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Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

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Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#141

Post by noen »

cheaprentalyeti wrote: post #52

"To sum it up, for the past twenty years, people having been dunking on Ballmer for being a buffoon who doesn't understand tech and who was, at best, some kind of bean counter who knew how to keep the lights on but didn't know how to foster innovation and caused Microsoft to fall behind in every important market." It's important to keep the lights on while waiting for the next new development to take off. I think it'…

He didn’t keep the lights on while waiting for new development to take off. He actively lost 40+ billion dollars on horrible acquisitions, and actively stifled internal innovation to ensure existing product lines weren’t threatened.

On the sales side he streamlined Microsoft into a single monolithic sales motion that killed dozens of products before they started because the target customer/market didn’t fit the EA model.

This included Azure that took nearly a decade after his departure to unwind so the sales force could actually sell consumption based products and services.

I honestly can’t think of anything substantially positive he achieved in his tenure other than promoting Satya and Scott G and a handful of others.

All of the contemporary media reports don’t know about the laundry list of near sighted, anti competitive, anti innovation shit he put on the company.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#142

Post by carabiner »

not_a_bot_4sho wrote: post #124

Funny story. I used to see Steve almost every weekday for a couple of years. I can't speak to his business skills, but I can attest that he never once offered a tip for his daily black iced tea. We'd even have it ready for him before he showed up so he never had to wait! He would pay with cash, and I'd hand him his change and drink, and that was that. It's funny to me now: one of the richest men in the world and he n…

Servers make minimum wage in WA, but you weren't a server. I also don't tip if I order at a register.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#143

Post by snowwrestler »

legitster wrote: post #75

Having spent some time at the Microsoft campus, I can tell you this is basically the consensus view from employees today. Ballmer was not a cool, trendy, or fun CEO who people rallied behind - but he more or less "got the job done". He was the captain of a massive ship with a turning radius the size of a continent guiding it through icebergs. Azure's success was specifically set in motion under Ballmer. Owed to the f…

This is hindsight bias. Because other people took some of his later initiatives and made them successful, it’s tempting to look back and grant him these as wins.

We should resist that temptation and judge him on the results he delivered. MS was the essential tech company, king of the world, and under his leadership their innovation stalled, they lost in markets where they were leading, the stock stagnated, and huge piles of money were vaporized on acquisitions that were poorly planned or executed.

He tried to buy Yahoo for $44 billion! Only Yahoo’s greater idiocy saved him from that gargantuan mistake. And that was just one of many.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#144

Post by cyberax »

legitster wrote: post #75

Having spent some time at the Microsoft campus, I can tell you this is basically the consensus view from employees today. Ballmer was not a cool, trendy, or fun CEO who people rallied behind - but he more or less "got the job done". He was the captain of a massive ship with a turning radius the size of a continent guiding it through icebergs. Azure's success was specifically set in motion under Ballmer. Owed to the f…

I remember working with Microsoft as a client in 2000-s, it was awesome. We started as a startup, and enrolled in a BizSpark program. It gave us basically free access to Microsoft tools and with very responsive support.

We later transitioned into volume licensing, that also was simple and straightforward. The business side of Microsoft was a streamlined unstoppable train at that point.

The technical side, not so much. Microsoft was still trying to be the only software company in the world, and it was pushing all kinds of WPF, WCF, and other WTFs. So they completely missed hyperscalers and the growing market of Linux-based servers.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#145

Post by pensatoio »

not_a_bot_4sho wrote: post #124

Funny story. I used to see Steve almost every weekday for a couple of years. I can't speak to his business skills, but I can attest that he never once offered a tip for his daily black iced tea. We'd even have it ready for him before he showed up so he never had to wait! He would pay with cash, and I'd hand him his change and drink, and that was that. It's funny to me now: one of the richest men in the world and he n…

[flagged]

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#146

Post by bena »

cryptozeus wrote: post #133
not_a_bot_4sho wrote: post #124

Funny story. I used to see Steve almost every weekday for a couple of years. I can't speak to his business skills, but I can attest that he never once offered a tip for his daily black iced tea. We'd even have it ready for him before he showed up so he never had to wait! He would pay with cash, and I'd hand him his change and drink, and that was that. It's funny to me now: one of the richest men in the world and he n…

Interesting that he would pay by cash

He’d be CEO during the early aughts, most places were still cash based

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#147

Post by not_a_bot_4sho »

arandomusername wrote: post #128
not_a_bot_4sho wrote: post #124

Funny story. I used to see Steve almost every weekday for a couple of years. I can't speak to his business skills, but I can attest that he never once offered a tip for his daily black iced tea. We'd even have it ready for him before he showed up so he never had to wait! He would pay with cash, and I'd hand him his change and drink, and that was that. It's funny to me now: one of the richest men in the world and he n…

What frugality? He was paying the full price that it was being sold at.

Seattle coffee culture is different than what you may be used to.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#148

Post by dexterdog »

dyauspitr wrote: post #120
legitster wrote: post #75

Having spent some time at the Microsoft campus, I can tell you this is basically the consensus view from employees today. Ballmer was not a cool, trendy, or fun CEO who people rallied behind - but he more or less "got the job done". He was the captain of a massive ship with a turning radius the size of a continent guiding it through icebergs. Azure's success was specifically set in motion under Ballmer. Owed to the f…

Azure happened because of Nadella (who led the project) despite Ballmer.

Azure may be successful financially, but as someone who has finally used it for the last two years after 15 years of AWS and a little bit of GCP, I can't help but think the world would be a better place if it didn't exist or if some lesser player had that market share.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#149

Post by achow »

dyauspitr wrote: post #120
legitster wrote: post #75

Having spent some time at the Microsoft campus, I can tell you this is basically the consensus view from employees today. Ballmer was not a cool, trendy, or fun CEO who people rallied behind - but he more or less "got the job done". He was the captain of a massive ship with a turning radius the size of a continent guiding it through icebergs. Azure's success was specifically set in motion under Ballmer. Owed to the f…

Azure happened because of Nadella (who led the project) despite Ballmer.

Scott Guthrie is the one who drove Azure.

Dated 2013, a year before Nadella became CEO:

https://www.change.org/p/the-microsoft-board-of-directors-as...

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#150

Post by kettlecorn »

Two small anecdotes about Ballmer from my internship there:

At an intern event an intern asked some question along the lines of "What's one quality of a competitor you wish Microsoft had?" They were clearly asking about cultural qualities but Ballmer's response was "I'd take Google's search engine because that thing prints money". Then he did this super exaggerated gesture and noise imitating a money machine printing money.

At the time that was a super disappointing answer to me because as an intern within the Bing division I really felt like there was this culture of "Bing is better and it's not our fault Google is beating us". To see Ballmer not use the question as an opportunity to talk about ways Microsoft could improve felt like seeing the source of that cultural problem.

The other was from an intern event with Phil Spencer. Phil Spencer at the time was the head of Xbox's Games Division, but not yet the head of Xbox. Spencer said he was in Ballmer's office one day and Ballmer asked him "Why don't you just make the games that sell?"

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