12 ms·

This article doesn’t understand what was fundamentally wrong with Ballmer’s leadership and what Nadella actually changed. The specific technologies that were s

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.
  - creesch 2y ago
    > 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. This is something that Microsoft still struggles with. Some things have improved, but a lot of the dev experiences on the Microsoft side are still cumbersome and not aimed at small time devs. My experience here is with browser extensions and publishing these for both old Edge (pre chromium) and the newer Edge. The entire publishing dashboard is/was overly complex and assumes you are either a single person or a big organization with (azure) AD set up. With Mozilla AMO you can just add individual developers to your extension by mail, and with Google it is as easy as setting up a group. With browser extensions specifically (and Edge as well) you can also clearly see where it is still a dedicated motivated internal team setting things up and where things were handed over to more general teams and support was also outsourced to somewhere else. Anyway, my main point is that even now, many years later, Microsoft still struggles in this area making me think this is more fundamental to the company culture and way of operating.
- kaon_ 2y ago
  I really wanted windows phone to be a success and am still sad it wasn't. I loved the interface. The native integration between my desktop/laptop and phone would have been great. Nowadays with so many apps being PWAs and built with nativescript or ionic, maybe windowsphone has a chance again? I have no idea tbh.
  - baxtr 2y ago
    I didn’t like the UI at all. A lot of unnecessary animations. It felt like a forced departure from the iPhone standard, just so that it’s different.
  - wombat-man 2y ago
    Feels a bit late at this point. Surface Pros run snapdragon but it still feels like too much of a lift to spin up an entire new mobile OS. I'd be pretty intrigued but they're still struggling to nail the tablet market imo.
- lenkite 2y ago
  Windows phone was damn good and was growing in popularity when Nadella came in and killed it. When you are #3 in a market, you need persistence to win. One cannot expect immediate, massive profits in a saturated market. Yet, Windows phone by itself was a growth multiplier for Windows which Nadella annihilated in order to turn Microsoft into a cloud & ad services company.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    > you need persistence to win. You also need a plan. How would Windows Phone displace either Apple or Android?
    - raxxorraxor 2y ago
      It wouldn't and it wouldn't need to. The decision was still very likely wrong, especially transparent after Apple proved with silicon that ARM platforms can be that competitive. Windows wasn't ready here and platform interop wasn't at all it strength. If Windows phones would have had an emulated x86 mode, many people would have bought it instantly due to the momentum that now steadily decreases. There can be solid business revenue if you are "just" #3 and the experience with development is very valuable. Although it is true that Microsoft and hardware has always been turbulent, with partners or without. Sometimes they simply created the best products in their class with a lot of margin, sometimes they basically sold scrap.
      - actionfromafar 2y ago
        The entire mobile market was immature back then, people didn't expect much interoperability and Windows Mobile 7 Nokias were slick and faster than iPhone or Android. They could have become the "contrarians luxury" if you didn't want to just get an iPhone. A bunch of hardcore Microsoft fan developers were gearing up to develop for Windows Mobilet dotnet when Microsoft changed the APIs with Mobile 8 (IIRC) and this dedicated bunch of developers just dropped the platform and just embraced Android or iOS instead.
    - mysterydip 2y ago
archerx 2y ago
Well since Nadella I have been using less Microsoft products and probably won’t be using Windows anymore once my Windows 10 LTSC stops working. I keep hearing praise for Nadella but all he is doing is alienating a lot of customers with his terrible decisions.
- juped 2y ago
  Ballmer would never have put honest-to-God advertisements in Windows Solitaire.
  - rightbyte 2y ago
    I always had the feeling MS was squeezing competitors and software vendors, not users directly. The user hostility have made me move me to Linux systems.
  - spacechild1 2y ago
    Let alone ads in the start menu!
    - DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
      To be fair, Windows 98 came with almost-ads in the stock Active Desktop wallpaper - and promos for AOL/CompuServ/Prodigy.
      - znpy 2y ago
        AOL was stuff that people actually used however. It wasn't "random stuff". For many people in the 90ies it was like the brand "AOL" was a synonym of "internet".
    - 1980phipsi 2y ago
      Or screw up search on the start menu
  - squarefoot 2y ago
    As a 100% Linux user with good memories of that era (flying chair, Linux==cancer, etc.) I may be the best person here to actually defend Ballmer, having for sure no hidden interests in doing that. Everything changed in those years: Google was cool, Linux desktop almost non existent, cryptocurrency not even in the head of its creator, AI was a myth and the best voice recognition could offer was the hilarious "double the killer" demonstration [1]. How can we compare CEOs actions separated by two decades? Ballmer did what was perceived as useful for its company back then just as Nadella is doing that now. Perspectives have changed, hence companies and their CEOS had to adapt. I'm 100% sure that if Ballmer were MS CEO today, he would include advertisements as well, as today putting advertisements in every free corner of the known Universe is perceived as acceptable, if not necessary, which was not the case 20 years back. [1] context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX8oYoYy2Gc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX8oYoYy2Gc
jayceedenton 2y ago
> a red headed step child Very good point, but please stop using this phrase.
anilakar 2y ago
> The problem with Microsoft was everything went through Windows. The entire company was designed to promote Windows. ...and nowadays Windows is designed to promote their cloud subscription services while local features get axed. If Google is not allowed to link directly to Maps, there is no way Microsoft can be allowed to advertise their paid services everywhere in their OS.
Hypergraphe 2y ago
I'm not sure that devaluating Windows is a good strategy at all...
- belter 2y ago
  Bad strategy for Microsoft but clearly a wining strategy for the World.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    Selling licenses is not where the money is. Selling subscriptions to corporations so that every corporate-supplied computer (including Macs) pay Microsoft for something, be it Office or a full Windows+Office+Sharepoint license. All things considered, they can give Windows for free and they'll still profit from it as an enabler for further Microsoft lock-in.
- ozim 2y ago
  It is in "everything is cloud" and "most of software runs in browsers anyway" world where operating systems don't matter . I would not say it was by any means one or the other CEO "insightful" choice but it was more of market choosing on its own. Microsoft had to make own cloud or die that was the choice and better to put loads of investment in that. Ballmer started Azure because Amazon of course was first and Google did the same so Nadella was just playing cards he was handed by the world.
  - Hypergraphe 2y ago
    Running a cloud and developping an operating system are two separare activites that don't need to be tied together. There is a lot of proprietary software in companies around the globe that rely on windows low level APIs and it will last for decades. There is a lot of things that are running outside the browser. The whole gaming industry is still tied to Windows directx.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  It's not a strategy, it's a recognition that the Windows org has decayed and they apparently don't know how to turn it around. Apparently simple projects take forever, new code they launch is often filled with bugs, different parts of the org don't talk to each other and they can't explain why anyone should write an app that targets the Windows API. I support customers shipping apps to every platform and Windows is nowadays 90% of the pain, it's worse even than Linux. Microsoft just don't care either, you can tell the devs who work on it are overwhelmed by the sheer size and tech debt levels of the codebase. Decades of compounding bad decisions have well and truly caught up with them :( This is a pity in a way, the desktop OS market could use more competition. Nadella de-prioritizing Windows was the right thing to do for the business because it had a monopoly, so after PC sales saturated the market the best they could achieve was treading water, but also because the strategy of tying everything to Windows assumed the Windows team would continue to execute well and these things would all be mutually reinforcing. In the 90s Windows did execute well but by 2010 that had stopped, and so the tying strategy also had to stop. A better CEO than Ballmer could possibly have turned the Windows situation around and avoided the need for the disconnection, but instead it was left to drift.
_heimdall 2y ago
Lately it has definitely felt as though Microsoft is resurrecting Ballmer's old meme as "AI! AI! AI!" I was at Microsoft for the last couple years of Ballmer and the first few years of Nadella. He definitely did change the company and I remember at the time feeling that he handled the change really well, but from where I sat he spent the first part of his tenure evolving Ballmer's final push to move focus from Windows to developers. Everything Microsoft did prior to LLMs was to bring developers over, from VS Code to GitHub to WSL. Now the company seems fully baked I to LLMs with everything they do chasing that. It would even make sense if the developer push was driven in part by the need to build up training sets for the eventual LLM work, though I really have a hard time believing that Microsoft was so well ahead of the game that they started grooming developers to provide data more than a decade ago.
- toyg 2y ago
  > Now the company seems fully baked I to LLMs with everything they do chasing that Them along absolutely everyone else. ChatGPT was an iPhone moment.
  - kranke155 2y ago
    I would press X to doubt just because of profitability. It’s cute that we now have image and video gen AI. Also we have now Turing test passing chat bots (Id say). But although they are very impressive, and I know lots of people who use them for various tasks, I haven’t seen a “killer app” yet. For iPhone the killer app was making calls. It was the best phone you could get. Then it had apps. It was undeniably better. LLMs are good at a lot of things, but they don’t seem to excel any particular task - yet. I’m not sure they are a revolution yet. I’d say they’re more of Macintosh moment. A hugely useful technology no doubt - but useful for what exactly? For Mac it was desktop publishing.
    - JKCalhoun 2y ago
      I agree generally with what you're saying but feel you were all over the place in your comment. The killer app on the iPhone was not "making calls" — I suspect instead it was Safari, the other 1st party apps, the touch screen and the slick integration of all of that to make it a no-brainer device that even my mom and dad could use (they were approaching their 70's when the iPhone debuted). Your analogy that ChatGPT (or LLMs generally) are more akin to the Mac feels close to the mark to me. Your comment about the Mac's killer app, desktop publishing, suggests that LLM's killer app will follow, just hasn't arrived yet. The analogy is a little shaky though since, some would argue, it was the laser printer (plus the Mac) that kicked off desktop publishing.
ozim 2y ago
I would argue that specific technologies changing is super relevant fact. In 90's and 00's "everything Windows" made loads of sense for a company so being hard on any competition was the right thing. Also I don't see people saying it about MacOs you cannot do software to this day for MacOs or iOS without having actual device and operating system from Apple. What changed for MSFT was that operating system in 2010's and forward became irrelevant. Cloud is where the money is and now MSFT is "all in Azure or nothing company", entire company is designed to promote Azure and O365. To properly promote Azure they need to run Linux on that cloud and they need mind share of developers that will develop products using Azure - earlier they could force developers to use Windows because that was where software was running.
chucke1992 2y ago
Yeah. It is basically a trap that every CFO who became CEO step into - tie everything to a single thing. With Satya he had much broader vision.
layer8 2y ago
As an end user, I lament the devaluation of Windows and the general drive to cloud-based solutions. It has made everything worse.
DowagerDave 2y ago
Yep, aside from the legacy desktop environment & gaming I don't really have any ties to MS anymore, and I was a pure MS developer for 20+ years. Now with .NET superior on non-windows platforms and the nonsense their hostile consumer & enterprise side keeps pulling why would I stay in the ecosystem? I agree that Ballmer was unfairly used as a punching bag, but MS today (both the good and bad) is all Nadella.
seoulmetro 2y ago
This sounds right until you realise how much market share Windows captured, held and now even solidifies from the Ballmer era. I don't agree with you, and I believe the Ballmer era did wonders for Windows and was a turbulent period. The new era of MS now is quite stable because of this.

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.
- creesch 2y ago
  > 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. This is something that Microsoft still struggles with. Some things have improved, but a lot of the dev experiences on the Microsoft side are still cumbersome and not aimed at small time devs. My experience here is with browser extensions and publishing these for both old Edge (pre chromium) and the newer Edge. The entire publishing dashboard is/was overly complex and assumes you are either a single person or a big organization with (azure) AD set up. With Mozilla AMO you can just add individual developers to your extension by mail, and with Google it is as easy as setting up a group. With browser extensions specifically (and Edge as well) you can also clearly see where it is still a dedicated motivated internal team setting things up and where things were handed over to more general teams and support was also outsourced to somewhere else. Anyway, my main point is that even now, many years later, Microsoft still struggles in this area making me think this is more fundamental to the company culture and way of operating.
kaon_ 2y ago
I really wanted windows phone to be a success and am still sad it wasn't. I loved the interface. The native integration between my desktop/laptop and phone would have been great. Nowadays with so many apps being PWAs and built with nativescript or ionic, maybe windowsphone has a chance again? I have no idea tbh.
- baxtr 2y ago
  I didn’t like the UI at all. A lot of unnecessary animations. It felt like a forced departure from the iPhone standard, just so that it’s different.
- wombat-man 2y ago
  Feels a bit late at this point. Surface Pros run snapdragon but it still feels like too much of a lift to spin up an entire new mobile OS. I'd be pretty intrigued but they're still struggling to nail the tablet market imo.
lenkite 2y ago
Windows phone was damn good and was growing in popularity when Nadella came in and killed it. When you are #3 in a market, you need persistence to win. One cannot expect immediate, massive profits in a saturated market. Yet, Windows phone by itself was a growth multiplier for Windows which Nadella annihilated in order to turn Microsoft into a cloud & ad services company.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  > you need persistence to win. You also need a plan. How would Windows Phone displace either Apple or Android?
  - raxxorraxor 2y ago
    It wouldn't and it wouldn't need to. The decision was still very likely wrong, especially transparent after Apple proved with silicon that ARM platforms can be that competitive. Windows wasn't ready here and platform interop wasn't at all it strength. If Windows phones would have had an emulated x86 mode, many people would have bought it instantly due to the momentum that now steadily decreases. There can be solid business revenue if you are "just" #3 and the experience with development is very valuable. Although it is true that Microsoft and hardware has always been turbulent, with partners or without. Sometimes they simply created the best products in their class with a lot of margin, sometimes they basically sold scrap.
    - actionfromafar 2y ago
      The entire mobile market was immature back then, people didn't expect much interoperability and Windows Mobile 7 Nokias were slick and faster than iPhone or Android. They could have become the "contrarians luxury" if you didn't want to just get an iPhone. A bunch of hardcore Microsoft fan developers were gearing up to develop for Windows Mobilet dotnet when Microsoft changed the APIs with Mobile 8 (IIRC) and this dedicated bunch of developers just dropped the platform and just embraced Android or iOS instead.
  - mysterydip 2y ago

archerx 2y ago

Well since Nadella I have been using less Microsoft products and probably won’t be using Windows anymore once my Windows 10 LTSC stops working. I keep hearing praise for Nadella but all he is doing is alienating a lot of customers with his terrible decisions.

juped 2y ago
Ballmer would never have put honest-to-God advertisements in Windows Solitaire.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  I always had the feeling MS was squeezing competitors and software vendors, not users directly. The user hostility have made me move me to Linux systems.
- spacechild1 2y ago
  Let alone ads in the start menu!
  - DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
    To be fair, Windows 98 came with almost-ads in the stock Active Desktop wallpaper - and promos for AOL/CompuServ/Prodigy.
    - znpy 2y ago
      AOL was stuff that people actually used however. It wasn't "random stuff". For many people in the 90ies it was like the brand "AOL" was a synonym of "internet".
  - 1980phipsi 2y ago
    Or screw up search on the start menu
- squarefoot 2y ago
  As a 100% Linux user with good memories of that era (flying chair, Linux==cancer, etc.) I may be the best person here to actually defend Ballmer, having for sure no hidden interests in doing that. Everything changed in those years: Google was cool, Linux desktop almost non existent, cryptocurrency not even in the head of its creator, AI was a myth and the best voice recognition could offer was the hilarious "double the killer" demonstration [1]. How can we compare CEOs actions separated by two decades? Ballmer did what was perceived as useful for its company back then just as Nadella is doing that now. Perspectives have changed, hence companies and their CEOS had to adapt. I'm 100% sure that if Ballmer were MS CEO today, he would include advertisements as well, as today putting advertisements in every free corner of the known Universe is perceived as acceptable, if not necessary, which was not the case 20 years back. [1] context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX8oYoYy2Gc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX8oYoYy2Gc

jayceedenton 2y ago

> a red headed step child Very good point, but please stop using this phrase.

anilakar 2y ago

> The problem with Microsoft was everything went through Windows. The entire company was designed to promote Windows. ...and nowadays Windows is designed to promote their cloud subscription services while local features get axed. If Google is not allowed to link directly to Maps, there is no way Microsoft can be allowed to advertise their paid services everywhere in their OS.

Hypergraphe 2y ago

I'm not sure that devaluating Windows is a good strategy at all...

belter 2y ago
Bad strategy for Microsoft but clearly a wining strategy for the World.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  Selling licenses is not where the money is. Selling subscriptions to corporations so that every corporate-supplied computer (including Macs) pay Microsoft for something, be it Office or a full Windows+Office+Sharepoint license. All things considered, they can give Windows for free and they'll still profit from it as an enabler for further Microsoft lock-in.
ozim 2y ago
It is in "everything is cloud" and "most of software runs in browsers anyway" world where operating systems don't matter . I would not say it was by any means one or the other CEO "insightful" choice but it was more of market choosing on its own. Microsoft had to make own cloud or die that was the choice and better to put loads of investment in that. Ballmer started Azure because Amazon of course was first and Google did the same so Nadella was just playing cards he was handed by the world.
- Hypergraphe 2y ago
  Running a cloud and developping an operating system are two separare activites that don't need to be tied together. There is a lot of proprietary software in companies around the globe that rely on windows low level APIs and it will last for decades. There is a lot of things that are running outside the browser. The whole gaming industry is still tied to Windows directx.
mike_hearn 2y ago
It's not a strategy, it's a recognition that the Windows org has decayed and they apparently don't know how to turn it around. Apparently simple projects take forever, new code they launch is often filled with bugs, different parts of the org don't talk to each other and they can't explain why anyone should write an app that targets the Windows API. I support customers shipping apps to every platform and Windows is nowadays 90% of the pain, it's worse even than Linux. Microsoft just don't care either, you can tell the devs who work on it are overwhelmed by the sheer size and tech debt levels of the codebase. Decades of compounding bad decisions have well and truly caught up with them :( This is a pity in a way, the desktop OS market could use more competition. Nadella de-prioritizing Windows was the right thing to do for the business because it had a monopoly, so after PC sales saturated the market the best they could achieve was treading water, but also because the strategy of tying everything to Windows assumed the Windows team would continue to execute well and these things would all be mutually reinforcing. In the 90s Windows did execute well but by 2010 that had stopped, and so the tying strategy also had to stop. A better CEO than Ballmer could possibly have turned the Windows situation around and avoided the need for the disconnection, but instead it was left to drift.

_heimdall 2y ago

Lately it has definitely felt as though Microsoft is resurrecting Ballmer's old meme as "AI! AI! AI!" I was at Microsoft for the last couple years of Ballmer and the first few years of Nadella. He definitely did change the company and I remember at the time feeling that he handled the change really well, but from where I sat he spent the first part of his tenure evolving Ballmer's final push to move focus from Windows to developers. Everything Microsoft did prior to LLMs was to bring developers over, from VS Code to GitHub to WSL. Now the company seems fully baked I to LLMs with everything they do chasing that. It would even make sense if the developer push was driven in part by the need to build up training sets for the eventual LLM work, though I really have a hard time believing that Microsoft was so well ahead of the game that they started grooming developers to provide data more than a decade ago.

toyg 2y ago
> Now the company seems fully baked I to LLMs with everything they do chasing that Them along absolutely everyone else. ChatGPT was an iPhone moment.
- kranke155 2y ago
  I would press X to doubt just because of profitability. It’s cute that we now have image and video gen AI. Also we have now Turing test passing chat bots (Id say). But although they are very impressive, and I know lots of people who use them for various tasks, I haven’t seen a “killer app” yet. For iPhone the killer app was making calls. It was the best phone you could get. Then it had apps. It was undeniably better. LLMs are good at a lot of things, but they don’t seem to excel any particular task - yet. I’m not sure they are a revolution yet. I’d say they’re more of Macintosh moment. A hugely useful technology no doubt - but useful for what exactly? For Mac it was desktop publishing.
  - JKCalhoun 2y ago
    I agree generally with what you're saying but feel you were all over the place in your comment. The killer app on the iPhone was not "making calls" — I suspect instead it was Safari, the other 1st party apps, the touch screen and the slick integration of all of that to make it a no-brainer device that even my mom and dad could use (they were approaching their 70's when the iPhone debuted). Your analogy that ChatGPT (or LLMs generally) are more akin to the Mac feels close to the mark to me. Your comment about the Mac's killer app, desktop publishing, suggests that LLM's killer app will follow, just hasn't arrived yet. The analogy is a little shaky though since, some would argue, it was the laser printer (plus the Mac) that kicked off desktop publishing.

ozim 2y ago

I would argue that specific technologies changing is super relevant fact. In 90's and 00's "everything Windows" made loads of sense for a company so being hard on any competition was the right thing. Also I don't see people saying it about MacOs you cannot do software to this day for MacOs or iOS without having actual device and operating system from Apple. What changed for MSFT was that operating system in 2010's and forward became irrelevant. Cloud is where the money is and now MSFT is "all in Azure or nothing company", entire company is designed to promote Azure and O365. To properly promote Azure they need to run Linux on that cloud and they need mind share of developers that will develop products using Azure - earlier they could force developers to use Windows because that was where software was running.

chucke1992 2y ago

Yeah. It is basically a trap that every CFO who became CEO step into - tie everything to a single thing. With Satya he had much broader vision.

layer8 2y ago

As an end user, I lament the devaluation of Windows and the general drive to cloud-based solutions. It has made everything worse.

DowagerDave 2y ago

Yep, aside from the legacy desktop environment & gaming I don't really have any ties to MS anymore, and I was a pure MS developer for 20+ years. Now with .NET superior on non-windows platforms and the nonsense their hostile consumer & enterprise side keeps pulling why would I stay in the ecosystem? I agree that Ballmer was unfairly used as a punching bag, but MS today (both the good and bad) is all Nadella.

seoulmetro 2y ago

This sounds right until you realise how much market share Windows captured, held and now even solidifies from the Ballmer era. I don't agree with you, and I believe the Ballmer era did wonders for Windows and was a turbulent period. The new era of MS now is quite stable because of this.