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Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

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Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#501

Post by actionfromafar »

mysterydip wrote: post #493
rbanffy wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you need persistence to win. You also need a plan. How would Windows Phone displace either Apple or Android?

Just a spitball idea, but rather than focusing on the consumer market, they could've been the new blackberry for businesses (that give employees phones). Native active directory and group policy integration would be a good solution for the myriad of third party apps/services/devices that attempt to control the other phones.

For sure. Enterprise mobile was not really a thing back then. (Laptops with VPN was state of the art.) Microsoft could have organically owned the enterprise mobile market but chose not to.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#502

Post by toyg »

_heimdall wrote: post #497
addicted wrote: post #182

This article doesn’t understand what was fundamentally wrong with Ballmer’s leadership and what Nadella actually changed. The specific technologies that were successful is irrelevant. Microsoft has and continues to invest in nearly every computer related technology that may come around the corner or they got late on. The problem with Microsoft was everything went through Windows. The entire company was designed to pr…

Lately it has definitely felt as though Microsoft is resurrecting Ballmer's old meme as "AI! AI! AI!" I was at Microsoft for the last couple years of Ballmer and the first few years of Nadella. He definitely did change the company and I remember at the time feeling that he handled the change really well, but from where I sat he spent the first part of his tenure evolving Ballmer's final push to move focus from Window…

> Now the company seems fully baked I to LLMs with everything they do chasing that

Them along absolutely everyone else. ChatGPT was an iPhone moment.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#503

Post by KptMarchewa »

actionfromafar wrote: post #495
rbanffy wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of those three, the only one that drives revenue to MS is GitHub.

VS Code is also low-key keeping Windows relevant as a developer OS. If something else came along which was truly very excellent but was only working well with Linux, and VS Code was not there to be the de-facto go-to solution for most new devs, it could eat away more of Windows marketshare. So I see VS Code as a slight moat, also in its promulgation of dotnet-isms. So I think VS Code drives some revenue Microsofts wa…

I'm not sure how it's improving Windows relevancy, second most popular IDE group - Jetbrains ones - are on Windows too.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#504

Post by actionfromafar »

toast0 wrote: post #303
dangus wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it may be true that the OS itself isn't really a cash cow anymore (if it ever was), I still think Microsoft's greatest failure of the previous decade was exiting the smartphone OS space and ceding it to Google and Apple. I think that Ballmer's management can take a lot of blame for that. I think a different CEO could have executed and possibly have kept Microsoft in that market with success. The Apple App Store…

> While it may be true that the OS itself isn't really a cash cow anymore (if it ever was), I still think Microsoft's greatest failure of the previous decade was exiting the smartphone OS space and ceding it to Google and Apple. I mean, Microsoft was too early and too late on smartphones. I never cared to look into the pre WP7 history. But the more recent Windows Phone died with WM10, which I don't think is fair to b…

My thesis is WP8 was already the first huge misstep where they lost developers.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#507

Post by _thisdot »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #473
archerx wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well since Nadella I have been using less Microsoft products and probably won’t be using Windows anymore once my Windows 10 LTSC stops working. I keep hearing praise for Nadella but all he is doing is alienating a lot of customers with his terrible decisions.

> he is doing is alienating a lot of customers with his terrible decisions Windows doesn't even make up 1/5 of their income, and in contrast a bit over half of their income is Office and Cloud* The real money is in enterprise IT and cloud services. The average consumer doesn't keep their prebuilt computer long enough to buy another version of the OS. They don't need to keep a niche within a minority (privacy-oriented…

It's a mystery to me why they haven't made Windows free yet. Surely they make much more money from users using Windows than buying Windows

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#509

Post by toyg »

legitster wrote: post #76
codeflo wrote: post #74

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…

I think a better way of understanding Ballmer is that he really struggled to relate to end consumers, but he understood their business partners very well.

He was very much an '80s/'90s exec. Back then, execs were not "visionaire rockstars"; they were wisecracking boomers in suits. Microsoft walked a very thin line between very different worlds, and Ballmer was closer to the old-world type than the new.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#510

Post by bsuvc »

elzbardico wrote: post #464
vjust wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ballmer hated Linux & open source. He would've driven their cloud division to the ground trying to sell Windows servers in the cloud. It would've taken him another 20 years to accept that Linux was key to the cloud. VSCode (Visual Studio Code) - would never have taken birth. Microsoft survived and thrived once Ballmer had no option but leave. In this era of Python development, Microsoft Windows still feels a step or…

Ballmer didn't hate linux and open source. He feared it as a threath to Microsoft's business model and revenue streams.

That's just why he hated it.
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