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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
If you haven't seen the remix, here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gI_HGDgG7c
By that metric, no he wasn't underrated.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Basic numbers I've been seeing on a quick search has PS5 almost doubling the Series X sales.
It's only the footnote of the article that mentions Ballmer's "stage persona". I think that's the important point, and I would add that his "interview persona" might have been even worse. Back then, he was quoted as saying insanely dumb shit all the time. Like when he literally publicly laughed about the iPhone. Or when he called a Zune feature to share files between devices "squirting".
Maybe he did make all kinds of brilliant decisions internally. I wouldn't know, but neither would the stock market. If the CEO comes across as not understanding tech, it's likely the market will price that in.
Azure's success was specifically set in motion under Ballmer. Owed to the fact that it was developed to Microsoft's strengths (enterprise support) that it didn't piss off too many of their partners and sales channels. Same with Office 365 and all of their other successful services. None are glamourous - but all are impressive with how not awful they are given their design constraints.
Even things like Surface, while considered a failure, did its intended job of getting hardware partners to get their act together and make better consumer products.
I'm not informed enough to rebut this, and don't want to be quoted in the follow-up article that suggests HN is still too dumb to get the genius of Ballmer, but here's my take. It's only the footnote of the article that mentions Ballmer's "stage persona". I think that's the important point, and I would add that his "interview persona" might have been even worse. Back then, he was quoted as saying insanely dumb shit a…
He'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 ma…
If you trust the article, then Azure and O365 are each, independently, easily Fortune 100 companies if separated. These "couple of wins along with many many losses" are some of the most valuable products in the world. Imagine a VC fund that invested in a few dozen product companies, two of which were Azure and O365. Is that a 6/10 VC company? Why is the logic different for a CEO making bets for a company's next sever…
MS should've been able to simply just extend their OS monopoly into all platforms and all architectures, but they didn't, and to a vast swath of the world have become irrelevant, and worse, have lost their ability to become relevant.
It's a decline from being the monopolist to simply a player, sure they executed well in enterprise sales and was fast in picking up OpenAI, but they have lost the ability to use their strategic resources to save xbox, help azure overcome competition, or push a mixer or Surface or whatever.
Edit: For people who don't understand the last sentence think about the way that O365 was able to help MS push Teams to stave off Zoom and others despite being objectively trash. MS should've been able to keep control of the internet, but they lost their moat to Google (Chrome), and the same story for various consumer products. Bing was a decent win but with a better consumer story they should've also been able to threaten social and youtube and so on. But now they're completely irrelevant there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
The problem with Ballmer is that he missed a lot of opportunities. Satya is much better in that regard.
Is he? What did he start? Most of MS current successes were launched under Ballmer most notably Azure. Satya has been good with acquisitions but what else?
Like with Ballmer we certainly would not have got O365 to iOS for example. It would be 100% bundled one way or another to Windows services or something or browser or whatever.
Even with Azure we would not have got such aggressive expansion and attempts to push services across Windows and Linux or playing with Open Source platforms like K8S. I think Ballmer was closer to the modern Google who is hell-bent on not using anything Windows.
Ballmer's attempt to buy Yahoo and disregard for touch screen phones is what defined his legacy. He was a good CFO who knew how to run business, but not a great CEO.
> Satya has been good with acquisitions but what else?
Ability to buy right things is important too. Like Ballmer wanted to buy Yahoo, while Satya bought Github. One cost 80b, while another created a whole foundation for Copilot push. Linkedin purchase was great and with OpenAI I am 100% sure that Ballmer would have missed AI train (like AWS did).
But maybe he was a fine CEO, dunno about that. I guess that's measured in profits.