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Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

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Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#541

Post by itake »

casey2 wrote: post #271
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in states with a lower tip worker's minimum wage, they are still guaranteed to make the standard minimum wage if the tips don't make up the difference. 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…

>Serving up food you didn't even cook isn't an intensely difficult or skilled job. Then it should be easy to automate, but the best I've seen is a conveyor belt or a box on top of a roomba. In reality it's a very skilled job, it's just that most everyone is capable of doing it. And "fair" is any wage were you can live and increase the quality of your life over time as much as your work has increased the quality of ot…

Can you share a couple examples of non-skilled labor?

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#542

Post by wkat4242 »

maeil wrote: post #426
wkat4242 wrote: post #108

For me it was more his personality that made me dislike him. He acted like a baboon on stage. Nadella is much more composed and seems more intelligent as a result. I don't like that kind of extreme expression and this is important because I wouldn't respect such a leader at work. See also other stuff like the chair-throwing incident of course. Also something I didn't see covered, this was also the dark age where Micr…

> One thing I don't really like about Satya Nadella by the way, his AI strategy is a mess. They're slamming stuff on the market way too quickly (see the recall fiasco) Google did an even worse job in that regard, Gemini's reputation is still greatly tainted in the tech world despite now being competitive with the other frontier models.

I don't really agree. Google is great at AI development, they're just not so good at marketing.

And I think they're right not to push it too hard like MS is doing. Because the tech still needs work.

Personally I use neither, but I use llama locally which is amazingly good considering the limited resources it has to work with here.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#543

Post by bradlys »

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #530

Everyone forgetting about Lisa Brummel and "stack ranking"? That nearly ruined Microsoft... https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft-ditches-syst...

What does Microsoft do now? Most every major tech company I’ve seen uses stack ranking - even if they don’t use that name. Hell, a lot of startups I’ve been at even use that. The founders and executives love it as far as I can tell - why else would they do it?

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#544

Post by sausagefeet »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #482
madisp wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With GitHub, TypeScript and VS code I'm probably using more Microsoft products than before.

They bought it. If Microsoft had developed it, we would get something like sourcesafe (was that the name?). Sure, the investment was quite sensible, although I don't think they can change it for their ambitions too much. Microsofts conquest against open source was of course a wrong strategy of Balmer.

> SourceSafe was originally created by a North Carolina company called One Tree Software.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#545

Post by paulluuk »

kranke155 wrote: post #527
toyg wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I would press X to doubt just because of profitability. It’s cute that we now have image and video gen AI. Also we have now Turing test passing chat bots (Id say). But although they are very impressive, and I know lots of people who use them for various tasks, I haven’t seen a “killer app” yet. For iPhone the killer app was making calls. It was the best phone you could get. Then it had apps. It was undeniably better.…

I'd say the killer "app" for the iPhone was the touch-screen. There were plenty of other phones that could be used to make calls, at the same quality for a lower price. Frankly, I still find the iPhone to be way too expensive for what you get in return.

For LLMs, the "killer app", for me, is already here. And there's two of them right now.

The first is the chatbot (like chatGPT or Pi or Claude). Having someone who you can just ask for any kind of information, from book recommendations to hypothetical space travel situations to advice about birthday gifts, and to get answers that are better than what I'd get from 90% of real humans, is huge to me.

The second one is the coding assistant, in my code copilot. It has made me at least twice, if not thrice as productive as I was before.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#546

Post by fsckboy »

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #530

Everyone forgetting about Lisa Brummel and "stack ranking"? That nearly ruined Microsoft... https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft-ditches-syst...

"grading on a curve" is a good idea, and if athletics wasn't run that way, nobody would watch.

that doesn't mean it's easy to implement, manage, or impossible to game, or that it plays nice wrt human factors, but to attack the core idea as essentially wrong is anti math, science, and rationality.

Microsoft always suffered from rewarding egotists and political animals over people who did actual work.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#547

Post by schnitzelstoat »

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #530

Everyone forgetting about Lisa Brummel and "stack ranking"? That nearly ruined Microsoft... https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft-ditches-syst...

I was going to mention this. It was such an awful system and management method.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#548

Post by rightbyte »

fakedang wrote: post #516
actionfromafar wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

> 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

Windows 10/11 does a really bad job at emulating XP/7 UI. It is about as foreign to XP users as Debian or whatever.

I made a XP VM the other month to run some insane software I had to run at work.

I felt so much at home. It was so nice. Everything was awesome. The control panel was awesome. The distinct buttons were awesome. The start menu was awesome. The 'My computer' at desktop root was awesome.

All in muscle memory, still.

Then I am back out to 10 and can't figure out where my app shortcuts are without knowing their name or what of the 3 or 4 different control panels I am supposed to use.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#549

Post by benrutter »

tylerchilds wrote: post #499
raxxorraxor wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They bought it. If Microsoft had developed it, we would get something like sourcesafe (was that the name?). Sure, the investment was quite sensible, although I don't think they can change it for their ambitions too much. Microsofts conquest against open source was of course a wrong strategy of Balmer.

this is the funny thing about microsoft they are way better at buying and selling software than ideating and creating it. successful microsoft products are acquisitions.

I agree but I'm not sure it's just microsoft- meta's instagram, whatsapp and quest are all acquisitions of already sucessful products. Oracle are similar.

I think, up to a point, and especially in the US where antitrust is pretty lax, it's a very safe investment to just buy other already sucessful companies.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#550

Post by Ragnarork »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #58
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…

I'm assuming that "this years massive Windows outage" refers to the Crowdstrike thing, which wouldn't have happened if Microsoft had been able to lock down the kernel, which antitrust regulators prohibited. (The essay extensively deals with antitrust, I'm sure you have thoughts on this.)

At this point I wonder if half the commenters have read the article.
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