Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is Steve Ballmer the Most Underrated CEO of the 21st Century?

blog.jovono.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 116 posts

Re: Is Steve Ballmer the Most Underrated CEO of the 21st Century?

#101

Post by anticorporate »

Jean-Papoulos wrote: post #49
anticorporate wrote: post #18

I guess it depends on your measure. Personally, the Ballmer era represents Microsoft going from being "the" software company to just another dying giant that wasn't relevant to me. I used fewer Microsoft products in 2014 than I did in 2000 when Ballmer took over. Sure, they expanded the product categories they competed in, but any company with that kind of capitalization could have chosen to do the same.

You don't, but companies sure do, and they're the ones with deep pockets.

Hence my comment "it depends on what you measure."

Microsoft is clearly continuing to find success in an enterprise space that had its addressable market grow astronomically during Ballmer's tenure.

At the same time, they went from absolute dominance in the 90s software market to having a smaller share of a much larger enterprise market today. Is that success? Maybe. Was it due to Ballmer, or was it inevitable? Also unclear.

Re: Is Steve Ballmer the Most Underrated CEO of the 21st Century?

#102

Post by anticorporate »

ghaff wrote: post #86
Jean-Papoulos wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't, but companies sure do, and they're the ones with deep pockets.

It's actually an interesting case study. As a consumer, I'm basically no longer a Microsoft customer at all. It's not an ideological position. It just is. But they're obviously doing pretty well. And, if I were an exec at a large business, I'd at least be talking to them.

You and I have a shared experience of working for years at a different operating system vendor who also pivoted into the enterprise space and expanded their offerings significantly beyond the OS.

It's clearly possible to be very financially successful with this kind of a pivot, while also having a lot of previous fans and customers be quite disappointed with it. An install base can increase while the user base decreases.

Re: Is Steve Ballmer the Most Underrated CEO of the 21st Century?

#103

Post by alephnerd »

scosman wrote: post #91
alephnerd wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Invested more in XBox and Business intelligence platforms. Both of which turned out to be the right move long term. Mobile is a commoditized winner takes all market, and there's no guarantee MS would have won even if they concentrated entirely on it. Concentrating on BI platforms helped spawn M365, and the Enterprise focus helped spawn MS Azure which had very early Product-Market Fit at the Fed because they became…

> There's way more money in Enterprise B2B than there is in B2C. Definitively not true by a huge margin.

I disagree and I'd like to see numbers proving otherwise.

B2C might be more prominently known, but Enterprise and B2B companies tend to make up the majority of the F1000s.

Re: Is Steve Ballmer the Most Underrated CEO of the 21st Century?

#104

Post by ivm »

sph wrote: post #66
paxys wrote: post #43

During Ballmer's tenure, the Office division spent a lot of resources building apps for iOS. Ballmer saw a demo, realized that they were better than the Office apps available on Microsoft's own phones and tablets, and so blocked the release. The company sat on the apps for multiple years . When Nadella came on, one of his first decisions as CEO was to release them to the public. This single incident perfectly demonst…

Meh, I don't see how Nadella's "vision" is praiseworthy either: * their flagship OS is more and more a spyware platform * Windows Server is pretty much a rarity these days outside of large corporate deployments. Anybody has seen MS SQL recently? * Azure seems to have reached its peak mind share, mostly pushed by free credits * Their gaming division mainly lives on Game Pass, while XBox is further and further away fro…

And the fractured developer ecosystem with multiple UI frameworks (WPF, WinUI, MAUI, Blazor) all being understaffed, while actual Microsoft products are being developed in React Native.

Re: Is Steve Ballmer the Most Underrated CEO of the 21st Century?

#105

Post by shrubble »

geodel wrote: post #20
shrubble wrote: post #15

It's easy to look like a genius when your company engages in sleazy, underhanded business practices and becomes a near-monopoly as a result. Stac, the paying off of Ziff-Davis publications, etc. Ever since Bill Gates snookered Ed Roberts , Microsoft has had 'flexible' business ethics.

Maybe 3 orders of magnitude more people have tried same techniques but couldn't succeed. So yes, it is still genius.

Every large mafia thus is "genius" by your definition.

Re: Is Steve Ballmer the Most Underrated CEO of the 21st Century?

#106

Post by filoleg »

rasz wrote: post #77
mulletbum wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still can, Skype was rebranded into a more successful product, but the backend has ton of legacy Skype work inside it still.

There is zero Skype legacy in Teams. Skype P2P model was rewritten after acquisition to enable spying.

I worked with the source code directly a few years ago. The grandparent comment confirms that what I saw back then is still the case today (assuming they have access to the source code in the present day).

With that in mind, where does such confidence on your end come from?

Re: Is Steve Ballmer the Most Underrated CEO of the 21st Century?

#109

Post by jq-r »

throwaway4pp24 wrote: post #34
rbanffy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ballmer was there when Longhorn/Vista happened.

Vista was good, just slow on the older contemporary computers. I bought a new properly specced machine when it was released and it was a significant improvement over XP.

Vista was utter garbage. It is historical revisionism to only blame it's failing on minimum requirements. Not only was it slow, it was a horrible clickfest eg with almost 20 clicks and almost as many windows to change wifi settings. At that time (and probably still today) do you know how many did you need to get to wifi settings on OSX? 3 or 4. That was insulting to a windows user and I've never used windows again as my primary choice of OS. Windows 11 is on a good path to become Vista as it's enshittified to hell and back.
Post reply on HN