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There is this universal contempt for Ballmer that I don't understand. He has made several mistakes, but on the other hand: He has held senior positions in MS fo
by jeswin 14y ago
There is this universal contempt for Ballmer that I don't understand. He has made several mistakes, but on the other hand:
He has held senior positions in MS for 30+ years, including 12 years as CEO now. Except a handful of quarters recently, they have shown revenue and profit growth. (It is expected to go up again, but who knows.) In addition, they have made countless 3rd party developers successful.
While we can all be happy about Apple and Google being more successful of late, give that man some credit for his role in more than 30 years of sustained growth.
- jiggy2011 14y agoI think there's a perception with Ballmer that he been mainly interested in milking existing cash cows like Office and Windows rather than being especially forward thinking.
- netcan 14y agoConsidering how much money and credibility they have been putting into other projects, this seems baseless.
- barrkel 14y agoHe is a hill-climbing optimizer - great at incrementally homing in on local optima. But he doesn't seem to be able to get the whole of MS to change direction the way Bill did, in a way that crosses the chasm to a hopefully larger optimum elsewhere. Instead, he seems to take gambles that don't really pay off. A lot of people in tech believe it's because he's not deeply technical and as a result isn't able to connect the dots at a larger strategic level. He is amazing at communicating to business people however - a boss at a company I used to work for once came back from a partner briefing almost like an evangelical convert. That boss came from sales, and I think that's really Ballmer's forte.