6 ms·

Ballmer was good at sales but horrible at running a company. He was perfect before the internet came to be and before the rise of mobile devices. Ballmer, is

Ballmer was good at sales but horrible at running a company. He was perfect before the internet came to be and before the rise of mobile devices. Ballmer, is in fact, what sunk Microsoft for a better part of a decade or more. Nadella is doing MS good. For one, he understands market dynamics better than Ballmer did and is willing to gamble. As a C# developer of 10 years, this is the first time Microsoft actually "spiced up" their product line. Offering up robust tooling like Visual Studio Community (which is just a free version of Professional) shows me Microsoft is committed to the platform. Now, with Visual Studio Code, it will make my work better since I'm 99% on a Mac these days. The next few months will be interesting. :)

hackuser 11y ago
> Ballmer was good at sales but horrible at running a company From Wikipedia: Under Ballmer's tenure as CEO, Microsoft's annual revenue surged from $25 billion to $70 billion, while its net income increased 215 percent to $23 billion May all companies suffer equally incompetent CEOs.
- Turing_Machine 11y ago
  Over the same period Apple was going from $8 billion to $182 billion in revenue and Google was going from $3 billion to $66 billion in revenue.
  - waterlesscloud 11y ago
    Google is a completely unfair comparison as that was their prime growth stage.
  - jliptzin 11y ago
    You could say the pie was just getting a lot bigger. Why should one company be expected to eat it all?
soup10 11y ago
No doubt Microsoft under ballmer launched quite a few failed products, but they've maintained their monopolies and have made record profits in the process. Posted from my Zune
pera 11y ago
> Open source is not available to commercial companies. The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source. If the government wants to put something in the public domain, it should. Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works. - Ballmer, 2001 Yeah Ballmer was pretty bad, but to be fair Bill Gates also was very anti open-source ("Communism! Communism!"... http://old.seattletimes.com/html/microsoft/2002152694_paul13.html http://old.seattletimes.com/html/microsoft/2002152694_paul13...). I like the direction of this "new Microsoft", but they still do some nasty stuff: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/20/windows-10-to-make-the-secure-boot-alt-os-lock-out-a-reality/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/20/win...
- serge2k 11y ago
  Is he wrong about the GPL? It actually does what he is talking about by design. Every company which uses GPL code is very careful about how they do so. A lot won't touch GPLv3 because of the newer restrictions. AGPL as well.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > Is he wrong about the GPL? Yes, even if he was talking about the GPL when he said "open source software", he would be wrong. (And if he meant the GPL, he would be wrong in using the general term "open source software" in referring to it, even if his statements were accurate for the GPL.) > It actually does what he is talking about by design. No it doesn't. He says "if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source." You can use GPL software without making your other software GPL. You can distribute GPL software without making your other software GPL. You can distribute GPL software without making other software you distribute together with the GPL software GPL, too, in some cases. > Every company which uses GPL code is very careful about how they do so. Many of them also produce a lot of non-GPL software. Which demonstrates that the "all your other software" claim is false.
    - 11y ago

hackuser 11y ago

> Ballmer was good at sales but horrible at running a company From Wikipedia: Under Ballmer's tenure as CEO, Microsoft's annual revenue surged from $25 billion to $70 billion, while its net income increased 215 percent to $23 billion May all companies suffer equally incompetent CEOs.

Turing_Machine 11y ago
Over the same period Apple was going from $8 billion to $182 billion in revenue and Google was going from $3 billion to $66 billion in revenue.
- waterlesscloud 11y ago
  Google is a completely unfair comparison as that was their prime growth stage.
- jliptzin 11y ago
  You could say the pie was just getting a lot bigger. Why should one company be expected to eat it all?

soup10 11y ago

No doubt Microsoft under ballmer launched quite a few failed products, but they've maintained their monopolies and have made record profits in the process. Posted from my Zune

pera 11y ago

> Open source is not available to commercial companies. The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source. If the government wants to put something in the public domain, it should. Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works. - Ballmer, 2001 Yeah Ballmer was pretty bad, but to be fair Bill Gates also was very anti open-source ("Communism! Communism!"... http://old.seattletimes.com/html/microsoft/2002152694_paul13.html http://old.seattletimes.com/html/microsoft/2002152694_paul13...). I like the direction of this "new Microsoft", but they still do some nasty stuff: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/20/windows-10-to-make-the-secure-boot-alt-os-lock-out-a-reality/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/20/win...

serge2k 11y ago
Is he wrong about the GPL? It actually does what he is talking about by design. Every company which uses GPL code is very careful about how they do so. A lot won't touch GPLv3 because of the newer restrictions. AGPL as well.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > Is he wrong about the GPL? Yes, even if he was talking about the GPL when he said "open source software", he would be wrong. (And if he meant the GPL, he would be wrong in using the general term "open source software" in referring to it, even if his statements were accurate for the GPL.) > It actually does what he is talking about by design. No it doesn't. He says "if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source." You can use GPL software without making your other software GPL. You can distribute GPL software without making your other software GPL. You can distribute GPL software without making other software you distribute together with the GPL software GPL, too, in some cases. > Every company which uses GPL code is very careful about how they do so. Many of them also produce a lot of non-GPL software. Which demonstrates that the "all your other software" claim is false.
  - 11y ago