No word that he was a psychopath and a Corporate bully, Instead we have a hagiography for Steve.
Clever ambiguity, or mere coincidence?
What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer
21–30 of 73 posts
Re: What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer
#22This strikes me as "odd": >Then he looked up, waited for a pause in the presentation, and said in a soft voice: “This number is wrong!” >... >Any other executive would have assumed his finance people could write Excel formulas and delegated the task. All the (successful) executives I ever dealt with have a sort of "sense" for numbers, and surely do not really-really trust their finance people writing Excel formulas,…
I am not impressed by this exploit, because there are some chance he had studied the document before the presentation, or even asked someone to verify it.
He was flawed on many aspects, for example trying to attract developers by dancing and chanting "developers, dev...".
His successors put Linux in Windows, open sourced .NET and this seems more efficient... without even harming Windows market share.
Re: What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
> who dragged down Microsoft Did he?
By being unable to use his warchest on a changing market. As an example: missing the smartphone boat twice (once with Windows Mobile vs Symbian, and once with Windows Phone vs iOS/Android). Another example: Microsoft search / Bing. Microsoft kept Office relevant though, made Azure relevant, and are reinventing themselves from a proprietary to a data company (like Google, Facebook, and Amazon) who also do a lot of ope…
Bing has proved to be one of the best investments that Microsoft ever made.
Ballmer's failure as it related to Bing was trying to build an advertising platform to compete with Google and failing.
Re: What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer
#24This strikes me as "odd": >Then he looked up, waited for a pause in the presentation, and said in a soft voice: “This number is wrong!” >... >Any other executive would have assumed his finance people could write Excel formulas and delegated the task. All the (successful) executives I ever dealt with have a sort of "sense" for numbers, and surely do not really-really trust their finance people writing Excel formulas,…
Yes, and the funny thing is the author even didn't get the correct take-away from this event.
Ballmer looked at the bottom line, was surprised by the number he saw and then started looking at the math that produced that number in detail. It has nothing to do with being a math wizz. The lesson here is that good executives ignore noise (the speaker) and focus on importance (numbers).
Balmer isn't a superhuman who can listen to a talk, read slides and do higher level math simultaneously, but he can spot a bottom line number that is surprising given his mental model of the deal. He expected to see one number and saw something else. That's when he stopped skimming the slides and gave 100% of his attention to the math that produced that bottom line number. That's also the point where he tuned out the speaker completely.
Math genius is not required. Superhuman ability to divide attention is not required. The only skill Ballmer displayed here is ability to direct his attention to a number he didn't trust, which turned out to be the right decision.
Programmers of average ability have their spider sense tingle when they look at code with sql injections, or at loops that don't terminate, or suspect allocation/threading logic. Bad code looks bad. Not always, but often enough. Finance is no different.
Re: What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer
#25To witness one of the most deadly attacks in American history, and then, with gravitas, say "you know what's more important than connecting with our community and people and reach them now in a time of bloody and violent uncertainty? making sure MSFT makes more money"
sounds like a real peach of a leader. truly inspiring.
Re: What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer
#26To witness one of the most deadly attacks in American history, and then, with gravitas, say "you know what's more important than connecting with our community and people and reach them now in a time of bloody and violent uncertainty? making sure MSFT makes more money" sounds like a real peach of a leader. truly inspiring.
What does it mean to connect with their community? What should Microsoft have done? Be specific.
Re: What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looking back, the whole "Developers, Developers, Developers..." bit was just what we saw publicly, I hope he was on fewer drugs when doing day to day management, but perhaps that is part of why Microsoft found itself in a dying segment of an industry it once monopolized.
Yeah, that's one of those memorable moments. Here's another one, the chair throw incident: "At some point in the conversation Mr. Ballmer said: "Just tell me it's not Google." I told him it was Google. At that point, Mr. Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office. Mr. Ballmer then said: "Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have done…
Looks like a scene from a movie.
Re: What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
By being unable to use his warchest on a changing market. As an example: missing the smartphone boat twice (once with Windows Mobile vs Symbian, and once with Windows Phone vs iOS/Android). Another example: Microsoft search / Bing. Microsoft kept Office relevant though, made Azure relevant, and are reinventing themselves from a proprietary to a data company (like Google, Facebook, and Amazon) who also do a lot of ope…
Bing has proved to be one of the best investments that Microsoft ever made. Ballmer's failure as it related to Bing was trying to build an advertising platform to compete with Google and failing.
Genuine question - how is Bing a good investment? Isn't it essentially a non-factor in the search market?
Re: What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer
#29I can't wait for Ballmer to become the lovable, goofy NBA owner instead of be remembered as the guy who dragged down Microsoft.
> who dragged down Microsoft Did he?
My opinion, fwiw:
Financially, no.
Optically, yes.
(and, in fairness to the latter, in a manner which was diminishing longer term value creation also. However he totally does not deserve the reputation he generally has with developers. Like a lot of things, folks love to view them in black in white, when in reality it's a rainbow).
Re: What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer
#30He raises a good point about the law of large numbers. When your core business is doing $75b and has 95% market share, it's near impossible to find other lines of business to complement that core in a meaningful way. I'd go as far as to say it's illogical to expect crazy growth or innovation at such a point.
That bit had me scratching my head. To me the law of large numbers had to do with stats. But apparently, MBAs have come up with their own completely unrelated "law".