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Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

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Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#361

Post by throw4950sh06 »

switch007 wrote: post #329
not_a_bot_4sho wrote: post #124

Funny story. I used to see Steve almost every weekday for a couple of years. I can't speak to his business skills, but I can attest that he never once offered a tip for his daily black iced tea. We'd even have it ready for him before he showed up so he never had to wait! He would pay with cash, and I'd hand him his change and drink, and that was that. It's funny to me now: one of the richest men in the world and he n…

Rich people are the most oddly tight people I've ever met. They'll buy a £5m house one day then the next spend 30 minutes arguing with the gardener that the broken 10 year old mower should just work and most definitely doesn't need replacing

They probably bought an expensive one that should be working longer than that. You don't get rich by buying cheap shit that breaks often.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#362

Post by RandomThoughts3 »

jimbob45 wrote: post #282
legitster wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hindsight works both ways. Developing OSes and software was clearly an unsustainable business. It's obvious in hindsight that cloud infrastructure was the way to go. But at the time placing a lot of different bets to find a few successful product-market fits was the best you could ask for.

Developing OSes and software was clearly an unsustainable business. It's obvious in hindsight that cloud infrastructure was the way to go. Cloud infrastructure has become a commodity though and you can replace your cloud provider easily (theoretically, lol). What moat can MS or anyone else build around cloud infrastructure? Compare to OS' where MS may never have had a competitor catch up if they'd kept up speed on th…

> Cloud infrastructure has become a commodity though

There are only 3 significant providers and the needed investments are a gigantic barrier to entry but sure it’s a commodity.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#363

Post by RandomThoughts3 »

nl wrote: post #297
Uvix wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's just "what you're used to", but I'd swap Azure and AWS in that statement. Going from Azure to AWS, I found it not nearly as nice to use or easy to understand. Even basic features like "see all the resources in my account" were missing from AWS.

I use all three regularly. AWS has a horrible , inconsistent UI, and the Azure portal is mostly ok (although I think GCP is the best of the three) But OTOH AWS generally works and usually does what you think, whereas I'm never surprised when Azure breaks or some random Azure API works nothing like we expect.

> GCP is the best of the three

Until you have to call Google. Google business services are awful.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#364

Post by pheatherlite »

godelski wrote: post #245
not_a_bot_4sho wrote: post #124

Funny story. I used to see Steve almost every weekday for a couple of years. I can't speak to his business skills, but I can attest that he never once offered a tip for his daily black iced tea. We'd even have it ready for him before he showed up so he never had to wait! He would pay with cash, and I'd hand him his change and drink, and that was that. It's funny to me now: one of the richest men in the world and he n…

Everyone, chill Regardless of how you feel about tipping culture we're not talking about the average person nor are we talking about the average * experience* . The dude is worth north of $100bn, and is making nearly $10k per minute![0]. Someone who cannot spend his wealth. Someone who'd have to spend tens of millions of dollars every single day just to stop his wealth from growing. Someone who makes money faster tha…

That's not the point, though. It's not how generous he is with his money. It's how he sees money, its purpose in his life. People who see wealth as a force multiplier don't gorm habits of being careless with it. Just like you see people who have no money live pay check to pay check, take on debt just to assume a class they don't exist in. Yet you used to see Bezos in a camry and Buffet in some equally run of the mill car. It's because these people place value on everything, a car to themis just depreciating numbers. They formed a habit of critically assessing the "why".

Back to the topic at hand: Tipping is a ridiculous notion that the wealthy can see through, while the rest of us are too brainwashed to objectively analyze

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#365

Post by [deleted] »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #114
greggyb wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MS should've been able to simply just extend their OS monopoly into all platforms and all architectures, but they didn't, and to a vast swath of the world have become irrelevant, and worse, have lost their ability to become relevant. Microsoft is, pretty famously, on the receiving end of one of the most significant antitrust judgments in modern history. Choosing to further a monopoly seems that it would be a phenom…

I don't buy the "MS purposefully let IE die to avoid anti-trust" story. Ballmer was an enterprise sales guy, no wonder his enterprise software business did great, IE lacked focus and died. Just keeping IE around, they didn't have to kill Google, but just keeping it around would've been interesting in 2020 as they can conceivably use it to move onto rivals. Similarly, windows phone didn't die because of anti-trust but…

[deleted]

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#366

Post by CoastalCoder »

geodel wrote: post #212
booleandilemma wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. I hope the tip screen on tablets goes away soon.

I think they are just getting started. Soon there will announcement on speakers for non-tippers "Congratulations! You won cheap ass of the day award"

Being part way through the third Dungeon Crawler Carl book, this really amuses me.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#367

Post by kortilla »

thowawatp302 wrote: post #349
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. So how long did you spend doing it, to be able to asser that?

You can tell based on the hiring criteria. There aren’t any

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#368

Post by cinntaile »

godelski wrote: post #286
keyle wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Everyone, chill" then proceeds to drop emphasis , F words and other strong words. Maybe take a page of your own book.

Chill because you all are giving me anxiety that I don't need. Idk how to tell you this, but this is a pretty common pattern for human speech. You see it in plenty of countries, plenty of cultures. Welcome to Earth. Words mean more than the literal dictionary interpretation of them. Edit: I only have sass in me tonight.

The workweek just started, you gotta save some sass for the rest of the week too.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#369

Post by RandomThoughts3 »

noen wrote: post #141
cheaprentalyeti wrote: post #52

"To sum it up, for the past twenty years, people having been dunking on Ballmer for being a buffoon who doesn't understand tech and who was, at best, some kind of bean counter who knew how to keep the lights on but didn't know how to foster innovation and caused Microsoft to fall behind in every important market." It's important to keep the lights on while waiting for the next new development to take off. I think it'…

He didn’t keep the lights on while waiting for new development to take off. He actively lost 40+ billion dollars on horrible acquisitions, and actively stifled internal innovation to ensure existing product lines weren’t threatened. On the sales side he streamlined Microsoft into a single monolithic sales motion that killed dozens of products before they started because the target customer/market didn’t fit the EA mo…

> I honestly can’t think of anything substantially positive he achieved in his tenure other than promoting Satya and Scott G and a handful of others.

Ok, but apart from fostering a great generation of new executives, investing in currently extremely profitable products and business lines, streamlining our sales operations and getting us out of these life threatening antitrust cases, what did Steve Ballmer ever do for us?

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#370

Post by switch007 »

throw4950sh06 wrote: post #361
switch007 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rich people are the most oddly tight people I've ever met. They'll buy a £5m house one day then the next spend 30 minutes arguing with the gardener that the broken 10 year old mower should just work and most definitely doesn't need replacing

They probably bought an expensive one that should be working longer than that. You don't get rich by buying cheap shit that breaks often.

You don't get poor from that level of rich replacing a lawnmower

The mower was £500 (my Dad was the gardener)

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