Developers are the seeds in your garden so I believe his laser focus on "developers, developers, developers" while now a meme is spot on.
Is Steve Ballmer the Most Underrated CEO of the 21st Century?
21–30 of 116 posts
Re: Is Steve Ballmer the Most Underrated CEO of the 21st Century?
#22The latest Acquired episode makes a pretty strong case for Ballmer, implying that he led the Microsoft move to own all enterprise software, not Gates.
I think the current CEO is definitely a good one. I just wish one CEO would finally focus on making Windows less awful for power users. Let us turn off all the useless garbage and have offline accounts. I'll personally pay more to do so. Give power users the OS they want. Curious why Ballmer is coming up lately, did something happen with him?
All that comes to mind is that he is now surpassing the net worth of Bill Gates, to a large extent because when he left Microsoft he said he would keep his Microsoft stock positions.
Re: Is Steve Ballmer the Most Underrated CEO of the 21st Century?
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
jack welch ?
Having worked at GE, during Neutron Jack's time, I concur.
Not wrong, but then he (post-retirement) says things like:
> Regarding shareholder value, Welch said in a Financial Times interview on the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, "On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy...your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products."[67]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch#Politics
Given his actions as CEO, what he says (above) and what he actually did, there's some kind of disconnect (unless he had some kind of 'conversion' in retirement).
Re: Is Steve Ballmer the Most Underrated CEO of the 21st Century?
#24I 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.
Yet still most enterprises use windows, O365, teams outlook, AD/entra etc. Azure has like 30% of market share. Copilot, visual studio, Dotnet framework, Microsoft dynamics, Power Automate are massive. I prefer the current incarnation of MS to any of the previous ones TBH, experience of Xbox has been pretty good as well.
Re: Is Steve Ballmer the Most Underrated CEO of the 21st Century?
#25The latest Acquired episode makes a pretty strong case for Ballmer, implying that he led the Microsoft move to own all enterprise software, not Gates.
The link: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/microsoft-volume-ii
I haven't listened to this episode specifically, but I have listened to probably 20 of their other ones. It's a solid podcast, although I wish they were a little more critical and not always so laudatory.
Re: Is Steve Ballmer the Most Underrated CEO of the 21st Century?
#26The latest Acquired episode makes a pretty strong case for Ballmer, implying that he led the Microsoft move to own all enterprise software, not Gates.
What a great show huh? Recent discovery for me and I've binged the whole thing.
For those unaware: https://www.youtube.com/@AcquiredFM
I've never wanted to be on a podcast in my life but for some reason I want to go on it and tell the story of how we built DigitalOcean, I feel like they would ask actually good questions. Really enjoying them.
Re: Is Steve Ballmer the Most Underrated CEO of the 21st Century?
#27There's a case to be made that Ballmer is smarter than the ignorati give him credit for but let's not forget things like the attempted Yahoo acquisition. That would have been an absolute disaster for Microsoft.
Re: Is Steve Ballmer the Most Underrated CEO of the 21st Century?
#28We need to be asking who the most overrated are. They are the ones who can exploit their positions to do real harm. (Lookin' at you, Sloe Mnuk.)
Sundar
Re: Is Steve Ballmer the Most Underrated CEO of the 21st Century?
#29The latest Acquired episode makes a pretty strong case for Ballmer, implying that he led the Microsoft move to own all enterprise software, not Gates.
I think the current CEO is definitely a good one. I just wish one CEO would finally focus on making Windows less awful for power users. Let us turn off all the useless garbage and have offline accounts. I'll personally pay more to do so. Give power users the OS they want. Curious why Ballmer is coming up lately, did something happen with him?
What you’re asking is not specific to power users. I have never seen a single user, “power” or not, saying they like ads and privacy invasions embedded in their OS.
Re: Is Steve Ballmer the Most Underrated CEO of the 21st Century?
#30Having worked on mobile there 2008-2011: no, I would say he’s properly rated. Had years head start on the Android model (hackable OS+vendors+wide HW support), and threw it away. Chased iPhone model briefly without the commitment to actually win. Took smartphone market share from 20-30% to 0% when it mattered most. Invested more in XBox and Business intelligence platforms.