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Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

danluu.com

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Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#291

Post by nl »

snowwrestler wrote: post #143
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 p…

Would Yahoo under different management have done better?

Yahoo.com remains the 8th most visited website on earth[1] (I had no idea until I read that on HN some months back). It sits between Wikipedia and Reddit.

[1] https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#292

Post by bigstrat2003 »

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...

You are literally the first person I've ever seen say this. It is definitely not true that everyone agrees with you on that.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#293

Post by nextworddev »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #246

I worked at Microsoft from 2003-2007, and left a couple months after the iPhone launched (for totally unrelated reasons, but I wanted to situate the timeline). Steve was a terrible leader. He helped the company grow moribund, lazy, and self-absorbed. Stack ranking was a cancer[1]. Employees were far more interested in stabbing each other in the back than building world-class products. [1] https://www.theverge.com/201…

Kind of unrelated, but stack ranking is very much back now across the board now in big tech.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#294

Post by hardwaresofton »

fnord123 wrote: post #59

A rare miss by Mr. Luu. > Ballmer wins... 2010: Microsoft creates Azure The Azure project was run by Nadella before he became CEO. And it succeeded despite Ballmer. Azure was seen as the Microsoft cloud, where people ran Windows Servers. But Microsoft had long lost the battle for the server space to Linux. When Ballmer stepped aside, only then could Nadella drop the limiters and push the Microsoft <3 Linux perspectiv…

Almost instinctive disagree -- this guy doesn't miss much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Azure#Key_people

Also elsewhere in this post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41978577

That said, have never been a Microsoft watcher and basically will never run it in the server context so... Happy to be corrected.

I do agree that the current phase of Microsoft is remarkable -- the turn around in strategy/sentiment is huge.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#295

Post by csomar »

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.

Bonus/Options are to be paid by the employer. Essentially, what you are asking for is that you go to Netflix subscription page and there is a dropdown saying "how much bonus to pay our employees this year?"

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#296

Post by nirui »

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…

> one of the richest men in the world and he never once offered a tip.... he was always very polite and warm so I can't be mad

I bet Mr. Ballmer saved a lot of money from his "polite and warm".

I once watched one of TED business talk videos. In the video the businessman proudly claimed that from a very young age, he learned to take advantage of people's empathy towards him as a kid to get a better business term (or something like that, it was long ago I can't fully remember).

From that video, I've learned to reduce my empathy/emotional reaction when making decisions. Because you just don't know if the other side is manipulating you into making mistakes. Money is money, you pay what you should've, we'll discuss extra things after that.

If Mr. Ballmer never pay the tips that he should've, then he needs to pay more for the product (in the form of added on convenience fee, for example). Of course, if you failed in charging such fee, then that's your fault, for falling into the "polite and warm" trap.

BTW: "sensitive" not. But comments on Hacker News are often trended to demand stuff for free, including kindness which is independent of the original stuff. That's very foolish.

Today at least you have 15% 20% 25% choice to punish or reward people who directly serve you. If everything is 20% included in the price (oh, it will be like this, it always goes like this), then you just have to sit there and take in whoever got the altitude that day. That's not even how capitalism let alone democracy works.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#297

Post by nl »

Uvix wrote: post #207
dexterdog wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe it's just "what you're used to", but I'd swap Azure and AWS in that statement. Going from Azure to AWS, I found it not nearly as nice to use or easy to understand. Even basic features like "see all the resources in my account" were missing from AWS.

I use all three regularly. AWS has a horrible, inconsistent UI, and the Azure portal is mostly ok (although I think GCP is the best of the three)

But OTOH AWS generally works and usually does what you think, whereas I'm never surprised when Azure breaks or some random Azure API works nothing like we expect.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#298

Post by gs17 »

hyperhopper wrote: post #247
spookie wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was "wrong" about the talk exactly?

He effectively pretended to be dumb. And that included using the wrong "you're" and very simple dialects of English and mannerisms which he thought could potentially be seen as disparaging some groups. I think it was so generic and so clearly a joke it would be insane to pretend it was making fun of a group that existed in real life. For reference in the talk he also listed strongly typed languages as "weekly typed",…

Is this a real thing that happened? It's framed as a young child making a lot of misconceptions, you'd have to be pretty darn sensitive to get offended by that.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#299

Post by roenxi »

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…

> Still, if I'm a regular somewhere and they are giving me special service, I'm gonna throw a few dollars into the tip jar.

There are some philosophical problems there. The business/servers can't renegotiate the menu like that - if they aren't getting paid for a service and the customer didn't ask for it then there is no reason they should get more money for it.

Also, an observation about how the economics of regulars work - if you are a regular the business is probably already making a lot of money off you. Someone who goes back even a single time earns them 2x as much as a one-time walk in. Being a regular is already a favour to a business even if all you do is order something cheap off the menu. In my experience, when a business identifies that I am a regular they try to make me pay less to keep me coming back.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#300

Post by tdeck »

snowwrestler wrote: post #143
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 p…

> 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.

A lot of this sounds like Google under Sundar's leadership, although I'm not sure if there is a parallel to the failed acquisitions, and some of the rot had set in well before.

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