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

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

#111

Post by seanmcdirmid »

actionfromafar wrote: post #51
throw0101c wrote: post #6

"Steve Ballmer played a powerful part in Microsoft’s comeback" (2019): * https://qz.com/1551842/steve-ballmer-played-a-powerful-part-... "Satya Nadella credits Steve Ballmer for pushing Microsoft into the cloud": * https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/16/satya-nadella-credits-ballme... I think the biggest knock against Ballmer was not being able to figure out a (smart)phone strategy that ended up working. Having more than ju…

Mobile 8 was not compatible with Mobile 7. You can't go around and change interfaces when companies are betting the barn on you. For Windows proper you can release and deprecate a GUI every 20 minutes because there is always Win32 to fall back to. But when you are bootstrapping an entire eco-system you can't muck around like that. Also strategic blunder to buy Nokia and then do exactly nothing with it. Linux was stil…

Windows phone 7 was not compat with windows phone 8, but the interface was similar at least. I remember using both fondly.

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

#112

Post by actionfromafar »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #111
actionfromafar wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mobile 8 was not compatible with Mobile 7. You can't go around and change interfaces when companies are betting the barn on you. For Windows proper you can release and deprecate a GUI every 20 minutes because there is always Win32 to fall back to. But when you are bootstrapping an entire eco-system you can't muck around like that. Also strategic blunder to buy Nokia and then do exactly nothing with it. Linux was stil…

Windows phone 7 was not compat with windows phone 8, but the interface was similar at least. I remember using both fondly.

To be clear, I meant APIs :)

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

#113

Post by rasz »

filoleg wrote: post #106
rasz wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Was the 'few years ago' 2012? Skype was rewritten less than a year after acquisition https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-...

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

#114

Post by rbanffy »

jq-r wrote: post #109
throwaway4pp24 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I second that, and I don’t have a much better opinion on 7 and eight. I kind of like 10 and 11 on their corporate crapware-free versions.

Still would prefer a Unix like OS though. Windows is too complicated to debug.

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

#116

Post by ThrowawayB7 »

scosman wrote: post #89
ThrowawayB7 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was more directly on Terry Myerson, VP of Mobile and Embedded Devices or whatever it was called at the time, than Ballmer.

CEO of the PC company can't miss the new primary form of personal computing and blame a VP.

He didn't "miss" anything. Microsoft had wrested dominance in smartphones from Palm just before the iPhone was released. Ballmer may have made a mistake in keeping him on but Myerson was the person in charge of keeping Windows Phone competitive with iPhone.
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