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Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

danluu.com

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Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#511

Post by eastbound »

cyberax wrote: post #144
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…

> The business side of Microsoft was a streamlined unstoppable train at that point.

Surprising. As a startup I just couldn’t understand how to subscribe to MS Office, seems like it required a hotmail account or something, it always bored me before completing the steps.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#512

Post by palla89 »

The amazing thing about the internet is that it’s always just a matter of time before something negative gets completely reversed by someone. For every “best, coolest thing ever,” there will inevitably be an article arguing that it was all hype and actually the opposite.

And the same thing happens with a bad product / action eventually, there’s always an article attempting to redeem it.

Why is that? Is it just human nature driving our need to be heard and seen as visionaries?

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#513

Post by toyg »

hilux wrote: post #208
adabyron wrote: post #158

What Dan doesn't mention is that Steve was given the reins to a sinking ship if I recall. The US Govt was just finishing it's trial on Microsoft & was watching them closely. Tech bubble just burst. On day 1 of the transition after Steve, the stock jumped like crazy & continued that momentum. The stock was, as Dan mentions, at an unfairly low p/e ratio too. Idk if Steve was great but seems he was given the role of tra…

> On day 1 of the transition after Steve, the stock jumped like crazy & continued that momentum. Many people would interpret that as "investors had no faith in Steve Ballmer and were delighted to see his back." Do you have a different interpretation? Also, you seem to be implying that the trial was some external event, and not directly the fault of Bill and Steve. That is not how most people felt at the time.

> implying that the trial was some external event

In many ways, it was. The political stars aligned "just so", in a way we've not really seen before or since. Many, many other companies got away with much more egregious behaviour (hello, Apple).

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#514

Post by floatrock »

palla89 wrote: post #512

The amazing thing about the internet is that it’s always just a matter of time before something negative gets completely reversed by someone. For every “best, coolest thing ever,” there will inevitably be an article arguing that it was all hype and actually the opposite. And the same thing happens with a bad product / action eventually, there’s always an article attempting to redeem it. Why is that? Is it just human…

For politics: its bots setting a narrative. For temu dropshipping: its bots to make money.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#515

Post by hermanradtke »

nvader wrote: post #268
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

Thank you for the link but I was looking for the reproducibility talk.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#516

Post by fakedang »

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…

How is VS Code a moat when it's platform agnostic? Plus the developer market is just a fraction of the overall market.

MS Office is the real moat, as is Windows XP/7. Everyone use MS Office because Google Slides/Docs/Sheets is a silly contender to the MS Office suite. Windows XP/7 because that's what a huge percent of the human population using computers grew up on today, so they're most familiar with it. And let's be honest, that's not going away, even as MS enshittifies Windows 11, simply because no Linux build can apparently mirror the Windows XP/7 UI (for some reason, not even Mint) while Apple is hell-bent on doing its own thing on the sidelines.

The day MS breaks Office suite is the day Microsoft goes down, but that's unlikely because the current crop of devs at MS don't even know how to get started. Microsoft could literally not do anything and still make tons in revenue.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#517

Post by dangus »

actionfromafar wrote: post #504
toast0 wrote: post #303

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 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.

Yeah, the idea that Nadella killed Windows Phone only makes sense in the context of Windows Phone already having failed under Ballmer.

I was a Windows Phone user during 8 and 8.1. There was a short period where I felt like some traction was taking place. My bank even had a Windows Phone app, until they didn’t.

Windows 8.1 was the most competitive version against contemporaries, but then the delays and issues surrounding 10 really took the wind out of those sails.

My perspective as a consumer is that Microsoft buying Nokia seemed to have made Nokia worse and delayed their phone development process. I found myself without any upgrade path, while Apple and Samsung users could get a pretty significant upgrade in capability every year at that time.

Nokia was also better at making low-end phones and had very few flagship products that were iPhone and Galaxy competitors.

On the business side Microsoft didn’t focus on having their entire lineup available on all four US carriers. They had all these weird carrier exclusives where getting a new Windows Phone would mean switching carriers.

I have to think that the break in compatibility between Windows 7 and 8 really screwed over developer relations as well. On the Apple side they were delivering an experience very familiar to Mac developers, and on the Android side the experience was an open source free-for-all playground.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#518

Post by high_na_euv »

palla89 wrote: post #512

The amazing thing about the internet is that it’s always just a matter of time before something negative gets completely reversed by someone. For every “best, coolest thing ever,” there will inevitably be an article arguing that it was all hype and actually the opposite. And the same thing happens with a bad product / action eventually, there’s always an article attempting to redeem it. Why is that? Is it just human…

Or maybe because there is many things that are vastly misunderstood because people prefer simple explainations and theories

In general people are scared of complexity

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#519

Post by al_borland »

RandomThoughts3 wrote: post #354
al_borland wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but Ballmer's attempt to reinvent Windows Mobile to compete with modern smartphones was too little too late. Microsoft during that era was one bad call after another. When Apple saw multitouch they made a phone; Microsoft made a giant table[0] (very little imagination beyond the Jeff Han demo[1]). When Microsoft saw the iPhone reception, they sunk 2 years an $1B into the Kin line of phones[2], which lasted al…

> As far as Teams goes... it is used a lot by companies that are all-in on O365, but Slack and Zoom were the two household names in the space during the pandemic. Tell me you have no idea of what’s happening in the real world outside your small tech bubble in one sentence. Nobody uses Slack outside of tech. They are virtually unknown in Europe.

I don’t use Slack personally, but it’s always what I hear mentioned online. It’s also what I hear friends mention (who don’t work in tech) who aren’t working at big cooperations.

I’ve also heard many people use the phrase, “it’s like Slack”, when trying to explain what MS Teams is to a non-technical friend. It was all over the news during the pandemic, so people learned what it was. Same with Zoom.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#520

Post by saghm »

_thisdot wrote: post #507
StableAlkyne wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

It basically already is, at least for consumers. You can download an .iso of whatever the latest Windows version is and install it, and although it will prompt you to put in a product key, nothing stops you from continuing to use it if you don't. You can't customize certain cosmetic settings, and there's a small watermark in the bottom left corner, but it's hard to imagine that it being fully functional otherwise is an oversight rather than something they're fine with. The only people who will go through the effort to install it like that and keep using it are the ones who are least likely to pay for it.
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