9 ms·

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

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...
  - ulfw 1y ago
    Using both I don't see how copilot LLM is any worst than Gemini LLM honestly
    - Spooky23 1y ago
      Depending on which of the 40 Copilots you’re speaking of, context window is dramatically better with Gemini.
      - ulfw 1y ago
        copilot.microsoft.com vs gemini.google.com
torben-friis 1y ago
>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. That seems shaky as a justification. I don’t have any data behind it, but in a world of eight billion people, it’s a hard sell that there’s only enough top talent for 3 companies. Plus, feel free to correct me but I don’t feel Meta has brought anything technically brilliant to the table lately. Google might be a better sell with alphafold and some other projects but none of it seems mainstream tech either. Maybe pixels if you want to stretch it, but search, maps, Gmail, YouTube, android, and even photos were there a decade ago already.
- gxs 1y ago
  I hear you, I might give people the benefit of the doubt too much, but I interpreted what he said more like while Facebook and Google were going out of their way to make sure they hired only the best, hiring was just not a point of emphasis for Microsoft and as a result it didn’t hire as many good people I think that point is fair - at the very least, Microsoft wasn’t in the conversation as far as where the typical CS grad wanted to work - FANG doesn’t even include Microsoft in the acronym (I kid, I realize this doesn’t actually mean anything)
- ycombinatrix 1y ago
  >I don’t feel Meta has brought anything technically brilliant to the table lately I was pleasantly surprised by Llama.
  - klooney 1y ago
    I always hear bad things about its standings in the frontier model rankings, although I don't follow that close enough to know if that's real or not. What's cool about Llama?
    - ycombinatrix 1y ago
      Basically after years of raising money as a non-profit & training on everyone's data, "Open"AI rug-pulled the world and decided to keep their secret models secret to become a for-profit venture. I was pissed. Then Meta came out of nowhere to release Llama, a model with performance comparable to ChatGPT. I was able to download it & run it for free on my computer. Thank you Zucc, very cool.
CSMastermind 1y ago
I'm a Ballmer truther. He was completely right about many things including his vision for AI. I know that being early is often the same as being wrong but I don't think his big strategic moves as CEO were incorrect. Microsoft during his era was more marked by an inability to execute on those strategies.
- anonymars 1y ago
  I wonder if this is another one of those "two sides of the same coins" situations: on the one hand I agree that Ballmer was too weirdly competitive, e.g. with Linux/etc., plus the cringey takes on the iPhone, Google, etc. On the other hand Microsoft had a fire and passion that I don't really see anymore. I miss Developers, Developers, Developers. Now it's just ads, AI, blah.
  - flopsamjetsam 1y ago
    > on the one hand I agree that Ballmer was too weirdly competitive He was really the epitome of that, and that was the MO of Microsoft at the time. I always thought of him as the embodiment of that, the pinnacle, the ne plus ultra.
    - anonymars 1y ago
      Thinking about this some more -- in the interview, he seemed to have a feeling of Microsoft "struggling for survival" well past the timeframe when that was actually a reality
- CamperBob2 1y ago
  What was his vision for AI, and how could it be relevant? He was gone before the current wave hit. Going on TV and laughing at the iPhone pretty much told me everything I needed to know about Ballmer. The best thing I can say about him is that unlike Nadella, he didn't spend too much of his time actively trying to enshittify Windows.
eikenberry 1y ago
Once a company are over a certain size its ability to execute is throttled by business process, not individual's abilities. Individuals are kept from making an impact as they don't want that, they want predictable, replaceable cogs in the machine. Google and Meta suffer the same problem but, as businesses, they are slightly more nimble as they 3x smaller, but that has 0 to do with their hiring/promotion practices.
- breadwinner 1y ago
  So you're saying average people are fine for a big company? I would agree, if all you want to do is maintain existing products.
  - mikert89 1y ago
    its risky for big companies to move quickly. They mostly want to maintain what they have. its a myth that they want to innovate daily
    - Nevermark 1y ago
      Increase the conversion rates a couple percent, decrease the turnover a couple percent, and pretty soon your talking about big money.
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    I think you can actually do a lot with average people, if you have sufficient structure, process, guard rails, documentation, training and reviews. And big companies have a lot of this, specifically put in place to harvest above-average work from average talent. Yes, a company full of John Carmacks, un-shackled by process, can probably run circles around an average tech giant, but who can actually find and hire all these John Carmacks?
    - nickff 1y ago
      I think a company of Carmacks would probably be a mess; maybe resembling Xerox PARC, in that they came up with many interesting ideas, but rarely if ever actually created a profitable suite of products.
mikert89 1y ago
I think Microsoft actually just hired experienced H1Bs instead of new college grads. And they have such a moat with their corporate customers using excel, outlook, etc that execution doesnt matter as much for them.
- breadwinner 1y ago
  Nonsense. None of the top companies are H1B abusers. Meta, Google, Microsoft are all using H1Bs for the intended purpose. The abusers are companies not in tech industry like Disney etc. who bring in H1Bs to decrease their payroll expense. Top tech companies don't do that.
  - mikert89 1y ago
    Clearly youve never worked inside these companies
  - washadjeffmad 1y ago
    Disney might not care about appearances, and the HQs might be flagrantly flouting the rules, but what of the hundred subsidiaries and shadow corps that are their hands and feet? They don't need to court those hires. An acquaintance is an H1B at an Alphabet (owned) corp, hired to work a position that anyone with an Industrial Engineering BS could. And he only found out who owned his employer after an inspection by HQ prior to the scale up for Bard. I'm happy he got the opportunity, and it enabled his family to marry him and for his new wife to come to the US and start a teaching position at a university, but his role could have been filled by a local grad... if they could have been convinced to accept his salary.
  - GOD_Over_Djinn 1y ago
    There are a ton of highly qualified American citizens that are not able to find work, or are underemployed. The layoffs of the past few years have made it very clear that there is an abundance of local talent, and big tech hiring from outside is not about a lack of labor supply
GOD_Over_Djinn 1y ago
Really interesting comment. Is there a source for the promo quota thing? Or is this a policy that’s only discussed internally on a need-to-know basis?
- breadwinner 1y ago
  Managers and above know this. In order for execs to get their bonus they have to meet diversity goals. So execs have promoted women to positions they would not ordinarily be promoted, in order to get their bonuses. This started many years ago, and continue to this day. https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/18/13681738/microsoft-diversity-goals-executive-bonuses-women-in-tech https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/18/13681738/microsoft-diver... https://www.businessinsider.com/how-microsoft-execs-earn-their-bonuses-internal-memo-2019-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-microsoft-execs-earn-the... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-17/microsoft-to-tie-executive-bonuses-to-company-diversity-goals https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-17/microsoft...
jillesvangurp 1y ago
Google has largely stagnated with products that they largely already had before Satya Nadella took over. Facebook was kind of at its peak then and they had bought Whatsapp and added Instagram to their portfolio. But since then, Meta has had a few duds as well and it seems a bit lackluster lately. Messenger launched and imploded. Then VR. And now they are messing up with AI. The point is, if Google and Meta got the best people, what the hell did they do in the last ten years? I think they mostly got more people and less ability to do anything very well. It hasn't worked out that great for them. Neither of them has much to show for their efforts. Google bootstrapped AI and then had their people walk off to form OpenAI who are (for now) best buddies with MS. Facebook/Meta keeps changing their mind about what they are about. Social media, VR, and now AI. But it seems they end up chasing their tail every time. MS actually got better over the last ten years. They too had a few nice acquisitions. But more importantly, they revitalized what was a pretty dead development strategy. Github was critical. The attitude towards Linux and the complete 180 on open source in general was critical. MS did quite a few things right under Nadella. > They don't have any interesting new products. None of these companies do.
- deleted 1y ago
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- ghurtado 1y ago
  > what the hell did they do in the last ten years? Having the best people and knowing how to use them effectively are two very, very different things
  - mellosouls 1y ago
    I think the point here is that there is nothing to back up the dubious claim that MS recruits were inferior; your observation essentially reinforces that point.
    - kulahan 1y ago
      I've heard the claim so many times, and pay (that I was good enough to achieve) at MS was lower than salaries for FB and Google posted on Blind, but who knows how real those were. I never bothered to look into it myself. Honestly I was just kind of a Microsoft fanboy at the time, haha.
roncesvalles 1y ago
>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. 1. The best new grads are absolutely not going to Google or Meta. There are many far sexier companies. As a CS grad, landing in big tech is mostly regarded as having settled for mediocrity. 2. Microsoft's compensation for early career is competitive with Google and Meta (at least for the first couple of years; Meta will grow your level faster and Google gives better annual RSU refreshers, but many people don't know this and go by the offer's face value). I don't think there's much of a difference in the talent that they can pick up. Microsoft also aggressively sops up the best talent in Tier 2 geos -- it's unlikely that the best devs in the Bay Area work at Microsoft but some of the best devs in Vancouver or Atlanta probably work at Microsoft.
- dijit 1y ago
  That’s an interesting modern perspective. I would say though that you’re both correct. Satya came in 2014 and during the last 11 years I would say that the majority of that is as the GP described. I’m not sure when what you are describing became the outside perspective, but I suspect somewhere around 2019-2022, when Google lost a very large amount of its shine as the former Oracle Execs started to take over fully.
- Arainach 1y ago
  >Microsoft's compensation for early career is competitive with Google and Meta (at least for the first couple of years; Meta will grow your level faster and Google gives better annual RSU refreshers It's not. Microsoft's stock grants are a joke. I left Microsoft after 8 years with ~36k in unvested stock (vesting over 4-5 years) and a title of Senior (L63). Both Google and Meta offered me a downlevel (L4) for a 40% increase in total comp and with annual stock refreshers significantly larger than 5 years worth of stock grants at MSFT. Microsoft starts to become competitive around Principal/Staff, sort of, but from a compensation perspective working at them at a junior/midlevel/senior level is a huge mistake.
  - roncesvalles 1y ago
runjake 1y ago
Azure began adopting and offering Linux while Ballmer was CEO. Microsoft already began the process of open sourcing stuff while Ballmer was CEO. Eg. What would become DotNet Core. There are a number of other errors in your points. Some public, some not. I encourage you to re-examine what you think to be true. Look, I agree it was time for Ballmer to retire and I’m glad Satya is CEO, but while he made some miscalculations, he wasn’t the zero some try to make him to be.
- simonh 1y ago
  It’s true Azure offered Linux under Balmer, but who was running Azure at the time?
  - breadwinner 1y ago
    Exactly. Satya was in charge of Azure just before he became CEO and it was his decision to open things up in Azure.
- aakkaakk 1y ago
  No, ms didn’t offer ”azure” during ballmer’s reign. They offered ”Windows azure”. That speaks volumes.
- Spooky23 1y ago
  Satya has a charismatic nature in addition to his other skills. People who criticize him feel compelled to apologize for it. Microsoft people always liked to tell the story about Ballmer losing his shit with people dealing with him using iPhones. The dude lacked public charisma and his belief in his company played like a NIH syndrome gone wild. But he was hella smart and his push for things like EAs and software assurance paved the way for the modern Microsoft cash cows.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
kenjackson 1y ago
This take seems bad top to bottom. And the Satya revisionist history on his quote is absurd since it’s well documented. He didn’t just say it at a women’s conference. He was asked “For women who aren’t comfortable asking for a raise, what’s your advice for them?”. And part of response included “That might be one of the initial ‘super powers’ that, quite frankly, women don’t ask for a raise have. It’s good karma. It will come back.” He has since sufficiently walked this back, so it’s odd the need to lie about what he said.
stinkbeetle 1y ago
Attitude to Linux and open source was not really a problem for Ballmer IMO. Microsoft had vast revenues locked in to their software in PC and business servers. In the regulatory environment in which they were permitted to operate, it made a lot of sense to try to keep competitors out. A cohort of geeks hated Microsoft's attitude, but I'd be surprised if it did much to their bottom line. But Linux and OSS are just a tools, easily adopted when the winds change. Microsoft under Ballmer completely missed the boat on a bunch of things which should have been pretty close to Microsoft's wheelhouse -- search, social media, mobile/smartphone, and cloud, to name some of the big ones (each one of these spawned a big 10 corporation). It's not that they should be expected to cover all these things or that no other tech company should have become successful, it's just that they had little response to any big developments in the industry for many years. I think it's less that he wasn't willing to let go of Windows, more that the myopic focus on it blinded them to other issues, or deluded them into believing they could continue using Windows to gatekeep and buy or crush competition. They missed the boat on the internet before Ballmer too, but eventually managed to use the money and power that Windows provided them to grind down the competition.
SlowTao 1y ago
I have been both impressed and kind of disappointed in Satya's role. He made some hard and direct changes initially that has allowed them to coast very comfortably, but we have also seen Microsoft become very tame in some areas. I was optimistic at first, especially because he was willing to make the hard choices like binning Windows mobile even with all the potential it had. Cloud is just being the cloud, the AI stuff they are excited on but maybe at the detriment of everything else, Xbox is dying a slow sad death as they are directionless and Windows is just a dump truck for all the more questionable business decisions possible.
lostlogin 1y ago
I was never a fan of Windows, being a Mac guy. However Word used to be good. After a long avoidance I had to use it for work. Teams Word, online Word, Word.app Word. It is a complete cluster fuck and formatting etc is a shambles across versions. The ecosystem within MS products is a dumpster fire. And yet is the state of the art. The Office suite is one of their key products, and it’s awful.
- bluedino 1y ago
  Don't forget OneDrive and SharePoint and Teams. But, every big company keeps buying this shit.
  - abhiyerra 1y ago
    God the inability of Sharepoint Online to show all sites, but only “Recent sites” is infuriating. You create a site and wait an hour to show up in the sidebar. Or the slew of bugs across Office UX. At least Google feels like a designer looked at it after things have gone live.
paulpauper 1y ago
Ballmer and MSFT got the last laugh. In 2005-2006 a lot of people counted them out.
- keeda 1y ago
  Heck, even in 2013-2015 people were counting them out.
rhyperior 1y ago
I’ve worked through all 3 CEO eras of Microsoft. Satya’s biggest mistake will be breaking the internal culture that made Microsoft what it is, for better and worse. Classic “be careful what you wish for” or perhaps law of unintended consequences, imo. And yes, part of that involves the way they’ve changed the hiring and retention objectives.
- keeda 1y ago
  I'm curious to hear more about your take on why the culture change could be a mistake. From speaking to a couple of long-timers at Microsoft, while they didn't seem to have complaints under Ballmer, they did seem to welcome some aspects of Satya's culture change, specifically how it had become much more collaborative internally. To me, that seemed like a fix for the internal dynamics at MSFT depicted in that popular comic about Big Tech org-charts: https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts
  - jeffhwang 1y ago
    I thought there was grumbling about Ballmer adopting GE’s stack ranking employee evaluation system where every team has to grade at least some people as below par. So that led to weird incentives like not collaborating across teams, sabotage, etc.
    - fruitplants 1y ago
      Has stack ranking worked well anywhere? Genuine question. edit: Not relevant for stack ranking thing but I will highly recommend the book Lights Out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_Out_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_Out_(book)
      - izacus 1y ago
        More important question is: is there any big company that DOESN'T stack rank?
    - 1y ago
amy_petrik 1y ago
> 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. I mean are you saying women are worse leaders? Because it seems to me microsoft is harnessing the limitless potential of gender diversity. With a gender-diverse staff they will be able to crush their peers by streamlining against horrible things such as toxic masculinity where the bourgeois men keep down honest and hardworking proleteriat women
- jnaina 1y ago
  True. AWS is also clearly leveraging the boundless power of gender diversity as its master plan to fade into irrelevance in the AI race.
- sieabahlpark 1y ago
  [dead]
- krmboya 1y ago
  How I interpreted it is that where there's a limited pool of women and promotion of women is encouraged, eventually you'll have some women who have worse leadership qualities than their male counterparts getting promoted over them. Works both ways btw, if promotion of men is encouraged, you eventually have men of worse leadership qualities than fellow female colleagues promoted over them.
- KPGv2 1y ago
  Do you agree or disagree with this? 1. there's a significant population of men in tech who make the environment actively hostile for women, 2. women know about this, 3. many women do not want to work in environments actively hostile to them, and 4. women who choose to work at them underperform because dealing with hostility directed at you does take a cognitive toll (I am only responding to this very weird straw man: "With a gender-diverse staff they will be able to crush their peers by streamlining against horrible things such as toxic masculinity where the bourgeois men keep down honest and hardworking proleteriat women")
- fruitplants 1y ago
mindwok 1y ago
LLMs and whatever succeeds them are going to change how we interact with information in a big way. Microsoft has so far mostly stayed out of that race and that’ll be a huge issue that compounds over time. What they do have though is access to power and pretty significant data centre presence. I definitely wouldn’t write them off but it’s not looking good over the long term.
Spooky23 1y ago
I work with customer facing and adjacent Microsoft people regularly. I’d say in my observation they recruit well. The problem is that the culture is a toxic waste dump. If I write down the 10-12 best MS people I’ve worked with in those forward facing roles… I’d say 80% of them have been laid off at random or due to internal politics. Standing out there is bad for your health. As a customer, I’m aware of their politics — bad sign.
teekert 1y ago
Somehow I've always been in the MS ecosystem for work. I wouldn't call their MS365 strategy "coasting". MS365 is incredible value for money, and there is an element of looking outside and incorporating it (just copy Slack with Teams for example), it does all work quite well. I join MS365 regularly as a 100% Linux person and for example PowerPoint went from being unusable to pretty good in the FireFox over a period of a year or so. I can live in the ecosystem in the browser as long as I do office/consulting work, obviously I'd hate it if would force me to Windows. I just installed a Windows 11 PC for my neighbor, what a s*show. I think I clicked "pass" on 100 options and offers, I asked some to my neighbor, she said: "Please, you decide I don't know what any of this means". Compare that to Ubuntu, which just works after you give it your name, and stays out of your way. I'm converting their old desktop to Ubuntu this week now that it's e-waste to MS.
lenkite 1y ago
I don't like the guy because he killed Windows Phone and the Native (Chakra-based) Edge browser - both of which were excellent products. Also it was towards the end of Ballmer's tenure that the Linux switch happened AFAIK - though Nadella got the credit for it.
- djmips 1y ago
  Because he lead the Linux switch internally prior to becoming CEO?
contrarian1234 1y ago
> 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 Not to be over cynical, I'm happy when big corps give away stuff for free, but has this made them any money? They seem to have lost all their moats. LibreOffice is on par with MS's offering (which hasn't really done anything interesting in decades). Windows is semi abandoned and bloated adware. The unified OS ecosystem between desktop console and mobile is pretty much dead. The MS "ecosystem" is a half hearted afterthought at this point Sure, Azure happened to boom in the meantime, but that seems coincidental and not a product of them giving everything away. It's also a lot less of a moat. Cloud is becoming commodity over time. MS is now Azure with a bunch of atrophying vestigial bits hanging off the side.
- XajniN 1y ago
  There is nothing even close to M365, especially for corporations.
high_na_euv 1y ago
>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. How do you know it (that top ppl didnt go there) and why it didn't materialize after a decade?
AlecSchueler 1y ago
> 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. Sorry but he surely got burned because this completely ignores systemic advantages given to men. If everyone quietly relies on the system then women will be disadvantaged. I know that's not a popular thing to say around here but it's been shown time and again and the women at that conference all knew it too. > Satya has had to fight against this accusation and he has done so by establishing a quota system for promoting women employees... That's great and everything but did he actually own the error or recognise the problem with what he said? Volunteer for bias training or anything that would actually help the issue at the core rather than putting bandaids over the wounds?
pjmlp 1y ago
We dearly miss Steve Balmer among those of us that still care about Windows desktop development tooling. Satya would kill Windows if he could, and replace everything with Azure OS thin clients. Likewise XBox woes with console, is due to similar approach, he only cares about XBox as games publisher umbrella brand for all Microsoft Games Studios subdivisions.
- dh2022 1y ago
  Not sure if your message is tongue-in-cheek, but Windows desktop dev work is gone. If you wish MSFT would go back to that and give up Azure then you wish Microsoft would be less than half the size it is today... (and still no-one would use those Windows desktop dev tools)
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    I know it is a mess, yet looking at the competition, one doesn't need to give up native platforms in the name of cloud. Android and iOS/macOS are what Longhorn never managed to be (granted still under Balmer), and SwiftUI/Jetpack Compose have managed to be something useful in half the time Project Reunion has been going with a joke in resourcing.
skeezyboy 1y ago
> Satya's mistake.... > Another of Satya's mistakes same guy also says > Microsoft today is the second most valuable company go figure
ionwake 1y ago
Not suprising. One of the greatest programmers I ever knew eventually got hired by Microsoft. He worked as hard as one can work, only for his whole team to quit one by one due to the workload pushed on him by a boss seeking KPIs. The boss did so because it was the only way to get promoted. After all the coders on the team including my friend being the last, eventually quit, the boss ended up leaving after not being promoted / being unhappy a couple years later. Non of those coders will ever want to return. Such terrible loss for the company, that deserves no better due its handling of them, with as usual a complete lack of oversight of its middle managers. But Microsoft was never known for carefully curation of talent or breaking technologies, from its roots it was a , take what it can, hold on it, sue the rest. From the earliest days of DOS to the later years of ignoring the iphone, to the careful privacy invading code even from the 90s. I am greatful for all they have done, and some thin skinned managers may read this and be upset, but this is just feedback, which can help improve the company.
QuantumGood 1y ago
"a lot of women now occupy positions they would not otherwise. Again, the impact is decreased ability to execute." This is not necessarily causation. People still make the decisions, and it can free them to make better choices that are hard to otherwise support. Every system will be gamed, sometimes to the benefit of something unexpected.

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...
- ulfw 1y ago
  Using both I don't see how copilot LLM is any worst than Gemini LLM honestly
  - Spooky23 1y ago
    Depending on which of the 40 Copilots you’re speaking of, context window is dramatically better with Gemini.
    - ulfw 1y ago
      copilot.microsoft.com vs gemini.google.com

torben-friis 1y ago

>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. That seems shaky as a justification. I don’t have any data behind it, but in a world of eight billion people, it’s a hard sell that there’s only enough top talent for 3 companies. Plus, feel free to correct me but I don’t feel Meta has brought anything technically brilliant to the table lately. Google might be a better sell with alphafold and some other projects but none of it seems mainstream tech either. Maybe pixels if you want to stretch it, but search, maps, Gmail, YouTube, android, and even photos were there a decade ago already.

gxs 1y ago
I hear you, I might give people the benefit of the doubt too much, but I interpreted what he said more like while Facebook and Google were going out of their way to make sure they hired only the best, hiring was just not a point of emphasis for Microsoft and as a result it didn’t hire as many good people I think that point is fair - at the very least, Microsoft wasn’t in the conversation as far as where the typical CS grad wanted to work - FANG doesn’t even include Microsoft in the acronym (I kid, I realize this doesn’t actually mean anything)
ycombinatrix 1y ago
>I don’t feel Meta has brought anything technically brilliant to the table lately I was pleasantly surprised by Llama.
- klooney 1y ago
  I always hear bad things about its standings in the frontier model rankings, although I don't follow that close enough to know if that's real or not. What's cool about Llama?
  - ycombinatrix 1y ago
    Basically after years of raising money as a non-profit & training on everyone's data, "Open"AI rug-pulled the world and decided to keep their secret models secret to become a for-profit venture. I was pissed. Then Meta came out of nowhere to release Llama, a model with performance comparable to ChatGPT. I was able to download it & run it for free on my computer. Thank you Zucc, very cool.

CSMastermind 1y ago

I'm a Ballmer truther. He was completely right about many things including his vision for AI. I know that being early is often the same as being wrong but I don't think his big strategic moves as CEO were incorrect. Microsoft during his era was more marked by an inability to execute on those strategies.

anonymars 1y ago
I wonder if this is another one of those "two sides of the same coins" situations: on the one hand I agree that Ballmer was too weirdly competitive, e.g. with Linux/etc., plus the cringey takes on the iPhone, Google, etc. On the other hand Microsoft had a fire and passion that I don't really see anymore. I miss Developers, Developers, Developers. Now it's just ads, AI, blah.
- flopsamjetsam 1y ago
  > on the one hand I agree that Ballmer was too weirdly competitive He was really the epitome of that, and that was the MO of Microsoft at the time. I always thought of him as the embodiment of that, the pinnacle, the ne plus ultra.
  - anonymars 1y ago
    Thinking about this some more -- in the interview, he seemed to have a feeling of Microsoft "struggling for survival" well past the timeframe when that was actually a reality
CamperBob2 1y ago
What was his vision for AI, and how could it be relevant? He was gone before the current wave hit. Going on TV and laughing at the iPhone pretty much told me everything I needed to know about Ballmer. The best thing I can say about him is that unlike Nadella, he didn't spend too much of his time actively trying to enshittify Windows.

eikenberry 1y ago

Once a company are over a certain size its ability to execute is throttled by business process, not individual's abilities. Individuals are kept from making an impact as they don't want that, they want predictable, replaceable cogs in the machine. Google and Meta suffer the same problem but, as businesses, they are slightly more nimble as they 3x smaller, but that has 0 to do with their hiring/promotion practices.

breadwinner 1y ago
So you're saying average people are fine for a big company? I would agree, if all you want to do is maintain existing products.
- mikert89 1y ago
  its risky for big companies to move quickly. They mostly want to maintain what they have. its a myth that they want to innovate daily
  - Nevermark 1y ago
    Increase the conversion rates a couple percent, decrease the turnover a couple percent, and pretty soon your talking about big money.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  I think you can actually do a lot with average people, if you have sufficient structure, process, guard rails, documentation, training and reviews. And big companies have a lot of this, specifically put in place to harvest above-average work from average talent. Yes, a company full of John Carmacks, un-shackled by process, can probably run circles around an average tech giant, but who can actually find and hire all these John Carmacks?
  - nickff 1y ago
    I think a company of Carmacks would probably be a mess; maybe resembling Xerox PARC, in that they came up with many interesting ideas, but rarely if ever actually created a profitable suite of products.

mikert89 1y ago

I think Microsoft actually just hired experienced H1Bs instead of new college grads. And they have such a moat with their corporate customers using excel, outlook, etc that execution doesnt matter as much for them.

breadwinner 1y ago
Nonsense. None of the top companies are H1B abusers. Meta, Google, Microsoft are all using H1Bs for the intended purpose. The abusers are companies not in tech industry like Disney etc. who bring in H1Bs to decrease their payroll expense. Top tech companies don't do that.
- mikert89 1y ago
  Clearly youve never worked inside these companies
- washadjeffmad 1y ago
  Disney might not care about appearances, and the HQs might be flagrantly flouting the rules, but what of the hundred subsidiaries and shadow corps that are their hands and feet? They don't need to court those hires. An acquaintance is an H1B at an Alphabet (owned) corp, hired to work a position that anyone with an Industrial Engineering BS could. And he only found out who owned his employer after an inspection by HQ prior to the scale up for Bard. I'm happy he got the opportunity, and it enabled his family to marry him and for his new wife to come to the US and start a teaching position at a university, but his role could have been filled by a local grad... if they could have been convinced to accept his salary.
- GOD_Over_Djinn 1y ago
  There are a ton of highly qualified American citizens that are not able to find work, or are underemployed. The layoffs of the past few years have made it very clear that there is an abundance of local talent, and big tech hiring from outside is not about a lack of labor supply

GOD_Over_Djinn 1y ago

Really interesting comment. Is there a source for the promo quota thing? Or is this a policy that’s only discussed internally on a need-to-know basis?

breadwinner 1y ago
Managers and above know this. In order for execs to get their bonus they have to meet diversity goals. So execs have promoted women to positions they would not ordinarily be promoted, in order to get their bonuses. This started many years ago, and continue to this day. https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/18/13681738/microsoft-diversity-goals-executive-bonuses-women-in-tech https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/18/13681738/microsoft-diver... https://www.businessinsider.com/how-microsoft-execs-earn-their-bonuses-internal-memo-2019-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-microsoft-execs-earn-the... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-17/microsoft-to-tie-executive-bonuses-to-company-diversity-goals https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-17/microsoft...

jillesvangurp 1y ago

Google has largely stagnated with products that they largely already had before Satya Nadella took over. Facebook was kind of at its peak then and they had bought Whatsapp and added Instagram to their portfolio. But since then, Meta has had a few duds as well and it seems a bit lackluster lately. Messenger launched and imploded. Then VR. And now they are messing up with AI. The point is, if Google and Meta got the best people, what the hell did they do in the last ten years? I think they mostly got more people and less ability to do anything very well. It hasn't worked out that great for them. Neither of them has much to show for their efforts. Google bootstrapped AI and then had their people walk off to form OpenAI who are (for now) best buddies with MS. Facebook/Meta keeps changing their mind about what they are about. Social media, VR, and now AI. But it seems they end up chasing their tail every time. MS actually got better over the last ten years. They too had a few nice acquisitions. But more importantly, they revitalized what was a pretty dead development strategy. Github was critical. The attitude towards Linux and the complete 180 on open source in general was critical. MS did quite a few things right under Nadella. > They don't have any interesting new products. None of these companies do.

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ghurtado 1y ago
> what the hell did they do in the last ten years? Having the best people and knowing how to use them effectively are two very, very different things
- mellosouls 1y ago
  I think the point here is that there is nothing to back up the dubious claim that MS recruits were inferior; your observation essentially reinforces that point.
  - kulahan 1y ago
    I've heard the claim so many times, and pay (that I was good enough to achieve) at MS was lower than salaries for FB and Google posted on Blind, but who knows how real those were. I never bothered to look into it myself. Honestly I was just kind of a Microsoft fanboy at the time, haha.

roncesvalles 1y ago

>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. 1. The best new grads are absolutely not going to Google or Meta. There are many far sexier companies. As a CS grad, landing in big tech is mostly regarded as having settled for mediocrity. 2. Microsoft's compensation for early career is competitive with Google and Meta (at least for the first couple of years; Meta will grow your level faster and Google gives better annual RSU refreshers, but many people don't know this and go by the offer's face value). I don't think there's much of a difference in the talent that they can pick up. Microsoft also aggressively sops up the best talent in Tier 2 geos -- it's unlikely that the best devs in the Bay Area work at Microsoft but some of the best devs in Vancouver or Atlanta probably work at Microsoft.

dijit 1y ago
That’s an interesting modern perspective. I would say though that you’re both correct. Satya came in 2014 and during the last 11 years I would say that the majority of that is as the GP described. I’m not sure when what you are describing became the outside perspective, but I suspect somewhere around 2019-2022, when Google lost a very large amount of its shine as the former Oracle Execs started to take over fully.
Arainach 1y ago
>Microsoft's compensation for early career is competitive with Google and Meta (at least for the first couple of years; Meta will grow your level faster and Google gives better annual RSU refreshers It's not. Microsoft's stock grants are a joke. I left Microsoft after 8 years with ~36k in unvested stock (vesting over 4-5 years) and a title of Senior (L63). Both Google and Meta offered me a downlevel (L4) for a 40% increase in total comp and with annual stock refreshers significantly larger than 5 years worth of stock grants at MSFT. Microsoft starts to become competitive around Principal/Staff, sort of, but from a compensation perspective working at them at a junior/midlevel/senior level is a huge mistake.
- roncesvalles 1y ago

runjake 1y ago

Azure began adopting and offering Linux while Ballmer was CEO. Microsoft already began the process of open sourcing stuff while Ballmer was CEO. Eg. What would become DotNet Core. There are a number of other errors in your points. Some public, some not. I encourage you to re-examine what you think to be true. Look, I agree it was time for Ballmer to retire and I’m glad Satya is CEO, but while he made some miscalculations, he wasn’t the zero some try to make him to be.

simonh 1y ago
It’s true Azure offered Linux under Balmer, but who was running Azure at the time?
- breadwinner 1y ago
  Exactly. Satya was in charge of Azure just before he became CEO and it was his decision to open things up in Azure.
aakkaakk 1y ago
No, ms didn’t offer ”azure” during ballmer’s reign. They offered ”Windows azure”. That speaks volumes.
Spooky23 1y ago
Satya has a charismatic nature in addition to his other skills. People who criticize him feel compelled to apologize for it. Microsoft people always liked to tell the story about Ballmer losing his shit with people dealing with him using iPhones. The dude lacked public charisma and his belief in his company played like a NIH syndrome gone wild. But he was hella smart and his push for things like EAs and software assurance paved the way for the modern Microsoft cash cows.
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kenjackson 1y ago

This take seems bad top to bottom. And the Satya revisionist history on his quote is absurd since it’s well documented. He didn’t just say it at a women’s conference. He was asked “For women who aren’t comfortable asking for a raise, what’s your advice for them?”. And part of response included “That might be one of the initial ‘super powers’ that, quite frankly, women don’t ask for a raise have. It’s good karma. It will come back.” He has since sufficiently walked this back, so it’s odd the need to lie about what he said.

stinkbeetle 1y ago

Attitude to Linux and open source was not really a problem for Ballmer IMO. Microsoft had vast revenues locked in to their software in PC and business servers. In the regulatory environment in which they were permitted to operate, it made a lot of sense to try to keep competitors out. A cohort of geeks hated Microsoft's attitude, but I'd be surprised if it did much to their bottom line. But Linux and OSS are just a tools, easily adopted when the winds change. Microsoft under Ballmer completely missed the boat on a bunch of things which should have been pretty close to Microsoft's wheelhouse -- search, social media, mobile/smartphone, and cloud, to name some of the big ones (each one of these spawned a big 10 corporation). It's not that they should be expected to cover all these things or that no other tech company should have become successful, it's just that they had little response to any big developments in the industry for many years. I think it's less that he wasn't willing to let go of Windows, more that the myopic focus on it blinded them to other issues, or deluded them into believing they could continue using Windows to gatekeep and buy or crush competition. They missed the boat on the internet before Ballmer too, but eventually managed to use the money and power that Windows provided them to grind down the competition.

SlowTao 1y ago

I have been both impressed and kind of disappointed in Satya's role. He made some hard and direct changes initially that has allowed them to coast very comfortably, but we have also seen Microsoft become very tame in some areas. I was optimistic at first, especially because he was willing to make the hard choices like binning Windows mobile even with all the potential it had. Cloud is just being the cloud, the AI stuff they are excited on but maybe at the detriment of everything else, Xbox is dying a slow sad death as they are directionless and Windows is just a dump truck for all the more questionable business decisions possible.

lostlogin 1y ago

I was never a fan of Windows, being a Mac guy. However Word used to be good. After a long avoidance I had to use it for work. Teams Word, online Word, Word.app Word. It is a complete cluster fuck and formatting etc is a shambles across versions. The ecosystem within MS products is a dumpster fire. And yet is the state of the art. The Office suite is one of their key products, and it’s awful.

bluedino 1y ago
Don't forget OneDrive and SharePoint and Teams. But, every big company keeps buying this shit.
- abhiyerra 1y ago
  God the inability of Sharepoint Online to show all sites, but only “Recent sites” is infuriating. You create a site and wait an hour to show up in the sidebar. Or the slew of bugs across Office UX. At least Google feels like a designer looked at it after things have gone live.

paulpauper 1y ago

Ballmer and MSFT got the last laugh. In 2005-2006 a lot of people counted them out.

keeda 1y ago
Heck, even in 2013-2015 people were counting them out.

rhyperior 1y ago

I’ve worked through all 3 CEO eras of Microsoft. Satya’s biggest mistake will be breaking the internal culture that made Microsoft what it is, for better and worse. Classic “be careful what you wish for” or perhaps law of unintended consequences, imo. And yes, part of that involves the way they’ve changed the hiring and retention objectives.

keeda 1y ago
I'm curious to hear more about your take on why the culture change could be a mistake. From speaking to a couple of long-timers at Microsoft, while they didn't seem to have complaints under Ballmer, they did seem to welcome some aspects of Satya's culture change, specifically how it had become much more collaborative internally. To me, that seemed like a fix for the internal dynamics at MSFT depicted in that popular comic about Big Tech org-charts: https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts
- jeffhwang 1y ago
  I thought there was grumbling about Ballmer adopting GE’s stack ranking employee evaluation system where every team has to grade at least some people as below par. So that led to weird incentives like not collaborating across teams, sabotage, etc.
  - fruitplants 1y ago
    Has stack ranking worked well anywhere? Genuine question. edit: Not relevant for stack ranking thing but I will highly recommend the book Lights Out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_Out_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_Out_(book)
    - izacus 1y ago
      More important question is: is there any big company that DOESN'T stack rank?
  - 1y ago

amy_petrik 1y ago

> 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. I mean are you saying women are worse leaders? Because it seems to me microsoft is harnessing the limitless potential of gender diversity. With a gender-diverse staff they will be able to crush their peers by streamlining against horrible things such as toxic masculinity where the bourgeois men keep down honest and hardworking proleteriat women

jnaina 1y ago
True. AWS is also clearly leveraging the boundless power of gender diversity as its master plan to fade into irrelevance in the AI race.
sieabahlpark 1y ago
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krmboya 1y ago
How I interpreted it is that where there's a limited pool of women and promotion of women is encouraged, eventually you'll have some women who have worse leadership qualities than their male counterparts getting promoted over them. Works both ways btw, if promotion of men is encouraged, you eventually have men of worse leadership qualities than fellow female colleagues promoted over them.
KPGv2 1y ago
Do you agree or disagree with this? 1. there's a significant population of men in tech who make the environment actively hostile for women, 2. women know about this, 3. many women do not want to work in environments actively hostile to them, and 4. women who choose to work at them underperform because dealing with hostility directed at you does take a cognitive toll (I am only responding to this very weird straw man: "With a gender-diverse staff they will be able to crush their peers by streamlining against horrible things such as toxic masculinity where the bourgeois men keep down honest and hardworking proleteriat women")
fruitplants 1y ago

mindwok 1y ago

LLMs and whatever succeeds them are going to change how we interact with information in a big way. Microsoft has so far mostly stayed out of that race and that’ll be a huge issue that compounds over time. What they do have though is access to power and pretty significant data centre presence. I definitely wouldn’t write them off but it’s not looking good over the long term.

Spooky23 1y ago

I work with customer facing and adjacent Microsoft people regularly. I’d say in my observation they recruit well. The problem is that the culture is a toxic waste dump. If I write down the 10-12 best MS people I’ve worked with in those forward facing roles… I’d say 80% of them have been laid off at random or due to internal politics. Standing out there is bad for your health. As a customer, I’m aware of their politics — bad sign.

teekert 1y ago

Somehow I've always been in the MS ecosystem for work. I wouldn't call their MS365 strategy "coasting". MS365 is incredible value for money, and there is an element of looking outside and incorporating it (just copy Slack with Teams for example), it does all work quite well. I join MS365 regularly as a 100% Linux person and for example PowerPoint went from being unusable to pretty good in the FireFox over a period of a year or so. I can live in the ecosystem in the browser as long as I do office/consulting work, obviously I'd hate it if would force me to Windows. I just installed a Windows 11 PC for my neighbor, what a s*show. I think I clicked "pass" on 100 options and offers, I asked some to my neighbor, she said: "Please, you decide I don't know what any of this means". Compare that to Ubuntu, which just works after you give it your name, and stays out of your way. I'm converting their old desktop to Ubuntu this week now that it's e-waste to MS.

lenkite 1y ago

I don't like the guy because he killed Windows Phone and the Native (Chakra-based) Edge browser - both of which were excellent products. Also it was towards the end of Ballmer's tenure that the Linux switch happened AFAIK - though Nadella got the credit for it.

djmips 1y ago
Because he lead the Linux switch internally prior to becoming CEO?

contrarian1234 1y ago

> 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 Not to be over cynical, I'm happy when big corps give away stuff for free, but has this made them any money? They seem to have lost all their moats. LibreOffice is on par with MS's offering (which hasn't really done anything interesting in decades). Windows is semi abandoned and bloated adware. The unified OS ecosystem between desktop console and mobile is pretty much dead. The MS "ecosystem" is a half hearted afterthought at this point Sure, Azure happened to boom in the meantime, but that seems coincidental and not a product of them giving everything away. It's also a lot less of a moat. Cloud is becoming commodity over time. MS is now Azure with a bunch of atrophying vestigial bits hanging off the side.

XajniN 1y ago
There is nothing even close to M365, especially for corporations.

high_na_euv 1y ago

>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. How do you know it (that top ppl didnt go there) and why it didn't materialize after a decade?

AlecSchueler 1y ago

> 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. Sorry but he surely got burned because this completely ignores systemic advantages given to men. If everyone quietly relies on the system then women will be disadvantaged. I know that's not a popular thing to say around here but it's been shown time and again and the women at that conference all knew it too. > Satya has had to fight against this accusation and he has done so by establishing a quota system for promoting women employees... That's great and everything but did he actually own the error or recognise the problem with what he said? Volunteer for bias training or anything that would actually help the issue at the core rather than putting bandaids over the wounds?

pjmlp 1y ago

We dearly miss Steve Balmer among those of us that still care about Windows desktop development tooling. Satya would kill Windows if he could, and replace everything with Azure OS thin clients. Likewise XBox woes with console, is due to similar approach, he only cares about XBox as games publisher umbrella brand for all Microsoft Games Studios subdivisions.

dh2022 1y ago
Not sure if your message is tongue-in-cheek, but Windows desktop dev work is gone. If you wish MSFT would go back to that and give up Azure then you wish Microsoft would be less than half the size it is today... (and still no-one would use those Windows desktop dev tools)
- pjmlp 1y ago
  I know it is a mess, yet looking at the competition, one doesn't need to give up native platforms in the name of cloud. Android and iOS/macOS are what Longhorn never managed to be (granted still under Balmer), and SwiftUI/Jetpack Compose have managed to be something useful in half the time Project Reunion has been going with a joke in resourcing.

skeezyboy 1y ago

> Satya's mistake.... > Another of Satya's mistakes same guy also says > Microsoft today is the second most valuable company go figure

ionwake 1y ago

Not suprising. One of the greatest programmers I ever knew eventually got hired by Microsoft. He worked as hard as one can work, only for his whole team to quit one by one due to the workload pushed on him by a boss seeking KPIs. The boss did so because it was the only way to get promoted. After all the coders on the team including my friend being the last, eventually quit, the boss ended up leaving after not being promoted / being unhappy a couple years later. Non of those coders will ever want to return. Such terrible loss for the company, that deserves no better due its handling of them, with as usual a complete lack of oversight of its middle managers. But Microsoft was never known for carefully curation of talent or breaking technologies, from its roots it was a , take what it can, hold on it, sue the rest. From the earliest days of DOS to the later years of ignoring the iphone, to the careful privacy invading code even from the 90s. I am greatful for all they have done, and some thin skinned managers may read this and be upset, but this is just feedback, which can help improve the company.

QuantumGood 1y ago

"a lot of women now occupy positions they would not otherwise. Again, the impact is decreased ability to execute." This is not necessarily causation. People still make the decisions, and it can free them to make better choices that are hard to otherwise support. Every system will be gamed, sometimes to the benefit of something unexpected.