paulpauper 2y ago
    Agree .Balmer was a disaster. Microsoft stock basically languished from 2003-2013 as everything else went up.
    • datavirtue 2y ago
      I was looking at the candles for all of Microsoft the other day and was surprised (and kind of pissed) that Microsoft didn't really take off until 2015. You could have gotten Microsoft dirt cheap for decades compared to the current issue price.
    • dingaling 2y ago
      Which only means he was a 'disaster' from the speculative trader's perspective. Stock trading has no benefit to a company unless they need to go to the markets for another round of funding, which Microsoft didn't.
      • kortilla 2y ago
        This is not true when your employees’ compensation depends on the stock. They all implicitly become speculative traders and watching the employees at Amazon/Google become millionaires in a couple of years caused a lot of brain drain at Microsoft.
  • dvt 2y ago
    Azure launched as (and still is) a complete dumpster fire. Unless your company has business ties to MS (e.g. your usage is heavily subsidized, which is most of their large clients from what I understand), I would never in a million years use it over GCP or AWS.
• sublinear 2y ago
  I'm still somewhat bitter about the failure of Windows Phone and can't believe it even happened. The iPhone wasn't even that good at the time and Android was a total mess. Microsoft dropped the ball on their first party app dev, and several flagship phones had great hardware but terrible driver support. Microsoft clearly wasn't interested in the consumer market anymore and it shows through to today.
  • jillesvangurp 2y ago
    I worked at Nokia Maps at the time the Microsoft acquisition of the phone business was being negotiated. I never met Ballmer but I heard some stories of people that did. Intense guy apparently. I was at two joint meetings with MS to discuss some of the details of things related to the thing I was working on. Ultimately that wasn't transferred to MS. MS made a big mess of the whole windows phone project. First it royally screwed Nokia over by deciding to do a big overhaul of Windows Phone OS internals and effectively leaving Nokia dead in the water with now obsolete products that they just launched. I'm sure this was intentional on Ballmer's side: weaken Nokia and acquire their phone business. But he threw out the baby with the bathwater. The first generation of windows phone was basically windows CE repackaged. The second one was a whole new kernel (windows NT based, I guess). The transition took crazy long. MS announced early and this made the old generation of Lumia phones a really hard sell. There was a vague promise of upgrades that of course never happened. And then the acquisition rumors destroyed the OEM ecosystem because they'd be competing with MS on phones. Then MS bought what remained of Nokia's phone division and it got busy demolishing it right away (including an actual Nokia Android phone that existed). When Nadella inherited this train wreck, he unceremoniously put an end to the whole thing and fired pretty much the whole team. At that point it very little hope of catching up because the OEMs and users had left. As much as I loved Nokia, it was the right decision at that point. All the good stuff had long been killed/cancelled already. It was Ballmer's fixation on Windows that led to this. Nokia had a bonafide Android competitor in the form of Meego. Backing Linux would have been the right move. Nadella might have approached this differently.
• devinegan 2y ago
  "When Ballmer became CEO in January 2000, Microsoft's stock was around $53. When he stepped down in February 2014, it was around $38." By that metric, no he wasn't underrated.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • throw4950sh06 2y ago
    Msft had a stock split during that time.
  • missedthecue 2y ago
    Unfair thing to measure him by in my opinion. Steve Ballmer inherited Microsoft when the stock traded at a P/E of 60. When he left it was 14, in line with many other tech stocks during that time. (Even Apple was lower) He took earnings per share from $0.70 to $2.63 during his tenure. A CAGR of 10.5% across 13 years in one of the world's biggest companies. He couldn't control multiple compression following the dotcom bust.
• codeflo 2y ago
  I'm not informed enough to rebut this, and don't want to be quoted in the follow-up article that suggests HN is still too dumb to get the genius of Ballmer, but here's my take. It's only the footnote of the article that mentions Ballmer's "stage persona". I think that's the important point, and I would add that his "interview persona" might have been even worse. Back then, he was quoted as saying insanely dumb shit all the time. Like when he literally publicly laughed about the iPhone. Or when he called a Zune feature to share files between devices "squirting". Maybe he did make all kinds of brilliant decisions internally. I wouldn't know, but neither would the stock market. If the CEO comes across as not understanding tech, it's likely the market will price that in.
  • legitster 2y ago
    I think a better way of understanding Ballmer is that he really struggled to relate to end consumers, but he understood their business partners very well.
    • toyg 2y ago
      He was very much an '80s/'90s exec. Back then, execs were not "visionaire rockstars"; they were wisecracking boomers in suits. Microsoft walked a very thin line between very different worlds, and Ballmer was closer to the old-world type than the new.
  • causality0 2y ago
    Brief data transmissions being called "squirts" is common, and was more common at the time.
    • wsc981 2y ago
      I squirt all the time on Twitter.
    • kstrauser 2y ago
      I've been involved with computer networking since approximately 1982, and I've never once heard someone use "squirts" outside talking about Zunes. I don't doubt that it was jargon inside very specific niches, but it has never been common elsewhere.
• legitster 2y ago
  Having spent some time at the Microsoft campus, I can tell you this is basically the consensus view from employees today. Ballmer was not a cool, trendy, or fun CEO who people rallied behind - but he more or less "got the job done". He was the captain of a massive ship with a turning radius the size of a continent guiding it through icebergs. Azure's success was specifically set in motion under Ballmer. Owed to the fact that it was developed to Microsoft's strengths (enterprise support) that it didn't piss off too many of their partners and sales channels. Same with Office 365 and all of their other successful services. None are glamourous - but all are impressive with how not awful they are given their design constraints. Even things like Surface, while considered a failure, did its intended job of getting hardware partners to get their act together and make better consumer products.
  • signa11 2y ago
    do you think if azure would have even _happened_ if mr. jeffrey snover was not tenacious enough ?
  • dyauspitr 2y ago
    Azure happened because of Nadella (who led the project) despite Ballmer.
    • SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago
      Would love some sources cited for both your take and the parent's take.
    • dexterdog 2y ago
      Azure may be successful financially, but as someone who has finally used it for the last two years after 15 years of AWS and a little bit of GCP, I can't help but think the world would be a better place if it didn't exist or if some lesser player had that market share.
      • wongarsu 2y ago
        For most stuff Azure is pretty meh, but it seems to have the best features for running Windows servers and integrates well with Active Directory (or MS Entra or whatever they currently call it). Features that I don't need as a startup founder, but that would be very interesting for many places I worked at. Basically the cloud for everyone but the tech companies
• ajkjk 2y ago
  When I judge someone I compare them to what they ought to have been able to do. Bing, Azure, and Office 365 were mid and it's the person in charge's responsibility to do better than that. The world would be a better place if he had done a better job. But maybe he was a fine CEO, dunno about that. I guess that's measured in profits.
• nopurpose 2y ago
  Balmer launched Get the facts smearing campaign. It says all about who Balmer is.
• dh2022 2y ago
  To the list of misses he forgot to add Skype and Nokia purchases, IE market share decreasing from something like 90% to less than 20%, Windows losing the battle in the data center, deriding iPhone and open source. Ballmer blocked Office on iPhone even though it was ready to go: Office on iPhone was released on Sep 2014; Satya became CEO on Feb 2014. Never-mind stack ranking (which he copied from Jack Welch) and the cut-throat culture it inspired (seeing Somasegar bicker with the head of Excel over porting Excel code base to VS .Net in 2003 at a DevDiv 'morale' event was something) So yeah, good riddance!
• whobre 2y ago
  His biggest success was the failure to acquire Yahoo for 44 bn in 2008
• wkat4242 2y ago
  For me it was more his personality that made me dislike him. He acted like a baboon on stage. Nadella is much more composed and seems more intelligent as a result. I don't like that kind of extreme expression and this is important because I wouldn't respect such a leader at work. See also other stuff like the chair-throwing incident of course. Also something I didn't see covered, this was also the dark age where Microsoft hated linux. Now they say they love Linux and there is certainly some affection going around (though I remain sceptical). One thing I don't really like about Satya Nadella by the way, his AI strategy is a mess. They're slamming stuff on the market way too quickly (see the recall fiasco), they call everything 'copilot' so even their own people get confused which product does what because there are literally over 30 separate copilot products now. Stuff is changing by the day (until 2 weeks ago the copilot button controlled both consumer and corporate copilots, now it only works with consumer). It's the kind of overeager rush that makes it feel like nobody has a clue what they're doing anymore.
  • maeil 2y ago
    > One thing I don't really like about Satya Nadella by the way, his AI strategy is a mess. They're slamming stuff on the market way too quickly (see the recall fiasco) Google did an even worse job in that regard, Gemini's reputation is still greatly tainted in the tech world despite now being competitive with the other frontier models.
    • wkat4242 2y ago
      I don't really agree. Google is great at AI development, they're just not so good at marketing. And I think they're right not to push it too hard like MS is doing. Because the tech still needs work. Personally I use neither, but I use llama locally which is amazingly good considering the limited resources it has to work with here.
      • maeil 2y ago
        What I'm getting is that Google did push too hard, they gave Bard/early Gemini demos when the product was still miles from ready and compared awfully to GPT, and they're still suffering from it.
• Rastonbury 2y ago
  Culturally everyone I've spoken to who has seen both Ballmer era and later Nadella complains how terrible the company was to work for back then
• not_a_bot_4sho 2y ago
  Funny story. I used to see Steve almost every weekday for a couple of years. I can't speak to his business skills, but I can attest that he never once offered a tip for his daily black iced tea. We'd even have it ready for him before he showed up so he never had to wait! He would pay with cash, and I'd hand him his change and drink, and that was that. It's funny to me now: one of the richest men in the world and he never once offered a tip. Frugality aside, he was always very polite and warm so I can't be mad. Makes for a good ice breaker story. Edit: holy moly, this is a sensitive subject. Please remember this was from a time before tipflation. Tipping meant you left your change behind once in a while only if you felt the desire to show appreciation. It wasn't an obligation. Yes, I still do think it's a funny story. Roast me for being entitled lol
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • arandomusername 2y ago
    What frugality? He was paying the full price that it was being sold at.
    • stouset 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
        That depends on whether it's table service, or whether you yourself go to the counter to buy your drink. Until very recently, that was the dividing line for tips (except at bars).
        • deleted 2y ago
          [deleted]
        • isodev 2y ago
          How cruel can one be to try to come up with such a "line"? In my mind it goes like this: If you're served by a human and tips are not included in normal pay by law, you tip. If it's a country where people can't live with just the one job, you tip a lot.
• Maxatar 2y ago
  My understanding is that Azure became an incredibly profitable cloud platform once it became open to Linux, which was something done after Ballmer had stepped down and Nadella became CEO.
• kettlecorn 2y ago
  Two small anecdotes about Ballmer from my internship there: At an intern event an intern asked some question along the lines of "What's one quality of a competitor you wish Microsoft had?" They were clearly asking about cultural qualities but Ballmer's response was "I'd take Google's search engine because that thing prints money". Then he did this super exaggerated gesture and noise imitating a money machine printing money. At the time that was a super disappointing answer to me because as an intern within the Bing division I really felt like there was this culture of "Bing is better and it's not our fault Google is beating us". To see Ballmer not use the question as an opportunity to talk about ways Microsoft could improve felt like seeing the source of that cultural problem. The other was from an intern event with Phil Spencer. Phil Spencer at the time was the head of Xbox's Games Division, but not yet the head of Xbox. Spencer said he was in Ballmer's office one day and Ballmer asked him "Why don't you just make the games that sell?"
• adabyron 2y ago
  What Dan doesn't mention is that Steve was given the reins to a sinking ship if I recall. The US Govt was just finishing it's trial on Microsoft & was watching them closely. Tech bubble just burst. On day 1 of the transition after Steve, the stock jumped like crazy & continued that momentum. The stock was, as Dan mentions, at an unfairly low p/e ratio too. Idk if Steve was great but seems he was given the role of transition CEO. Plus did Bill ever really leave? It'll be interesting to see how Satya finishes his career & the first few years after. Microsoft was making really good software the first few years after Satya took over & a lot of people were wanting to work there. Since Covid though, their software quality & updates have crashed imo.
  • hilux 2y ago
    > On day 1 of the transition after Steve, the stock jumped like crazy & continued that momentum. Many people would interpret that as "investors had no faith in Steve Ballmer and were delighted to see his back." Do you have a different interpretation? Also, you seem to be implying that the trial was some external event, and not directly the fault of Bill and Steve. That is not how most people felt at the time.
    • toyg 2y ago
      > implying that the trial was some external event In many ways, it was. The political stars aligned "just so", in a way we've not really seen before or since. Many, many other companies got away with much more egregious behaviour (hello, Apple).
      • hilux 2y ago
        Apple does not have the percentage ownership of the market that Microsoft had with both Windows and Office. And to my knowledge Apple operates out in the open, i.e. they do not lie to everyone, and do not bundle shitty products with monopoly products in the way that Microsoft habitually did - and may still do.
    • adabyron 2y ago
      > Many people would interpret that as "investors had no faith in Steve Ballmer and were delighted to see his back." Do you have a different interpretation? You're 100% right. Starbucks just did something similar. I personally don't believe these jumps are warranted until the new CEO proves their ability to change the ship. It would be really interesting to hear from Microsoft insiders what changes were being made before the CEO changeover & what ones were heavily done by Satya. > Also, you seem to be implying that the trial was some external event, and not directly the fault of Bill and Steve. That is not how most people felt at the time. While many people may have felt they were being very anti-competitive at the time, the same standard has not been held to other companies or Microsoft much over the past 20 years in the United States.
• addicted 2y ago
  This article doesn’t understand what was fundamentally wrong with Ballmer’s leadership and what Nadella actually changed. The specific technologies that were successful is irrelevant. Microsoft has and continues to invest in nearly every computer related technology that may come around the corner or they got late on. The problem with Microsoft was everything went through Windows. The entire company was designed to promote Windows. This was the fundamental flaw with Microsoft that Nadella changed. He quickly not just made Windows just another part of Microsoft’s business, to a great extent he actively devalued it. The fact that Ballmer invested in Azure, etc before Nadella would all be irrelevant because under Ballmer Azure would have remained a red headed step child to Windows, so it’s unlikely to have seen much success under him anyways. Same goes for pretty much everything else Microsoft is doing right now.
  • dataflow 2y ago
    I don't know anything more than the next guy here, but just reading this, it seems like a really underrated and insightful comment. Thanks for explaining it so clearly.
  • ThrowawayB7 2y ago
    Except Steven Sinofsky, longtime head of the Windows division and one of the internal forces preventing Microsoft from going in alternate directions, was pushed out under Ballmer's tenure, not Nadella's. Granted, Ballmer made the mistake of putting Terry Myerson, who headed up the failed Windows Phone effort, in charge of Windows but that's another story.
    • iforgotpassword 2y ago
      Not just that everything was going through windows as GP said, whatever market they entered, they acted like their product will be like windows in that sector too from day one. Zune was like that, but the best example is windows phone, version 8 more precisely which is the first proper modern smartphone version. Google realized that if they want to stand a chance in catching up to the iPhone, they need to shove android in people's faces, and lure in devs. Microsoft entered the game (WP8) when android already had a foothold, making it even harder. They started with a mostly empty app store, and while they were clever enough to make sure the most widely used apps would be available by effectively bribing those big companies to develop windows phone apps, they pretty much gave the middle finger to all the small indie devs. I remember when android 2 was around I just downloaded android studio and played around a bit, making a simple scrobbler app for my Samsung device. Sideloadong was king back then, but even up to this point I had to pay zero bucks and jump through no hoops to try this out. I don't remember what putting this on the Google play store would've cost me back then, but not much. The windows phone experience was: sign up for a dev account to download visual studio with WP support. Start up VS, asked for your account again. I think in the beginning this was actually a paid account, probably because apple did it that way and again, you're Microsoft so act like you already own the place. But later in they reversed course here at least and you could log in with a free account. So you start building a small test app and then you want to run it in the shipped emulator but surprise! Your laptop only shipped with windows 8 home which doesn't include virtualization features, so tough. So the only way to test the app was to push it to your phone, which was another overly complicated mess where your phone had to be in developer mode and you could only "sideload" one app at a time, iirc. The result was an app store with mostly tumbleweed. Whatever small utility or gimmick you wanted, when on android a search would give you dozens of results, on WP, there was maybe 4, and 3 of them almost unusable and abandoned. I'm not blaming ballmer for having decided this specifically, but holy hell how did this pass any meetings with the higher-ups? You're uo against two tech giants who have a head-start of a few years, you try to get people to switch to your platform by being pricey, having no apps, and being hostile to smaller devs? The same played out with all the phone makers, who had to pay license fees for WP when android was free to use. Guess which phones were cheaper in the end. And when Microsoft bought Nokia, Nokia had the unfair advantage of getting WP for free, making it even less attractive for others to compete in that sector. And let's not get into the botched Nokia acquisition because I also don't think this can be blamed on ballmer that easily, or primarily.
• Nevermark 2y ago
  > Microsoft under Ballmer made deep, long-term bets that set up Microsoft for success in the decades after his reign This is no doubt true. Under Ballmer, Nadella "led a transformation of the company's business and technology culture from client services to cloud infrastructure and services." [0] But the number of failed mobile (phone, small PC) initiatives and products, from long before the iPhone to multiple waves of multi-billion dollar write downs afterward, (phones, music players, ...) despite Ballmer clearly wanting Windows "everywhere", and no limit on his spending, was just as large of an opportunity, cyclically bungled for a couple decades. I had one of the earlier generations/extinct-species of Windows phone. At the time I had given up on Palm following through on their great start, but found the Windows phone was just frustrating in other ways. (I did have friends with Microsoft's last phone, and they really liked it. Just too late.) Apples market cap today, approximately its iOS market cap, is a good proxy for the ball Ballmer couldn't stop dropping. Even when only his team was on the court. So I give Ballmer a 5/10. :) But any massive hypergrowth business, is still a massive hypergrowth business. Microsoft gets 10/10. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Nadella https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Nadella
  • senderista 2y ago
    Are you remembering Windows Mobile? That sucked, but Windows Phone did not (and was famously built by a totally different team). But it was too little, too late.
    • shiroiushi 2y ago
      >Are you remembering Windows Mobile? That sucked, but Windows Phone did not (and was famously built by a totally different team) This seems to show another of MS's big problems in those days: too many different products doing the same thing, and a lack of focus. IIRC, they went from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone (version x) and then to Windows Phone (version y, totally incompatible with version x). Each time, this alienated 3rd-party developers because all the apps they wrote wouldn't work on the all-new platform.
    • Nevermark 2y ago
      > (I did have friends with Microsoft's last phone, and they really liked it. Just too late.)
• fumeux_fume 2y ago
  Weird how few people who worked under him feel that way.
• jimbobbam 2y ago
  This is a bunch of revisionist history bs. Windows me, windows vista, explorer, windows media player, zune, ms retail store. He brought the worst products to the market and we hated him for it.
• datavirtue 2y ago
  I enjoy those fact videos he has been making. I was impressed that he cared enough to do them and actually take the time to run point.
• nailer 2y ago
  So azure was a hit and Office moving to a saas model was a hit. Balmer lost: the most popular consumer operating system, the most popular web browser, the most popular media player, the most popular instant messaging platform.
• aaronbrethorst 2y ago
  I worked at Microsoft from 2003-2007, and left a couple months after the iPhone launched (for totally unrelated reasons, but I wanted to situate the timeline). Steve was a terrible leader. He helped the company grow moribund, lazy, and self-absorbed. Stack ranking was a cancer[1]. Employees were far more interested in stabbing each other in the back than building world-class products. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/12/5094864/microsoft-kills-stack-ranking-internal-structure https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/12/5094864/microsoft-kills-...
  • nextworddev 2y ago
    Kind of unrelated, but stack ranking is very much back now across the board now in big tech.
    • aaronbrethorst 2y ago
      That’s appalling.
      • ripvanwinkle 2y ago
        Its cyclical, a lot of companies over hired and are trying hard to cut down
        • aaronbrethorst 2y ago
          Cyclical processes and appallingness aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact they may well be related.
• bjoveski 2y ago
  If you want to learn more about MSFT during Ballmer era, i highly recommend the acquired podcast: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/microsoft-volume-ii https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/microsoft-volume-ii They come to the same conclusion as Dan - that Ballmer did a ton of things right and he was actually a much better CEO than the credit he's given today. Part 1 of the podcast focuses on Bill Gates' era - both episodes are super engaging, the research and preparation they do is remarkably good.
  • funksta 2y ago
    Great podcast and I really enjoyed their MSFT episodes. I thought their pro-Ballmer angle was interesting at the time too (it was the first long-form defense of his tenure that I had heard), but I wasn't sure how much of that was due to him being a primary source for the podcast's material.
  • abhiyerra 2y ago
    Second this podcast. Ballmer basically setup Microsoft as the enterprise software company. From the first episode it seemed that Bill was actually more interested in the consumer side of things and wasn't that interested in the enterprise, but it was Ballmer that basically setup that entire business line in the first place especially with him managing the OS/2 with IBM and later NT. I think a lot of fails for MS during the Ballmer era was them toeing the line post their anti-trust.
• jatins 2y ago
  tangential: anyone has the link to Gary Bernhardt talk on reproducibility mentioned in the post?
• roncesvalles 2y ago
  Ballmer was a successful CEO for the simple reason that he discovered Satya.
• bryanrasmussen 2y ago
  sure, we know that now after having a wider range of examples across the industry!
• tapirl 2y ago
  Agree, he just had bad public relations.
• zombiwoof 2y ago
  Came here to trash Microsoft, learned more about tipping than I ever thought possible
• skc 2y ago
  He made Microsoft an insane amount of money when they were at their "least" coolest. That takes some doing.
• wslh 2y ago
  I’m really looking forward to his autobiography, not just another Isaacson-style biography, but something from the man himself, even if he has some help writing it. Reading Paul Allen’s autobiography gave me a deep understanding of his and Bill Gates’ journey long before Microsoft. Their story started much earlier than the usual DOS narrative!
• sunaookami 2y ago
  This is what I always said. Nadella ruined Microsoft for consumers. Ballmer literally saved the Xbox business during the RROD fiasco and he made sure Windows Phone could thrive - it was an established 3rd operating system in Europe with over 10% market share and it could've been more but Nadella killed it because it wasn't popular in the US. Also, Windows was definitely better under Ballmer.
• LightBug1 2y ago
  "$500? Fully Subsidized? That is the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine."
• tyleo 2y ago
  The Acquired podcast also supports this claim in a 2-part episode on Microsoft I’ll link below. Their evidence is from interviews with current and former Microsoft employees who worked with Ballmer IIRC including Ballmer himself. They basically describe him as being the rock that cheerlead, navigated, and held the company together through a decade of legal troubles. He also started many important businesses like enterprise, gaming, and cloud. https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/microsoft https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/microsoft
• kevwil 2y ago
  Yikes. The hottest of takes there. Wow. I know he's super-rich now and I'm not, so whatever.
• yalogin 2y ago
  Underrated? He is properly rated in the sense that he owns 10s of billions even though he singlehandedly killed the windows smartphone and tablet business and also killed Nokia. Granted that apple killed them but with Microsoft’s resources there was no reason to just give up like they did. Buying Nokia was a historic bad decision that screams he didn’t understand the business at all. There was a huge opportunity to just emulate apple and just suck in all of the corporate market in one swoop and add them to their recurring revenue office service but Ballmer didn’t see it. He just saw them as phones and hardware.
• ReptileMan 2y ago
  On the other hand it took a complete moron to fuck up windows phone. And somehow it happened under his tenure.
• high_na_euv 2y ago
  I thought I saw article with similar title And yea https://blog.jovono.com/p/ballmer-microsoft-underrated https://blog.jovono.com/p/ballmer-microsoft-underrated
• palla89 2y ago
  The amazing thing about the internet is that it’s always just a matter of time before something negative gets completely reversed by someone. For every “best, coolest thing ever,” there will inevitably be an article arguing that it was all hype and actually the opposite. And the same thing happens with a bad product / action eventually, there’s always an article attempting to redeem it. Why is that? Is it just human nature driving our need to be heard and seen as visionaries?
  • floatrock 2y ago
    For politics: its bots setting a narrative. For temu dropshipping: its bots to make money.
  • high_na_euv 2y ago
    Or maybe because there is many things that are vastly misunderstood because people prefer simple explainations and theories In general people are scared of complexity
• flerchin 2y ago
  $100B does not seem underrated to me. Microsoft made lots of money with Ballmer, and continued to make even more money after he left.
• FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
  Everyone forgetting about Lisa Brummel and "stack ranking"? That nearly ruined Microsoft... https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft-ditches-system-that-ranks-employees-against-each-other/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft-ditches-syst...
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • bradlys 2y ago
    What does Microsoft do now? Most every major tech company I’ve seen uses stack ranking - even if they don’t use that name. Hell, a lot of startups I’ve been at even use that. The founders and executives love it as far as I can tell - why else would they do it?
    • andrewla 2y ago
      At Microsoft in particular, stack ranking has always been used in the sense of trying to put together a rough ordering of employees at similar levels. But "stack ranking" in scare quotes at Microsoft referred to the specific practice of the 20/70/10 rule -- the top 20% were the standouts, 70% was fine, and 10% was "this person needs to be eased out". This was applied for any org with more than a certain minimum number of people, and led to a very very toxic review process.
      • bradlys 2y ago
        This is pretty much what I see at almost every company I’ve been at in the last decade though… The review process is always toxic and has always lead to my peers in the industry being more likely to sabotage than help me since that’s the best way to look good in reviews. That with 80% of my peers being permanent H1B means they will do whatever it takes to stay employed. I would be happy to know big tech companies that aren’t doing this but I don’t know any?
        • andrewla 2y ago
• mproud 2y ago
  WSJ had a great write-up that was very interesting about the plans Ballmer was trying to get rolling. I really gained additional respect for him after reading this. He wanted to overhaul the company, but realized people would struggle doing so while he was in charge. He realized sometimes you have to let someone else do it. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303460004579194150724298162 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303460004579194... [archive here](https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pdfiles/cfovhds/weeklypuzzles/MicrosoftNewCEO/BallmerInterview.pdf https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pdfiles/cfovhds/weekly...)
• destitude 2y ago
  The guy that laughed at the iPhone when it was first announced.
• exmicrosoldier 2y ago
  I disagree with Dan due to my experience as an low level employee under Ballmer. He encouraged political infighting and backstabbing and dog eat dog internal competition, while praising and desiring tight integration between teams. He wanted "cloud first, moblie first" - two firsts! The culture at the time was built around RAID - the internal bug datadbase and that there should be clear prioritization for everything. The inability to decide between enterprise cloud and consumer client devices held Microsoft back. Ballmer had customers asking for enterprise cloud in 2000 but he kept listening to people talking about lifting windows sales by 10 percent with search integrated to the desktop. And then they chose the bloated SQL server for that and wondered why that couldn't run on normal consumer hardware in Longhorn. The fundamental tradeoffs between something that sacrifices generalization for specialization and efficiency meant that what is good for running server rack NASDAQ didn't work for low powered laptops. From a low level employee perspective Ballmer was the ruthless guy that wanted people to hate each other at work as they fought for survival lord of the flies style but was pikachu surprised that we could never deliver integrated experiences that worked together. Satya's two key abilites to me were the ability to actually prioritize in a coherent way and the decision to bring the rank and file infighting down because integrated experiences are hard to build when you want your brother and sister departments to fail so yours gets more budget because thats how Ballmer worked.
  • atomicnature 2y ago
    off-topic: Love the username :)
  • alexawarrior4 2y ago
    So Ballmer-era Microsoft was the inspiration for Amazon's current culture, I see.
    • xkqd 2y ago
      This one’s on Jack Welch - a pioneer in short term gain over long term building. You absolutely can juice a company’s performance by going dog-eat-dog, but inevitably when the smoke clears you’re left with jackals and hyenas stretched too thin. Always worth mentioning that this culturally altered America in a way that we’ll probably never unwind.
• nojvek 2y ago
  I was at Microsoft under both Ballmer and Nadella leadership. Ballmer was stuck on the old ways. I was connected to a team that had made iOS office apps but Ballmer blocked because MSFT jewel apps on Apple meant Apple would gain marketshare over Windows Mobile. That team was fairly pissed and some folks quit. Nadella was leading cloud division at that time, but they were not getting the firepower to go against AWS. Azure succeeded despite Ballmer. Nadella clearly saw Cloud was going to be the next big revenue firehose. Ballmer closely held onto Windows walled garden. His bet on acquiring Nokia and Skype had spectacularly failed. Android and iOS had won, they entirely lost on Windows Mobile. VSCode had just started but it was seen as an experiment and the sentiment was it could absolutely not jeopardize actual Visual Studio. Linux was seen a competitor to Windows. Under Nadella, he saw an entirely different Microsoft. He was playing bets on the future, while Ballmer held onto the past. The game had changed. Nadella didn't care about Windows walled garden. He wanted Microsoft on every platform where developers and Enterprises were. VSCode wanted to cannibalize VS go for it. MSFT apps on iOS go for it. Linux on Windows, go for it. All of MSFT switches to git, to for it. Acquire github and cannibalize Azure pipelines, go for it. Use chromium base for Edge instead of mshtml, go for it. Nadella made good bets over and over again. Ballmer doesn't have the same record. Nadella + Scott Guthrie went all out on Azure to be #2. The infra spend alone was in billions. Remains to be seen how OpenAI bet pans out.
• aidenn0 2y ago
  He should have said developers 37 times. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMcuxW6QzBM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMcuxW6QzBM
• 486sx33 2y ago
  Nadella has been horrible and a huge mistake for Microsoft. They will continue to suffer under his leadership. At least ballmer had goals and pretended to care what customers want. Windows is an unmitigated disaster under nadella and it doesn’t need to be. No new innovation is happening and hardware is more performant than ever. Windows had issues under ballmer because the hardware wasn’t there yet and they were trying new things. Nadella only wants spyware and bloatware and everything as a subscription / service. The leadership can’t change soon enough, hopefully his back room deals with OpenAI come to light and blow up sooner than later.
  • mixmastamyk 2y ago
    There's no evidence Ballmer would have avoided spyware. Especially for money. Who was the first boot-licking corp in the NSA Prism slides? That's right—MS 2007. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM#/media/File:Prism_slide_5.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM#/media/File:Prism_slide_...
• cryptonector 2y ago
  The biggest problem with Ballmer's tenure was stack ranking, which led to the famous org chart where every org in MSFT points a gun at every org in MSFT. Things like LINQ and VScode are very nice but they weren't created by Ballmer. Ballmer's org allowed them to flourish to the point where they needed serious capital, then the org gave them that capital. Sun was like that too, but ultimately the management at Sun failed in so many ways. It's not just the technologies you choose to invest in -- there's something more needed, and the nicest thing to say about Ballmer is that he didn't ruin MSFT. The nicest thing to say about Satya is that he made it a nice place to work at while also greatly growing MSFT's cloud business.
  • thijson 2y ago
    Intel also had the stack ranking. I think this management technique originated with Jack Welsh at GE. It does pit groups against each other. Even for individuals on the same team, it pays to sabotage each other's work. I heard of managers hiring people so that they could be offered up when layoffs came around. It was kind of like how the Celt's had human sacrifice. Families would adopt people so that they could be offered up if they were chosen to give a family member for sacrifice at a later date.
    • cryptonector 2y ago
      Amazon is famous for hiring to fire. I wonder when the business schools will teach that stack ranking was a failed experiment?
• black_13 2y ago
  [dead]
• anshulbhide 2y ago
  I guess Steve Ballmer deserves to be richer than Bill Gates today because he held onto his MSFT stock while Gates sold the majority of his :) Also, the Acquired podcast also makes the strong argument that Ballmer lay a lot of the foundation of what powered MSFT’s growth under Nadella e.g. Azure.
• bjornnn 2y ago
  If anyone is an authority on who is and isn't an underrated CEO, it's world famous titan of industry Dan Luu. Who hasn't heard of Dan Luu?
• marcusverus 2y ago
  MSFT is up more today than it was during Steve Ballmer's 14 year tenure. It's up 1%.
• bjornnn 2y ago
  I think the fact that Steve Ballmer could be considered a good CEO by anyone today is just another reminder of the fact that our society has lost all understanding of what a sustainable business model is and our modern conception of capitalism is really just feudalism, i.e. private owners with significant political influence eliminating all competition with the help of the state and wielding monopolistic control over essential resources and earning their profits by charging rent rather than actually producing anything of real value. We've been locked in this cycle for centuries now - technological progress opens up some new uncharted territory that is up for grabs and there is the brief period of booming growth and diverse competition in this new thriving industry, then the boom is over and the system no longer encourages competition or innovation or intelligent decisionmaking, instead it encourages overreach and incompetence and cancerous uninhibited growth and parasitic behavior - stealing ideas and flooding the market with cheap inferior imitations, aggressive anti-competitive practices, increased lobbying and increased dependence on state funding. The industry becomes dominated by these bloated behemoths that add nothing of value to the world and are an enormous burden on society and eventually they become so unsustainably huge that even the combined wealth of every sovereign nation cannot keep them afloat and then they collapse. I mean, seriously, everyone knows Windows has always been shit and people have never had anything but negative things to say about it, everyone knows that every product Microsoft has ever produced has been absolute trash and that they have never had any interest in doing anything innovative or original or contributing anything useful to the world. Microsoft isn't a company and people like Steve Ballmer are not CEOs or businessmen of any kind, they're just landlords.
• itrain 2y ago
  having worked there for a long time (left in 2013), i'd say the best thing that happened under ballmer was getting rid of sinofsky. sinofsky was the worst - windows8 had some great low level bits, but the shell and app models were total crap. and wait until the jeffrey epstien connections comes out...
• necovek 2y ago
  Too bad there is no mention of Nokia at all: that was one big blunder, but maybe if Ballmer did not step down a year after finalizing take-over, it wouldn't be as much of a bust.
• oglop 2y ago
  Ballmer was a fucking moron.