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Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

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Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#261

Post by itake »

skyyler wrote: post #218
thatfrenchguy wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minimum wage != Prevailing wage in that occupation

>Currently, min wage in Redmond (King County) is $20.29/hr. I'd love to know if that is a livable wage in King County.

My gripe with "living wage" is the term (to me) is too subjective.

MIT's living wage [0] seems to include car ownership (despite King county having a decent public transit system and I know several people that don't have cars working in tech). My first place in a great part of town was $1,400/mo in a roomshare. The podments are as low as $750/mo, but MIT says you need at least $2k/mo.

[0] - https://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/53033

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#262

Post by cryptoz »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #260
cryptoz wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If they get insufficient tips to meet the minimum, the employer makes up the difference. Nobody makes $2/hour.

Right. Are waiters in other countries listed above making less than US federal minimum wage?

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#263

Post by [deleted] »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #184
arandomusername wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> What frugality? He was paying the full price that it was being sold at. By that logic, most reading these comments should expect to hear from their employer: What annual bonus? What stock options? The company is paying full price that your time was being sold at.

[deleted]

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#264

Post by keyle »

godelski wrote: post #245
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…

Everyone, chill Regardless of how you feel about tipping culture we're not talking about the average person nor are we talking about the average * experience* . The dude is worth north of $100bn, and is making nearly $10k per minute![0]. Someone who cannot spend his wealth. Someone who'd have to spend tens of millions of dollars every single day just to stop his wealth from growing. Someone who makes money faster tha…

"Everyone, chill"

then proceeds to drop emphasis, F words and other strong words.

Maybe take a page of your own book.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#265

Post by greggyb »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #258
greggyb wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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 pretty much inevitable that there would be other browsers. And too-aggressiv…

> 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 do not think we live in the same world. As one data point, the majority of analysts still list Intel as a buy or a hold.[0] In the very same industry, AMD showed us that it can take more than a decade to turn around a poor architectural turn in semiconductor manufacturing. Their stock price peaked at the beginning of 2006 and then were in the doldrums until 2017-2018 (depending when you want to count their return). It may well turn out that we are witnessing Intel's death spiral, but to claim that with certainty, and further to ascribe that belief to "everyone" tells me that we see the world incredibly differently.

[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/INTC/analysis/

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#266

Post by gosub100 »

exabrial wrote: post #8

No 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…

Vista was released under his watch too.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#267

Post by [deleted] »

keyle wrote: post #264
godelski wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone, chill Regardless of how you feel about tipping culture we're not talking about the average person nor are we talking about the average * experience* . The dude is worth north of $100bn, and is making nearly $10k per minute![0]. Someone who cannot spend his wealth. Someone who'd have to spend tens of millions of dollars every single day just to stop his wealth from growing. Someone who makes money faster tha…

"Everyone, chill" then proceeds to drop emphasis , F words and other strong words. Maybe take a page of your own book.

[deleted]

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#268

Post by nvader »

hermanradtke wrote: post #36

> Much like Gary Bernhardt's talk, which was panned because he made the problem statement and solution so obvious that people didn't realize they'd learned something non-trivial I really want to see this video, but I cannot find it anywhere. I checked https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcGKfGEEONaDvuLDFFKRf... but I believe Gary asks that his videos not be shown (which I am fine with). I also checked https://www.…

I found it here: https://archive.org/details/usetypes

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#269

Post by [deleted] »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #184
arandomusername wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> What frugality? He was paying the full price that it was being sold at. By that logic, most reading these comments should expect to hear from their employer: What annual bonus? What stock options? The company is paying full price that your time was being sold at.

[deleted]

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#270

Post by ytoawwhra92 »

jfim wrote: post #255
ytoawwhra92 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Out of curiosity, what do you see as the fall of Xbox? It seems to work fine to play games, even if they had missteps with certain things (eg. Kinect being deprecated after being mandatory, some hardware issues).

> Out of curiosity, what do you see as the fall of Xbox?

The ever-declining hardware revenue and market share. If the decline that started in 2013 continues long enough it will stop making sense for Microsoft to sell consoles at all. They seem to be planning for this, as they're clearly pivoting the Xbox business towards "content and services".

This is a stark contrast to how Xbox was positioned prior to the 3rd gen. Xbox One. They had taken significant market share away from PlayStation and they were expecting to continue to do so, particularly outside the USA. They were also trying to get a foothold in the household computing market (this market was in its infancy then, now: Alexa/Fire TV, Nest/Chromecast, Apple TV/HomePod). Those ambitions are gone.

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