Bill Gates: can jump over an office chair - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxaCOHT0pmI
Steve Ballmer: developers developers developers developers developers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs
Two of my favorite videos haha
Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
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Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#42The problem with Ballmer is that he missed a lot of opportunities.
Satya is much better in that regard.
Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#43> One part of the plan to kill Google was to redirect users who typed google.com into their address bar to MSN search.
Crazy they were ever considering this.
Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#44It’s funny how all the comments here are falling in the trap described in the beginning of the article of disliking Ballmer because he comes from the sales side and they can’t fathom someone not coming from the tech side leading a tech company.
What’s undeniable in the article is that Ballmer literally built what remains Microsoft best asset even before being a CEO there: it’s incredibly good relationship with its corporate customers. Honestly, it’s really what sets Microsoft apart for me. When you do deal with them as a corporate customer, you really get the feeling that they understand the way things work in a big corp IT department and will be reliable and predictable.
Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#45He's underrated in the sense that a lot of CEOs of his era completely destroyed their companies, see Intel, GE, GM, Yahoo, etc and he didn't. So that's already a win, he set up the company in a decent position so that when someone with more vision takes over they'll have something to work with, even if he didn't have the talent to pull things off himself. He had a couple of wins (Azure, Office 365) along with many many losses, and they're good enough to secure him a 6/10 on my ratings.
Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#46Is there a name for this phenomenon when past leaders are viewed in a better light than they objectively deserved? I see this in politics a lot (eg Dubya) but in business too.
Hagiography?
Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember when he retired and the MSFT jumped. Satya is underrated.
Satya's tenure has seen the fall of Xbox, the lost relevance of Windows. While moving to a services model is going to be very lucrative for them, they risk competitors offering swap-out models.
Gamepass and the lack of first party exclusives both seem like moves to kill the console in the long term, but as of now it's still a serious competitor to playstation and switch no?
Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#48No he wasn’t haha. The only thing he did was slide the company sideways via pre existing illegal monopoly. In fact, they lost most of their monopoly under his supervision . At no point did the quality of their products improve, and that’s evidenced with this year’s massive massive Windows outage, or Garmins mega ransomware, out a hundred other people who’ve been hacked via Windows. If you’re running Windows for anyth…
Steve Ballmer has not been CEO for a decade. At 10 years later it is very much Nadella's ship.
Still Bill Gates: "Bill Gates never left - Insiders say he's still pulling the strings at Microsoft" - https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-still-pulling-str...
Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#49No he wasn’t haha. The only thing he did was slide the company sideways via pre existing illegal monopoly. In fact, they lost most of their monopoly under his supervision . At no point did the quality of their products improve, and that’s evidenced with this year’s massive massive Windows outage, or Garmins mega ransomware, out a hundred other people who’ve been hacked via Windows. If you’re running Windows for anyth…
I wonder if Windows is even their flagship app any more. I think people will give up Windows before they give up Excel. And they might not even notice a different OS, so long as it had the same file manager. In fact Excel is the last non-FOSS app that I still use, even if sporadically.
http://www.gnumeric.org
I still use it, it seems a little stagnant in development nowadays. No ssl on the website etc.
The free software distros really lost something going all in on open/libre office which is just not nearly as good as a replacement for excel. I think if it was still the free software goto, installed by default first choice etc there would be more development. The feature list and quality is impressive and has been for many years.
Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't have a strong opinion on his tenure at MSFT, but I don't know many sales jocks with a 1600 SAT score and a degree in applied math from Harvard.
Effective sales and marketing is more dependent on math than most people realize.
...how?
I get that it correlates with intelligence, but with math, specifically?