251–260 of 714 posts
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GM4Lt5k24s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgPt6mvjr5Q Here's a few more to add to your favorites
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Wait, you guys tip now when you go to the supermarket and get and scan your own toilet paper?
Nope! We sure don’t! Not on purpose any way. But the businesses sure want us to. This mostly happens at smaller stores and not big chains.
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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...
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It does suck. But in this culture that Steve exists within, those positions are paid mostly by tips. He certainly could afford to help out the people that prepared his iced tea ritual for him in a timely manner, but he did not.
> But in this culture that Steve exists within, those positions are paid mostly by tips. False. Presumably this was in WA, employers have to pay full wages. there is no carve out "tipped" wage (most) of the rest of the USA has. Currently, min wage in Redmond (King County) is $20.29/hr. Many businesses in King County do not allow tipping.
Serving up food you didn't even cook isn't an intensely difficult or skilled job. Nobody should expect a 20% cut for doing that. It is not a customers responsibility to ensure unskilled service workers are rolling in largesse. Just making minimum wage is fair for that kind of work provided the minimum is livable.
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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.
The fall of Xbox started with the Xbox One, which was developed and released while Ballmer was CEO. They put an enormous amount of investment into that console, but made some bad calls in both its development and marketing that put them in a deep hole that they've been unable to get out of since. The increasing backwards compatibility of modern consoles means that the current 4th generation Xbox is paying for the sin…
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Waiters in the US make more than their peers in: Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan, Canada, New Zealand, etc. That's thanks entirely to the tip system.
Got a citation for that? Lots of waiters in the US make $2/hour or something before tips (can anyone correct me here?) where the expectation is that tips will bring them up to $7-8/hour, more in line with other minimum wage jobs.
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You think you should have received a tip for working behind the counter? Or were you actually waiting tables and he'd be at a table? If it's the latter I apologise for the brusqueness.
This was a coffeehouse in Redmond. Tipping baristas has been a common thing for the past 50-60 years or so on the west coast of the US. And no, I don't think we "should" have received a tip. Most regular customers did tip occasionally. He was an outlier but only notable because of his wealth. Other customers who do never tipped were treated the exact same.
I'm American but have lived in Australia for nearly 20 years, and in Melbourne for the past 15. There's a huge coffee culture here and almost all cafes have a tipping jar. But I can't imagine any baristas finding it odd to the point of mentioning if a patron, even a repeat patron, never put money in the jars.
I've never been a Ballmer fan myself although he's gotten more likeable post-Microsoft IMO, but to me it says a lot about his character that he both got his own coffee/tea (as opposed to having a PA do it for him), and if you're saying he was always polite then I have no clue why you'd feel the need to cast aspersions on him by suggesting he should have tipped but didn't.
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I don't buy the "MS purposefully let IE die to avoid anti-trust" story. Ballmer was an enterprise sales guy, no wonder his enterprise software business did great, IE lacked focus and died. Just keeping IE around, they didn't have to kill Google, but just keeping it around would've been interesting in 2020 as they can conceivably use it to move onto rivals. Similarly, windows phone didn't die because of anti-trust but…
> I don't buy the "MS purposefully let IE die to avoid anti-trust" story I don't know who you'd buy it from, certainly not me. If that's what you've read into my comment, that is reflective of your perspective, not mine. IE was never that good. It was bundled with the predominant operating system, so had massive market share. As soon as Microsoft had to open the OS more and draw a line between OS and IE, it was prett…
I was not thinking about being more aggressive with bundling, but was commenting on the quality of IE. Not sure why you're giving a pass on IE sucking. It's not a coincidence that Ballmer, the Enterprise sales guy, developed an excellent enterprise sales machine at Microsoft. If he were a good tech guy he would've developed good tech there too. So yes, that Microsoft's tech sucked is on him.
There's a certain inertia to a huge company, if we're talking about executive wins I expect something above what I consider the bare minimum. For example everyone agrees that Intel is a failed company, but if you actually look at them they still have majority marketshare of x86 CPUs in both client and server. So would you say that they successfully defended their traditional business or would you call them a failure? I think it's pretty clear that if you strip away everything else about MS, and just look at Windows by its lonesome, it would be considered a loss today. It's only bigger by dint of the entire market being larger. But in the market it has lost a lot of power vs the day Ballmer started.
So
1. OS - Loss IMO.
2. Search - Loss, similarly to above Bing is a bare minimum for what I expect a company of this size to do. Look at Sogou vs Baidu in China for example for what other companies are able to achieve. But all in all I'm knocking Ballmer less for Bing than for how late Bing was. For 9 years of his time as CEO we had trash MSN as MS's search engine and the default through IE. Gave away all that time to Google to build incumbency, develop an ecosystem around gmail, etc, and grow their cash position. IE was a huge advantage for a long time... but by the time Bing came out it had eroded and Google Chrome was released. Microsoft was in a great advantageous position due to their Windows monopoly but acted too late to serve relevant products.
3. E-commerce - Loss, I wasn't thinking about competing with Amazon but more the Windows Store, bookings.com, airbnb, and steam. Why did the windows store take until the app store to come out to copy them? Why did steam come out in 2003 and Microsoft did nothing? It's because Ballmer isn't smart enough to understand how these things work. By the time windows store came out it was very late, and once again the software sucked. Owning the operating system was an advantage that a good CEO could've made something of, and he didn't.
4. Social - Loss, yeah MSN was a huge deal, along with windows to push it and later acquisition of skype, MS certainly did try. You can also consider something like Steam or xbox Live to be a social network. Regardless went nowhere and loss of opportunity. Certainly he made acquisitions too late and failed to make much of the social networks he had. Also anyone could've bought Instagram, anyone could've bought Youtube, he just didn't. Bought Skype instead. Sure after him there's more acquisitions but it has nothing to do with this discussion really.
5. Consumer devices - Loss, this one I'm most willing to give him a pass on actually. MS is mostly a software company, and partnerships are hard. But Zune was an alright product, and here is mostly a marketing fail. But wouldn't you place blame for bad marketing on the CEO? You can also imagine there's a lot more you can do with Zune. Microsoft had xbox too but never tried to get these parts together, letting Nintendo DS take the handheld market. Today zune is dead and xbox is not successful.
6. Enterprise Software - Unequivocal win, probably the best thing Ballmer did and most of his score.
7. Cloud - Win, acted not too late and was okay with it, Nadella fixed it though.
So definitely I would put E-commerce and social up into "advantaged but loss" and I tried to explain why I count search and OS as loss.
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Waiters in the US make more than their peers in: Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan, Canada, New Zealand, etc. That's thanks entirely to the tip system.
Got a citation for that? Lots of waiters in the US make $2/hour or something before tips (can anyone correct me here?) where the expectation is that tips will bring them up to $7-8/hour, more in line with other minimum wage jobs.