5 ms·

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

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
    - greggyb 2y ago
      > Basically the cloud for everyone but the tech companies And most companies are not tech companies. This is something that tends to be lost in HN discussions (not saying that applies to you, specifically). I've spent a lot of time in the Microsoft world. I worked for AWS as well. In general, Microsoft executes on platform and ecosystem in a way that works very well for a lot of customers. In general, AWS executes on products better, which tends to appeal more to those who are focused on technology, specifically.
    - stackskipton 2y ago
      As Azure SRE for a tech company, what feature is missing? We are using AKS with Linux, Blob storage and ServiceBus. Database is MySQL Flexible Server. I'm even using some Azure Tables for backend services just because it was easier to deal with.
      - fragmede 2y ago
        I think > Basically the cloud for everyone but the tech companies is referring to the idea that tech companies are competent enough to run their own computers, not that Azure is missing something specific.
  - Uvix 2y ago
    Maybe it's just "what you're used to", but I'd swap Azure and AWS in that statement. Going from Azure to AWS, I found it not nearly as nice to use or easy to understand. Even basic features like "see all the resources in my account" were missing from AWS.
- achow 2y ago
  Scott Guthrie is the one who drove Azure. Dated 2013, a year before Nadella became CEO: https://www.change.org/p/the-microsoft-board-of-directors-ask-microsoft-to-promote-scott-guthrie-to-next-chief-architect-of-microsoft https://www.change.org/p/the-microsoft-board-of-directors-as...
  - timsneath 2y ago
    Azure existed long before ScottGu took over. It started with dueling projects from Ray Ozzie’s world and Bob Muglia’s world. Ray had great ideas but no idea how to run something like Azure at scale. Bob brought the enterprise mindset and retooled it, and of course Scott owns the lion’s share of the credit for its growth and technical qualities.
    - achow 2y ago
      BobMu left Microsoft because he was not sold on cloud, he was an advocate for 'on-prem' solutions (and for its time it made sense since enterprise customers were against cloud).
    - rozzie 2y ago
      I began recruiting for what became Azure in Jan 2006. I was chief software architect / cto at the company. Amitabh Srivastava and the legendary Dave Cutler were the leads, with Dave focused on the hypervisor. (I'd met Dave in the 80's when he was at DEC and I was at DG.) The project was in my team (CSA labs) but was cross-funded behind the scenes by Kevin Johnson, the president of Server & Tools. KJ & I did this because there was passive-aggressive resistance to a 'cloud first' design/architecture philosophy from within his org, where there was a deeply-rooted belief that enterprise servers and ops management tools would adequately scale-up. KJ bought in and was all-in, as was the 'tools' part of his org (Soma & ScottGu). SteveB initially didn't quite know what to make of my desire and myriad efforts to fundamentally transform the company from packaged products toward services, and he had to cope with some of the wake I was leaving. It wasn't all smooth. But he believed in me and helped me to recruit internally, which was essential. My explicit cross-funding agreement with KJ, my peer, was that when I decided it was the 'right time', I'd hand off my Azure org and it would be re-merged into S&T in more-or-less a 'reverse merger', with cloud leadership taking over server. I launched Azure at PDC 2008 with what today we'd call lambda's (functions-as-a-service based on .net) & blobs & cloud database as the core services. Why no linux or windows VMs? They were absolutely part of day 1 plans, but a major political ploy from within KJ's team ('this will kill the server business') resulted in an active decision (mine) to defer until post-launch. It wasn't a technology issue, nor was it an OSS issue; the team believed in OSS & Linux. But shipping was top priority, and we shipped. When I ultimately left the company in 2011, it was time to do the reverse merger that KJ and I had planned. A proven, super-talented manager from Bing that everyone loved, Satya, was chosen to lead the org as it was moved into S&T upon my departure. James Hamilton, the architect of Azure's relational DB, left for AWS. Ultimately, under Satya, ScottGU & co ended up re-plumbing much of the original code with a by-then-ready Windows hypervisor, VMs & Linux, and all that you see today. By then the org finally was aligned and 'believed', and SteveB was genuinely 'all in'. Getting products from 0 to 1 is sometimes a challenging process involving incredible people and stamina from believers at every level. In this case I'd say it was worth the effort.
- hansi2001 2y ago
  Azure, AWS and CPQ are all platforms that are good enough. If you need a cloud which is standing out and will be the best place for you workload over the next decade or more you have to look to OCI.
snowwrestler 2y ago
This is hindsight bias. Because other people took some of his later initiatives and made them successful, it’s tempting to look back and grant him these as wins. We should resist that temptation and judge him on the results he delivered. MS was the essential tech company, king of the world, and under his leadership their innovation stalled, they lost in markets where they were leading, the stock stagnated, and huge piles of money were vaporized on acquisitions that were poorly planned or executed. He tried to buy Yahoo for $44 billion! Only Yahoo’s greater idiocy saved him from that gargantuan mistake. And that was just one of many.
- D13Fd 2y ago
  One of the points in the article is that he made many bets, some of them panned out really well, others didn't, but on the whole he set Microsoft on a really good path. Buying Yahoo would have been a bet that didn't work out, probably, but I don't think it goes against the point in the article.
- legitster 2y ago
  Hindsight works both ways. Developing OSes and software was clearly an unsustainable business. It's obvious in hindsight that cloud infrastructure was the way to go. But at the time placing a lot of different bets to find a few successful product-market fits was the best you could ask for.
  - dangus 2y ago
    While it may be true that the OS itself isn't really a cash cow anymore (if it ever was), I still think Microsoft's greatest failure of the previous decade was exiting the smartphone OS space and ceding it to Google and Apple. I think that Ballmer's management can take a lot of blame for that. I think a different CEO could have executed and possibly have kept Microsoft in that market with success. The Apple App Store by itself is a trillion dollar ecosystem. Microsoft being able to gain even a sliver of that size would be worth quite a lot. We might give Apple similar criticism on the other side of this coin by saying that it's somewhat insane that Apple hasn't tried entering the public cloud market, especially given the fact that they now design their own ARM processors that are essentially the market leaders in that architecture.
cyberax 2y ago
I remember working with Microsoft as a client in 2000-s, it was awesome. We started as a startup, and enrolled in a BizSpark program. It gave us basically free access to Microsoft tools and with very responsive support. We later transitioned into volume licensing, that also was simple and straightforward. The business side of Microsoft was a streamlined unstoppable train at that point. The technical side, not so much. Microsoft was still trying to be the only software company in the world, and it was pushing all kinds of WPF, WCF, and other WTFs. So they completely missed hyperscalers and the growing market of Linux-based servers.
- unixhero 2y ago
  They missed the mark on mobile oses and appstores.
- addicted 2y ago
  Wow. Microsoft Licensing was the stuff of nightmares. You could literally get certifications in Microsoft licensing. There were experts whose only job was Microsoft Licensing consultants. MS’es licensing was so bad you would get different quotes from the same person within a week of asking because almost no one understood it.
  - cyberax 2y ago
    Sure. MS had tons of resellers with somewhat different markups, although not that different. We needed only the basic stuff: Windows Server, Exchange, MSSQL, a bunch of XP licenses. And this all was straightforward. We also got MSDN subscription basically for free.
- datavirtue 2y ago
  WPF is still unmatched.
  - 71bw 2y ago
    Exactly and I'm never going to change my opinion. Nothing in this area was ever so easy and yet so powerful.
vjust 2y ago
Ballmer hated Linux & open source. He would've driven their cloud division to the ground trying to sell Windows servers in the cloud. It would've taken him another 20 years to accept that Linux was key to the cloud. VSCode (Visual Studio Code) - would never have taken birth. Microsoft survived and thrived once Ballmer had no option but leave. In this era of Python development, Microsoft Windows still feels a step or two behind as far as using a Windows laptop for coding in the cloud. Python is the language of AI - not Asp.net, not C#. Ballmer would never have seen the writing on the wall. He would've pushed something wierd, like VBA .
- elzbardico 2y ago
  Ballmer didn't hate linux and open source. He feared it as a threath to Microsoft's business model and revenue streams.
  - dymk 2y ago
    That’s a distinction without a difference
  - bsuvc 2y ago
    That's just why he hated it.
- metadat 2y ago
  I have as much disdain for the monkey man as the next OSS fan. But VSCode was always closed sourced crap at the arbitrary whims of a soulless zombie corp, and they never promised otherwise in a significant way. It's not relevant and not a good foundational signal or basis for any argument.
  - Karrot_Kream 2y ago
    ... https://github.com/microsoft/vscode https://github.com/microsoft/vscode? It's MIT licensed. Or are we here to start GPL vs MIT for the 10,000th time?
datavirtue 2y ago
Surface is selling like hotcakes.
- jobigoud 2y ago
  Ha! It was a trap, they are likely talking about Surface, the big table-computer. It was such a failure that they repurposed the name for something else and you might have never heard about it. We had one at work circa 2013.
belter 2y ago
Memories get a bit fuzzy after 5-10 years.But this take from 2012 is a reminder of what a mess Steve Ballmer was as CEO: https://www.netnetweb.com/content/blog/blog/top-10-reasons-why-steve-ballmer-has-failed-microsofts-ceo https://www.netnetweb.com/content/blog/blog/top-10-reasons-w...

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
  - greggyb 2y ago
    > Basically the cloud for everyone but the tech companies And most companies are not tech companies. This is something that tends to be lost in HN discussions (not saying that applies to you, specifically). I've spent a lot of time in the Microsoft world. I worked for AWS as well. In general, Microsoft executes on platform and ecosystem in a way that works very well for a lot of customers. In general, AWS executes on products better, which tends to appeal more to those who are focused on technology, specifically.
  - stackskipton 2y ago
    As Azure SRE for a tech company, what feature is missing? We are using AKS with Linux, Blob storage and ServiceBus. Database is MySQL Flexible Server. I'm even using some Azure Tables for backend services just because it was easier to deal with.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      I think > Basically the cloud for everyone but the tech companies is referring to the idea that tech companies are competent enough to run their own computers, not that Azure is missing something specific.
- Uvix 2y ago
  Maybe it's just "what you're used to", but I'd swap Azure and AWS in that statement. Going from Azure to AWS, I found it not nearly as nice to use or easy to understand. Even basic features like "see all the resources in my account" were missing from AWS.
achow 2y ago
Scott Guthrie is the one who drove Azure. Dated 2013, a year before Nadella became CEO: https://www.change.org/p/the-microsoft-board-of-directors-ask-microsoft-to-promote-scott-guthrie-to-next-chief-architect-of-microsoft https://www.change.org/p/the-microsoft-board-of-directors-as...
- timsneath 2y ago
  Azure existed long before ScottGu took over. It started with dueling projects from Ray Ozzie’s world and Bob Muglia’s world. Ray had great ideas but no idea how to run something like Azure at scale. Bob brought the enterprise mindset and retooled it, and of course Scott owns the lion’s share of the credit for its growth and technical qualities.
  - achow 2y ago
    BobMu left Microsoft because he was not sold on cloud, he was an advocate for 'on-prem' solutions (and for its time it made sense since enterprise customers were against cloud).
  - rozzie 2y ago
    I began recruiting for what became Azure in Jan 2006. I was chief software architect / cto at the company. Amitabh Srivastava and the legendary Dave Cutler were the leads, with Dave focused on the hypervisor. (I'd met Dave in the 80's when he was at DEC and I was at DG.) The project was in my team (CSA labs) but was cross-funded behind the scenes by Kevin Johnson, the president of Server & Tools. KJ & I did this because there was passive-aggressive resistance to a 'cloud first' design/architecture philosophy from within his org, where there was a deeply-rooted belief that enterprise servers and ops management tools would adequately scale-up. KJ bought in and was all-in, as was the 'tools' part of his org (Soma & ScottGu). SteveB initially didn't quite know what to make of my desire and myriad efforts to fundamentally transform the company from packaged products toward services, and he had to cope with some of the wake I was leaving. It wasn't all smooth. But he believed in me and helped me to recruit internally, which was essential. My explicit cross-funding agreement with KJ, my peer, was that when I decided it was the 'right time', I'd hand off my Azure org and it would be re-merged into S&T in more-or-less a 'reverse merger', with cloud leadership taking over server. I launched Azure at PDC 2008 with what today we'd call lambda's (functions-as-a-service based on .net) & blobs & cloud database as the core services. Why no linux or windows VMs? They were absolutely part of day 1 plans, but a major political ploy from within KJ's team ('this will kill the server business') resulted in an active decision (mine) to defer until post-launch. It wasn't a technology issue, nor was it an OSS issue; the team believed in OSS & Linux. But shipping was top priority, and we shipped. When I ultimately left the company in 2011, it was time to do the reverse merger that KJ and I had planned. A proven, super-talented manager from Bing that everyone loved, Satya, was chosen to lead the org as it was moved into S&T upon my departure. James Hamilton, the architect of Azure's relational DB, left for AWS. Ultimately, under Satya, ScottGU & co ended up re-plumbing much of the original code with a by-then-ready Windows hypervisor, VMs & Linux, and all that you see today. By then the org finally was aligned and 'believed', and SteveB was genuinely 'all in'. Getting products from 0 to 1 is sometimes a challenging process involving incredible people and stamina from believers at every level. In this case I'd say it was worth the effort.
hansi2001 2y ago
Azure, AWS and CPQ are all platforms that are good enough. If you need a cloud which is standing out and will be the best place for you workload over the next decade or more you have to look to OCI.

snowwrestler 2y ago

This is hindsight bias. Because other people took some of his later initiatives and made them successful, it’s tempting to look back and grant him these as wins. We should resist that temptation and judge him on the results he delivered. MS was the essential tech company, king of the world, and under his leadership their innovation stalled, they lost in markets where they were leading, the stock stagnated, and huge piles of money were vaporized on acquisitions that were poorly planned or executed. He tried to buy Yahoo for $44 billion! Only Yahoo’s greater idiocy saved him from that gargantuan mistake. And that was just one of many.

D13Fd 2y ago
One of the points in the article is that he made many bets, some of them panned out really well, others didn't, but on the whole he set Microsoft on a really good path. Buying Yahoo would have been a bet that didn't work out, probably, but I don't think it goes against the point in the article.
legitster 2y ago
Hindsight works both ways. Developing OSes and software was clearly an unsustainable business. It's obvious in hindsight that cloud infrastructure was the way to go. But at the time placing a lot of different bets to find a few successful product-market fits was the best you could ask for.
- dangus 2y ago
  While it may be true that the OS itself isn't really a cash cow anymore (if it ever was), I still think Microsoft's greatest failure of the previous decade was exiting the smartphone OS space and ceding it to Google and Apple. I think that Ballmer's management can take a lot of blame for that. I think a different CEO could have executed and possibly have kept Microsoft in that market with success. The Apple App Store by itself is a trillion dollar ecosystem. Microsoft being able to gain even a sliver of that size would be worth quite a lot. We might give Apple similar criticism on the other side of this coin by saying that it's somewhat insane that Apple hasn't tried entering the public cloud market, especially given the fact that they now design their own ARM processors that are essentially the market leaders in that architecture.

cyberax 2y ago

I remember working with Microsoft as a client in 2000-s, it was awesome. We started as a startup, and enrolled in a BizSpark program. It gave us basically free access to Microsoft tools and with very responsive support. We later transitioned into volume licensing, that also was simple and straightforward. The business side of Microsoft was a streamlined unstoppable train at that point. The technical side, not so much. Microsoft was still trying to be the only software company in the world, and it was pushing all kinds of WPF, WCF, and other WTFs. So they completely missed hyperscalers and the growing market of Linux-based servers.

unixhero 2y ago
They missed the mark on mobile oses and appstores.
addicted 2y ago
Wow. Microsoft Licensing was the stuff of nightmares. You could literally get certifications in Microsoft licensing. There were experts whose only job was Microsoft Licensing consultants. MS’es licensing was so bad you would get different quotes from the same person within a week of asking because almost no one understood it.
- cyberax 2y ago
  Sure. MS had tons of resellers with somewhat different markups, although not that different. We needed only the basic stuff: Windows Server, Exchange, MSSQL, a bunch of XP licenses. And this all was straightforward. We also got MSDN subscription basically for free.
datavirtue 2y ago
WPF is still unmatched.
- 71bw 2y ago
  Exactly and I'm never going to change my opinion. Nothing in this area was ever so easy and yet so powerful.

vjust 2y ago

Ballmer hated Linux & open source. He would've driven their cloud division to the ground trying to sell Windows servers in the cloud. It would've taken him another 20 years to accept that Linux was key to the cloud. VSCode (Visual Studio Code) - would never have taken birth. Microsoft survived and thrived once Ballmer had no option but leave. In this era of Python development, Microsoft Windows still feels a step or two behind as far as using a Windows laptop for coding in the cloud. Python is the language of AI - not Asp.net, not C#. Ballmer would never have seen the writing on the wall. He would've pushed something wierd, like VBA .

elzbardico 2y ago
Ballmer didn't hate linux and open source. He feared it as a threath to Microsoft's business model and revenue streams.
- dymk 2y ago
  That’s a distinction without a difference
- bsuvc 2y ago
  That's just why he hated it.
metadat 2y ago
I have as much disdain for the monkey man as the next OSS fan. But VSCode was always closed sourced crap at the arbitrary whims of a soulless zombie corp, and they never promised otherwise in a significant way. It's not relevant and not a good foundational signal or basis for any argument.
- Karrot_Kream 2y ago
  ... https://github.com/microsoft/vscode https://github.com/microsoft/vscode? It's MIT licensed. Or are we here to start GPL vs MIT for the 10,000th time?

datavirtue 2y ago

Surface is selling like hotcakes.

jobigoud 2y ago
Ha! It was a trap, they are likely talking about Surface, the big table-computer. It was such a failure that they repurposed the name for something else and you might have never heard about it. We had one at work circa 2013.

belter 2y ago

Memories get a bit fuzzy after 5-10 years.But this take from 2012 is a reminder of what a mess Steve Ballmer was as CEO: https://www.netnetweb.com/content/blog/blog/top-10-reasons-why-steve-ballmer-has-failed-microsofts-ceo https://www.netnetweb.com/content/blog/blog/top-10-reasons-w...