64 ms·

Steve Ballmer Interview

143 points by naves 1y ago

profsummergig 1y ago
TIL that Ballmer built their enterprise division from scratch. Figures. It was a highly profitable division that nobody could figure out what it did or how.
- karim79 1y ago
  He also saved Xbox from death [0]. More specifically the RROD (red ring of death) which afflicted most xbox360 consoles back in the day. I for one replaced my console three times before learning how to adjust the DVD drive's potentiometer after an insanely long disassembly process. Oh the good ole' days. [0] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/07/hear-how-steve-ballmer-bailed-out-xbox-after-red-ring-of-death/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/07/hear-how-steve-ballme...
  - rib3ye 1y ago
    Interesting because he also tried to kill Xbox internally before it was an initiative.
    - bitwize 1y ago
      Steve Jobs tried to kill the Macintosh before he took over the division building it and became its champion. Sometimes an exec doesn't see the value of something, until they do. It's the nature of working and leading in a corporation, when you're just one human with limited visibility into what's going on.
      - simonh 1y ago
        What they were building under Raskin, before Steve took over the team, was nothing like what the Mac became. It was text only, no mouse or GUI, and used some weird automatic mode switching UI that Raskin tinkered with for decades after but never really went anywhere.
rwmj 1y ago
Truly a legendary man for finding himself in the right place at the right time.
- jedberg 1y ago
  That's honestly a bit dismissive. You might not like him because he's loud and "not an engineer", but you gotta give him credit for tripling their revenue under his watch.
  - jama211 1y ago
    Not the person you just spoke to, and I don’t have any skin in this game, but technically speaking we don’t know if it tripled because of him or despite him, right? The truth is likely somewhere in the middle, but who knows where exactly.
    - rwmj 1y ago
      Or if another CEO could have done better. While Microsoft was a mature company at the time, it's still part of a very high growth industry. He was CEO for 14 years, so just tripling the revenue (and that's in nominal terms, not counting inflation) isn't exactly spectacular.
      - ThrowawayR2 1y ago
        Well, there's the CEOs of IBM, Sun, Yahoo, HP, DEC, Compaq, AOL, Palm Computing, and other formerly high flying competitors to compare against. I'm sure people could suggest a few others. Whatever else might be said about him, he didn't crater Microsoft while on the job.
        jama211 1y ago
        That is true, objectively he didn’t fuck it up I suppose
        1y ago
iambateman 1y ago
I’m not against wealthy people, and America has always had a Tycoon class… But allowing a single person to go from $20B to $130B in assets in 10 years feels like a pretty obvious policy failure.
- thefourthchime 1y ago
  Why? It's not like this money is in a giant vault filled with money and he swims around it. All of this money is being put to use in the U.S. economy.
  - jedberg 1y ago
    Almost all of that was an increase in stock price. That's about as close as you can get to just sitting in a vault. If he were selling it and using the money for something else, that would be one thing, but he's really not using much of it. This is not to say it's his fault. That's how our laws are written. But that is the point of OP. That our policies should be forcing him to sell and put that money back into the economy.
    - harperlee 1y ago
      Owning stock is the polar opposite of having money in a vault - it is giving money to the economy. Specifically to a part of the economy that is a money-generating machine: a company. Put in circulation precisely to be invested on the economy.
      - ryandrake 1y ago
        When you buy a stock, "the economy" is not getting the money. Some other investor is getting it, who may or may not be putting that money to use. They may just turn around and buy another stock, giving that money to another investor, who buys a different stock, and on and on and on, with no other actual economic activity happening.
        1y ago
breadwinner 1y ago
Ballmer's chief mistake was sticking to what worked in the past. He was not willing to let go of the Windows monopoly, and Azure in its early days was based on Windows servers. Then Satya came in and said, no it is OK to support Linux, and in fact it is OK to run Microsoft's own services on Linux. It is OK to support Open Source, and in fact we'll open source some of our stuff. That put Microsoft back on track. For now. Satya's mistake though is that he has filled Microsoft with average people. The best fresh graduates from the top colleges went to Google and Facebook in the last decade -- because they paid significantly more -- and Microsoft picked up the rest. What is the impact of that? Microsoft's execution ability is lower, and we'll see the impact of that in the coming years. Another of Satya's mistakes is his faux pas related to women employees. He was accused -- unfairly in my opinion -- of saying women employees should not ask for a raise. He did no such thing. He said employees should not ask for a raise (not women employees specifically) and instead should rely on the system to give you the appropriate raise at the appropriate time. But since he said that at a women's conference the accusation stood that he meant women employees specifically. Satya has had to fight against this accusation and he has done so by establishing a quota system for promoting women employees. Executive compensation at all levels at Microsoft is directly tied to promotion of women employees, and as a result, a lot of women now occupy positions they would not otherwise. Again, the impact is decreased ability to execute. Microsoft today is the second most valuable company behind Nvidia. But you wouldn't know that looking at their products. They don't have any interesting new products. To some extend they are coasting. Will their success continue into the next decade? It's going to be interesting to watch.
- Waterluvian 1y ago
  > he has filled Microsoft with average people. The best fresh graduates from the top colleges went to Google and Facebook in the last decade Is there a way to demonstrate that this actually mattered? That paying more did get them “better” talent that actually made a difference? Ie. not any self serving “they did because they’re better and they’re better because they were paid more.”
  - breadwinner 1y ago
    Look at AI. Microsoft was an early leader in AI but that was only because of their investment in OpenAI. What has Microsoft done in AI since then? Is anyone excited about Copilot? Look at what Google has done since then. Lots of interesting stuff. Only recently has Microsoft released something interesting: Mustafa Suleyman released the company’s first model trained internally from start to finish [1]. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/28/microsoft-tests-mai-1-preview-ai-model-boost-to-copilot-rival-openai.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/28/microsoft-tests-mai-1-previe...
belter 1y ago
Another interview about the story of Microsoft, who skillfully managed to avoid any mention of Mary Maxwell Gates :-) https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/05/how-bill-gates-mother-influenced-the-success-of-microsoft.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/05/how-bill-gates-mother-influe...
- HappyJoy 1y ago
  That was well covered in another episode.
anonymars 1y ago
Interesting interview in general, but I thought this was interesting framing on selling stock where you're ahead: > Why would I sell, so we have less to give to philanthropy someday, unless I really think Microsoft’s going to underperform the market by essentially the capital gains rate.
shihab 1y ago
I’m a big, big fan of acquired podcast, listened to every single of their episodes. But I remember their entire Microsoft episodes felt like a lengthy defense of Steve Ballmer. There were too many instances of “here’s why this bad decision of Steve made sense given the circumstances” or “ here is how people underestimate the contribution of Steve on this good decision.” They were all well argued points, of course, but so numerous that I found myself wondering if the hosts does not have a relationship with Steve. The existence of this interview does not help with that suspicion.
- big_toast 1y ago
  This is the problem with podcasts, but also modern media, in general. You have to play softball or be ideologically homogeneous to get access. Anything else has a negative k for a variety of reasons.
- SlowTao 1y ago
  I think the big thing was Steve did make a lot of great decisions, some of the best the company could at that time in those respective fields but completely missed on everything that Apple did. Portable media players, smart phones and tablets and those are the three huge misses and that is really were it counted. The old three envelope joke. You become CEO and there are three envelopes on your office desk, a note says "Every time there is an issue you open them in order and do what is inside". First envelope says "Blame your predecessor.". The second says "Blame yourself". The third says "Prepare three envelopes".
  - opo 1y ago
    >...The second says "Blame yourself". The second step in this joke is something like "Reorganize.", not "Blame yourself". https://kevinkruse.com/the-ceo-and-the-three-envelopes/ https://kevinkruse.com/the-ceo-and-the-three-envelopes/
- mrandish 1y ago
  I haven't listened to all their MSFT coverage but it's possible they genuinely feel Ballmer's gotten a worse rap than he deserves and they're trying to contextualize some of the decisions and circumstances.
dzonga 1y ago
due to the capitalistic nature of america, they lost a brilliant mathematician in ballmer, yet also gained an excellent salesperson / executive. guess end of day - money is a scale not an item to be measured.
markus_zhang 1y ago
Since Steve was the guy who single handedly recruited David Cutler and his gang, I figured he has a lot of tricks in his bag.
mrcsharp 1y ago
You know, Steve Ballmer is always fun and interesting to listen to. Meanwhile you have Satya Nadella. This very sanitized, boring, fake, borderline manufactured personality. I can't imagine sitting through a 3hr interview/podcast with him as a guest. I had no problem listening to this one though.
- mrandish 1y ago
  I agree with you that Satya typically has a flat, measured style that comes across dry and he also stage manages himself rigorously. But it's also worth mentioning that being the CEO of a massive, high-profile public company puts him under different expectations and constraints than a long retired CEO. Nadella is still spokesperson #1 for the company, products and stock. That said, I'm not sure we'd see a dramatically more forthright and unfiltered Satya when he's ten years out of MSFT. I think much of Satya's style is simply the way he is all the time.
  - umeshunni 1y ago
    I think another point is that there's a huge difference between a founder-CEO (or near founder like Ballmer) and a manager/employee-CEO. The former has nothing to prove and can speak their mind, for better or worse, and the latter has to tow the company line.
  - mrcsharp 1y ago
    Generally agree but if you look at the body language and how engaged Steve is vs. what you generally see from Satya, there is a massive difference and Satya being #1 spokesperson for the company doesn't explain it in my opinion. Matter of fact, I'd even argue that being #1 spokesperson and giving this low energy vibe is kind of bad for how the company is seen by the public. I'd rather have the "developers developers developers" CEO over whatever Satya is.
    - mrandish 1y ago
      > I'd rather have the "developers developers developers" CEO over whatever Satya is. I was fairly impressed with Satya in his first few years as CEO, mostly due to his embracing hard but necessary strategic changes that had been put off too long. However, the last few years I feel like he's really stalled out. To be clear, I'm not assessing based on the current revenue or stock price which can lag by five or more years but on doing the right things strategically, technically and on product vision. It's unclear the mind-boggling mountains of cash poured on AI (mostly OpenAI) in order to play catch-up are going to pay off in sufficiently high-margin revenue in a Wall Street-relevant time frame. And big chunks of the mountains of cash dumped into rolling up large gaming franchises at peak post-Covid game bubble valuations are already being written off.
slater 1y ago
Direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYC49_aeop0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYC49_aeop0
arp242 1y ago
> We were trying to get our browser to be a platform, embrace and extend I think is what we said. We’ll embrace the Internet and we’ll extend with these ActiveX controls. Haha, yeah, I think you've forgotten the last third there Steve.
- bitwize 1y ago
  "Embrace and extend" was how Microsoft publicly described its strategy wrt web standards, or really open standards of any sort in the 90s. They were savvy enough not to say the quiet part out loud.
keeda 1y ago
I always thought Ballmer was an underrated CEO. He knew who was really important for the success of his company. What other billionaire tech leader is ever going to get up on stage all sweaty and rave and chant and dance for people like me, me, me?
- bitwize 1y ago
  Even when it first became a meme, I realized that "developers, developers, developers" was not just a chant or a slogan but an integral part of Microsoft's platform strategy. Get third-party developers on board, lock 'em in, convince them that it was worth their while to build on and for Windows specifically. The mire developers loved and wrote fir Windows, the more valuable Windiws became and the stronger Microsoft's positi(n was. Every release of the MSDN library had a new API to get excited about. Keep iterating on their development tools, culminating in Visual Studio, which trammelled everything else in the marketplace. Even John Carmack, Miguel de Icaza, and Larry Wall thought Microsoft's platform was pretty much best of breed. To this day the debugging situation on Linux is still stone knives and bearskins compared to what VS offers. It worked, too. Every enterprise shop in the mid-late 90s was all in on Windows NT and ActiveX, until Java could get enough of a toehold in the enterprise space.
  - keeda 1y ago
    Yes, Visual Studio 6 was a mind-expanding experience. Nothing else came close until I tried IntelliJ a decade later, and even that is still missing a ton of advanced features. Microsoft gets a lot of hate for being anti-open source, but they really did treat developers very well -- as long as you stayed within their ecosystem.
rr808 1y ago
You guys know Steve Ballmer is worth more than Bill Gates and owns a bigger share of MS? Gates diversified and donated to his foundation.
jeffhwang 1y ago
Ballmer was hard-working, smart, and incredibly lucky in many ways. (Fairly or unfairly, I always have a soft spot for someone who survives Math 55 freshman year at Harvard—which Steve did!) But he was also enthusiastic about weird non-tech marketing initiatives like trying to partner with big paper companies to launch “MS Office” branded paper for higher margin paper sales. I think this was a few years before the US version of The Office. But it sounds pretty Dunder-Mifflin to me! Whatever his flaws, I don’t see Satya going in this direction. Source: I spoke directly with someone who worked with Ballmer on this.
rcleveng 1y ago
I found the episode very enlightening, and learned a lot as well as unlearned a few things that I thought I had known. I never realized how much of azure was him early on.' I didn't realize the tension between him and Bill, always assumed those two were thick as thieves, all the time. I super respect him for stepping down so that the company can change in the way it needs to, and also so wall street would realize a change has happened (which was around spending discipline vs. investments, and giving forward guidance, etc) I left this episode with a lot more respect for him as a person and saw him much more introspective and up front that I would have imagined based on what I thought I knew before. Also, a formerly favorite phrase of saying "we're in the Ballmer era at X company" is struck from my vocabularly, since in most places I've used it, it's meant to be an insult to the company, however it's really just an insult to Ballmer. He was way more intuned than many others.
GMoromisato 1y ago
I was disappointed that Ballmer didn't give Ray Ozzie more credit. Azure was incubated inside Ray's org and Cutler worked for Ray. I remember Ray telling me that he had to go to the board and ask for $1 billion to build a datacenter. This was in 2005, I think, when that seemed like a crazy amount of money. Ballmer sort of acknowledged Ray's role when he said that Cutler would not have wanted to work in the Servers and Tools org. But I think Ballmer undersells how much of the Azure strategy actually came from Ray.
anacrolix 1y ago
maybe it's Ballmer's salesmanship, but the interview really really enlightened me and increased my opinion of Ballmer.
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
Popping back into this thread because I just heard a clip of Steve Balmer introducing a new player to his Clippers basketball team in very much a classic Balmer way. (re: Developers! Developers!...) And he's in the news for it because the team might have used a sketchy tactic with a fake endorsement company to lure the player in. https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6595033/2025/09/03/kawhi-leonard-clippers-salary-cap-circumvention-accusations-aspiration/ https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6595033/2025/09/03/kawhi-le... Same ol' Balmer. haha

143 points by naves 1y ago

TIL that Ballmer built their enterprise division from scratch. Figures. It was a highly profitable division that nobody could figure out what it did or how.

karim79 1y ago
He also saved Xbox from death [0]. More specifically the RROD (red ring of death) which afflicted most xbox360 consoles back in the day. I for one replaced my console three times before learning how to adjust the DVD drive's potentiometer after an insanely long disassembly process. Oh the good ole' days. [0] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/07/hear-how-steve-ballmer-bailed-out-xbox-after-red-ring-of-death/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/07/hear-how-steve-ballme...
- rib3ye 1y ago
  Interesting because he also tried to kill Xbox internally before it was an initiative.
  - bitwize 1y ago
    Steve Jobs tried to kill the Macintosh before he took over the division building it and became its champion. Sometimes an exec doesn't see the value of something, until they do. It's the nature of working and leading in a corporation, when you're just one human with limited visibility into what's going on.
    - simonh 1y ago
      What they were building under Raskin, before Steve took over the team, was nothing like what the Mac became. It was text only, no mouse or GUI, and used some weird automatic mode switching UI that Raskin tinkered with for decades after but never really went anywhere.

rwmj 1y ago

Truly a legendary man for finding himself in the right place at the right time.

jedberg 1y ago
That's honestly a bit dismissive. You might not like him because he's loud and "not an engineer", but you gotta give him credit for tripling their revenue under his watch.
- jama211 1y ago
  Not the person you just spoke to, and I don’t have any skin in this game, but technically speaking we don’t know if it tripled because of him or despite him, right? The truth is likely somewhere in the middle, but who knows where exactly.
  - rwmj 1y ago
    Or if another CEO could have done better. While Microsoft was a mature company at the time, it's still part of a very high growth industry. He was CEO for 14 years, so just tripling the revenue (and that's in nominal terms, not counting inflation) isn't exactly spectacular.
    - ThrowawayR2 1y ago
      Well, there's the CEOs of IBM, Sun, Yahoo, HP, DEC, Compaq, AOL, Palm Computing, and other formerly high flying competitors to compare against. I'm sure people could suggest a few others. Whatever else might be said about him, he didn't crater Microsoft while on the job.
      - jama211 1y ago
        That is true, objectively he didn’t fuck it up I suppose
        1y ago

iambateman 1y ago

I’m not against wealthy people, and America has always had a Tycoon class… But allowing a single person to go from $20B to $130B in assets in 10 years feels like a pretty obvious policy failure.

thefourthchime 1y ago
Why? It's not like this money is in a giant vault filled with money and he swims around it. All of this money is being put to use in the U.S. economy.
- jedberg 1y ago
  Almost all of that was an increase in stock price. That's about as close as you can get to just sitting in a vault. If he were selling it and using the money for something else, that would be one thing, but he's really not using much of it. This is not to say it's his fault. That's how our laws are written. But that is the point of OP. That our policies should be forcing him to sell and put that money back into the economy.
  - harperlee 1y ago
    Owning stock is the polar opposite of having money in a vault - it is giving money to the economy. Specifically to a part of the economy that is a money-generating machine: a company. Put in circulation precisely to be invested on the economy.
    - ryandrake 1y ago
      When you buy a stock, "the economy" is not getting the money. Some other investor is getting it, who may or may not be putting that money to use. They may just turn around and buy another stock, giving that money to another investor, who buys a different stock, and on and on and on, with no other actual economic activity happening.
      - 1y ago

breadwinner 1y ago

Ballmer's chief mistake was sticking to what worked in the past. He was not willing to let go of the Windows monopoly, and Azure in its early days was based on Windows servers. Then Satya came in and said, no it is OK to support Linux, and in fact it is OK to run Microsoft's own services on Linux. It is OK to support Open Source, and in fact we'll open source some of our stuff. That put Microsoft back on track. For now. Satya's mistake though is that he has filled Microsoft with average people. The best fresh graduates from the top colleges went to Google and Facebook in the last decade -- because they paid significantly more -- and Microsoft picked up the rest. What is the impact of that? Microsoft's execution ability is lower, and we'll see the impact of that in the coming years. Another of Satya's mistakes is his faux pas related to women employees. He was accused -- unfairly in my opinion -- of saying women employees should not ask for a raise. He did no such thing. He said employees should not ask for a raise (not women employees specifically) and instead should rely on the system to give you the appropriate raise at the appropriate time. But since he said that at a women's conference the accusation stood that he meant women employees specifically. Satya has had to fight against this accusation and he has done so by establishing a quota system for promoting women employees. Executive compensation at all levels at Microsoft is directly tied to promotion of women employees, and as a result, a lot of women now occupy positions they would not otherwise. Again, the impact is decreased ability to execute. Microsoft today is the second most valuable company behind Nvidia. But you wouldn't know that looking at their products. They don't have any interesting new products. To some extend they are coasting. Will their success continue into the next decade? It's going to be interesting to watch.

Waterluvian 1y ago
> he has filled Microsoft with average people. The best fresh graduates from the top colleges went to Google and Facebook in the last decade Is there a way to demonstrate that this actually mattered? That paying more did get them “better” talent that actually made a difference? Ie. not any self serving “they did because they’re better and they’re better because they were paid more.”
- breadwinner 1y ago
  Look at AI. Microsoft was an early leader in AI but that was only because of their investment in OpenAI. What has Microsoft done in AI since then? Is anyone excited about Copilot? Look at what Google has done since then. Lots of interesting stuff. Only recently has Microsoft released something interesting: Mustafa Suleyman released the company’s first model trained internally from start to finish [1]. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/28/microsoft-tests-mai-1-preview-ai-model-boost-to-copilot-rival-openai.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/28/microsoft-tests-mai-1-previe...

belter 1y ago

Another interview about the story of Microsoft, who skillfully managed to avoid any mention of Mary Maxwell Gates :-) https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/05/how-bill-gates-mother-influenced-the-success-of-microsoft.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/05/how-bill-gates-mother-influe...

HappyJoy 1y ago
That was well covered in another episode.

anonymars 1y ago

Interesting interview in general, but I thought this was interesting framing on selling stock where you're ahead: > Why would I sell, so we have less to give to philanthropy someday, unless I really think Microsoft’s going to underperform the market by essentially the capital gains rate.

shihab 1y ago

I’m a big, big fan of acquired podcast, listened to every single of their episodes. But I remember their entire Microsoft episodes felt like a lengthy defense of Steve Ballmer. There were too many instances of “here’s why this bad decision of Steve made sense given the circumstances” or “ here is how people underestimate the contribution of Steve on this good decision.” They were all well argued points, of course, but so numerous that I found myself wondering if the hosts does not have a relationship with Steve. The existence of this interview does not help with that suspicion.

big_toast 1y ago
This is the problem with podcasts, but also modern media, in general. You have to play softball or be ideologically homogeneous to get access. Anything else has a negative k for a variety of reasons.
SlowTao 1y ago
I think the big thing was Steve did make a lot of great decisions, some of the best the company could at that time in those respective fields but completely missed on everything that Apple did. Portable media players, smart phones and tablets and those are the three huge misses and that is really were it counted. The old three envelope joke. You become CEO and there are three envelopes on your office desk, a note says "Every time there is an issue you open them in order and do what is inside". First envelope says "Blame your predecessor.". The second says "Blame yourself". The third says "Prepare three envelopes".
- opo 1y ago
  >...The second says "Blame yourself". The second step in this joke is something like "Reorganize.", not "Blame yourself". https://kevinkruse.com/the-ceo-and-the-three-envelopes/ https://kevinkruse.com/the-ceo-and-the-three-envelopes/
mrandish 1y ago
I haven't listened to all their MSFT coverage but it's possible they genuinely feel Ballmer's gotten a worse rap than he deserves and they're trying to contextualize some of the decisions and circumstances.

dzonga 1y ago

due to the capitalistic nature of america, they lost a brilliant mathematician in ballmer, yet also gained an excellent salesperson / executive. guess end of day - money is a scale not an item to be measured.

markus_zhang 1y ago

Since Steve was the guy who single handedly recruited David Cutler and his gang, I figured he has a lot of tricks in his bag.

mrcsharp 1y ago

You know, Steve Ballmer is always fun and interesting to listen to. Meanwhile you have Satya Nadella. This very sanitized, boring, fake, borderline manufactured personality. I can't imagine sitting through a 3hr interview/podcast with him as a guest. I had no problem listening to this one though.

mrandish 1y ago
I agree with you that Satya typically has a flat, measured style that comes across dry and he also stage manages himself rigorously. But it's also worth mentioning that being the CEO of a massive, high-profile public company puts him under different expectations and constraints than a long retired CEO. Nadella is still spokesperson #1 for the company, products and stock. That said, I'm not sure we'd see a dramatically more forthright and unfiltered Satya when he's ten years out of MSFT. I think much of Satya's style is simply the way he is all the time.
- umeshunni 1y ago
  I think another point is that there's a huge difference between a founder-CEO (or near founder like Ballmer) and a manager/employee-CEO. The former has nothing to prove and can speak their mind, for better or worse, and the latter has to tow the company line.
- mrcsharp 1y ago
  Generally agree but if you look at the body language and how engaged Steve is vs. what you generally see from Satya, there is a massive difference and Satya being #1 spokesperson for the company doesn't explain it in my opinion. Matter of fact, I'd even argue that being #1 spokesperson and giving this low energy vibe is kind of bad for how the company is seen by the public. I'd rather have the "developers developers developers" CEO over whatever Satya is.
  - mrandish 1y ago
    > I'd rather have the "developers developers developers" CEO over whatever Satya is. I was fairly impressed with Satya in his first few years as CEO, mostly due to his embracing hard but necessary strategic changes that had been put off too long. However, the last few years I feel like he's really stalled out. To be clear, I'm not assessing based on the current revenue or stock price which can lag by five or more years but on doing the right things strategically, technically and on product vision. It's unclear the mind-boggling mountains of cash poured on AI (mostly OpenAI) in order to play catch-up are going to pay off in sufficiently high-margin revenue in a Wall Street-relevant time frame. And big chunks of the mountains of cash dumped into rolling up large gaming franchises at peak post-Covid game bubble valuations are already being written off.

slater 1y ago

Direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYC49_aeop0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYC49_aeop0

arp242 1y ago

> We were trying to get our browser to be a platform, embrace and extend I think is what we said. We’ll embrace the Internet and we’ll extend with these ActiveX controls. Haha, yeah, I think you've forgotten the last third there Steve.

bitwize 1y ago
"Embrace and extend" was how Microsoft publicly described its strategy wrt web standards, or really open standards of any sort in the 90s. They were savvy enough not to say the quiet part out loud.

keeda 1y ago

I always thought Ballmer was an underrated CEO. He knew who was really important for the success of his company. What other billionaire tech leader is ever going to get up on stage all sweaty and rave and chant and dance for people like me, me, me?

bitwize 1y ago
Even when it first became a meme, I realized that "developers, developers, developers" was not just a chant or a slogan but an integral part of Microsoft's platform strategy. Get third-party developers on board, lock 'em in, convince them that it was worth their while to build on and for Windows specifically. The mire developers loved and wrote fir Windows, the more valuable Windiws became and the stronger Microsoft's positi(n was. Every release of the MSDN library had a new API to get excited about. Keep iterating on their development tools, culminating in Visual Studio, which trammelled everything else in the marketplace. Even John Carmack, Miguel de Icaza, and Larry Wall thought Microsoft's platform was pretty much best of breed. To this day the debugging situation on Linux is still stone knives and bearskins compared to what VS offers. It worked, too. Every enterprise shop in the mid-late 90s was all in on Windows NT and ActiveX, until Java could get enough of a toehold in the enterprise space.
- keeda 1y ago
  Yes, Visual Studio 6 was a mind-expanding experience. Nothing else came close until I tried IntelliJ a decade later, and even that is still missing a ton of advanced features. Microsoft gets a lot of hate for being anti-open source, but they really did treat developers very well -- as long as you stayed within their ecosystem.

rr808 1y ago

You guys know Steve Ballmer is worth more than Bill Gates and owns a bigger share of MS? Gates diversified and donated to his foundation.

jeffhwang 1y ago

Ballmer was hard-working, smart, and incredibly lucky in many ways. (Fairly or unfairly, I always have a soft spot for someone who survives Math 55 freshman year at Harvard—which Steve did!) But he was also enthusiastic about weird non-tech marketing initiatives like trying to partner with big paper companies to launch “MS Office” branded paper for higher margin paper sales. I think this was a few years before the US version of The Office. But it sounds pretty Dunder-Mifflin to me! Whatever his flaws, I don’t see Satya going in this direction. Source: I spoke directly with someone who worked with Ballmer on this.

rcleveng 1y ago

I found the episode very enlightening, and learned a lot as well as unlearned a few things that I thought I had known. I never realized how much of azure was him early on.' I didn't realize the tension between him and Bill, always assumed those two were thick as thieves, all the time. I super respect him for stepping down so that the company can change in the way it needs to, and also so wall street would realize a change has happened (which was around spending discipline vs. investments, and giving forward guidance, etc) I left this episode with a lot more respect for him as a person and saw him much more introspective and up front that I would have imagined based on what I thought I knew before. Also, a formerly favorite phrase of saying "we're in the Ballmer era at X company" is struck from my vocabularly, since in most places I've used it, it's meant to be an insult to the company, however it's really just an insult to Ballmer. He was way more intuned than many others.

GMoromisato 1y ago

I was disappointed that Ballmer didn't give Ray Ozzie more credit. Azure was incubated inside Ray's org and Cutler worked for Ray. I remember Ray telling me that he had to go to the board and ask for $1 billion to build a datacenter. This was in 2005, I think, when that seemed like a crazy amount of money. Ballmer sort of acknowledged Ray's role when he said that Cutler would not have wanted to work in the Servers and Tools org. But I think Ballmer undersells how much of the Azure strategy actually came from Ray.

anacrolix 1y ago

maybe it's Ballmer's salesmanship, but the interview really really enlightened me and increased my opinion of Ballmer.

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

Popping back into this thread because I just heard a clip of Steve Balmer introducing a new player to his Clippers basketball team in very much a classic Balmer way. (re: Developers! Developers!...) And he's in the news for it because the team might have used a sketchy tactic with a fake endorsement company to lure the player in. https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6595033/2025/09/03/kawhi-leonard-clippers-salary-cap-circumvention-accusations-aspiration/ https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6595033/2025/09/03/kawhi-le... Same ol' Balmer. haha