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Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

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Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#581

Post by InDubioProRubio »

paulluuk wrote: post #545
kranke155 wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

The Killer App was the user-interface. There was not tutorial video, there was no long explanations. It was touch and go. And it worked.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#582

Post by WorldMaker »

vjust wrote: post #181
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…

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…

> He would've pushed something wierd, like VBA .

That was Bill Gates. Bill Gates founded the company on BASIC and seemed to remain a fan of the language even as the rest of the world moved on to other languages.

Ballmer wasn't technical so appeared to have no skin in the game of which language "won", so long it was Microsoft Developer Tools like Visual Studio developers used to work on it (and what would become VS Code, which as many point out did start under Ballmer's tenure). That "Developers! Developers! Developers!" meme was directly an "I want to support developers wherever they are and however they want to work". Sure he was a huge Windows cheerleader and would want those Developers working on Windows machines, but he really did seem to want to see Windows be the best platform for developers to code for anything (including/especially the cloud).

In terms of Python specifically, IronPython was active and interesting during Ballmer's tenure and Ballmer helped form a team that was actively contributing to open source projects like Python (and Node and Redis and others) to make them all run better (sometimes much better) on Windows. Ballmer may have been afraid of open source as a business model, but he also seemed to realize the usefulness of open source for bringing developers (back) to Windows and he did start efforts in that direction.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#583

Post by fluoridation »

globalise83 wrote: post #480
rowanG077 wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true for me as well. I do have a VR gaming machine which I don't think will linuxify soon but I would if I could. Nadella has grown Microsoft no doubt. But in the process has trashed Windows. One of the most valuable pieces of software. I wouldn't be surprised this will bite them in the long run a lot.

Our company is absolutely full of Microsoft products (all the Office 365 stuff, PowerBI, Azure, Microsoft SSO etc. etc.), yet most of our teams use Macbooks. Windows is no longer a necessity to work in a mostly-Microsoft environment, and that strategy is making Microsoft fabulous amounts of money.

Sorry, but how is that a response to what the GP said? It was not necessary to keep making Windows worse and worse to decouple it from other MS products.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#584

Post by MarkusWandel »

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.

I tried various "weird phones" on my way to standard Android, among them a high-end WinCE phone (Xperia X1a) and a WP8 one (Lumia 520). Make no mistake about it, WP8 was a good mobile OS, even if they did stick the dreaded "Windows" name in there. Smooth, reliable, battery efficient, well-thought-out UI. But alas, too late. By then Android had captured the "not iOS" market and it would have taken a miracle to bring a third OS to the mainstream.

I very briefly tried WP10, and it actually seemed a step backwards; in their desperate attempt to somehow unify the desktop and phone thing, be it in code base or user experience or whatever, they tried too hard.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#585

Post by hermanradtke »

hermanradtke wrote: post #515
nvader wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

I cannot edit anymore, but this is the talk descrption: https://www.thestrangeloop.com/2016/reproducibility.html

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#586

Post by sealeck »

fsckboy wrote: post #546
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.

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

Good thing that enterprise software and athletics are different things!

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#587

Post by chucke1992 »

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…

Yeah. It is basically a trap that every CFO who became CEO step into - tie everything to a single thing.

With Satya he had much broader vision.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#588

Post by mike_hearn »

Hypergraphe wrote: post #463
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…

I'm not sure that devaluating Windows is a good strategy at all...

It's not a strategy, it's a recognition that the Windows org has decayed and they apparently don't know how to turn it around. Apparently simple projects take forever, new code they launch is often filled with bugs, different parts of the org don't talk to each other and they can't explain why anyone should write an app that targets the Windows API. I support customers shipping apps to every platform and Windows is nowadays 90% of the pain, it's worse even than Linux. Microsoft just don't care either, you can tell the devs who work on it are overwhelmed by the sheer size and tech debt levels of the codebase. Decades of compounding bad decisions have well and truly caught up with them :( This is a pity in a way, the desktop OS market could use more competition.

Nadella de-prioritizing Windows was the right thing to do for the business because it had a monopoly, so after PC sales saturated the market the best they could achieve was treading water, but also because the strategy of tying everything to Windows assumed the Windows team would continue to execute well and these things would all be mutually reinforcing. In the 90s Windows did execute well but by 2010 that had stopped, and so the tying strategy also had to stop. A better CEO than Ballmer could possibly have turned the Windows situation around and avoided the need for the disconnection, but instead it was left to drift.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#589

Post by geodel »

itsoktocry wrote: post #451
throwaway2037 wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty heartless reply. I will be downvoted for expressing my view here. > It is the workplace's responsibility to pay their staff adequately. NOT YOURS. Yeah, except that most of these (low income/low skill) service workers don't have the negotiation power to change this power dynamic. Thus, you, someone with enough means to eat out, can offset that gap, just a little bit, by tipping.

> Yeah, except that most of these (low income/low skill) service workers don't have the negotiation power to change this power dynamic This has no bearing in reality. Most of these places can't staff their stores because no one will work for prevailing wages. > Thus, you, someone with enough means to eat out Oh yeah, the people grabbing coffee at Starbucks are all rich. Raise your prices and pay your staff.

The funny thing is when people reasonably say raise the price to actual costs, the answers is "Customer may stop coming..". As if the whole point to scam customer with fake low prices.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#590

Post by tylerchilds »

benrutter wrote: post #549
tylerchilds wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The most glaring example in recent memory would be the amazon monopoly and the evidence i submit is diapers.com

with enough money, you can fund your investments to strategically take down every mom and pop.

amazon can’t take on every consumer vertical simultaneously, but they used their funds to drive diapers.com into the red, because as a parent you’re scrwed either way and comparing food to diapers, will buy the cheaper diapers instead of the cheaper food.

amazon wanted diapers.com

diapers.com said, we’re good this isn’t a billion dollar enterprise, but it pays the bills.

amazon bought it after making sure they couldn’t actually use it to pay the bills.

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