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

Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

danluu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 714 posts

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#391

Post by solarkraft »

metadat wrote: post #217
vjust wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have as much disdain for the monkey man as the next OSS fan. But VSCode was always closed sourced crap at the arbitrary whims of a soulless zombie corp, and they never promised otherwise in a significant way. It's not relevant and not a good foundational signal or basis for any argument.

> they never promised otherwise in a significant way

It’s commonly promoted as „open source“ and this seems to be commonly believed. Pretty much everyone I tell that the official builds of VSCode are proprietary (and how proprietary they are) is pretty surprised.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#392

Post by jillesvangurp »

sublinear wrote: post #66

I'm still somewhat bitter about the failure of Windows Phone and can't believe it even happened. The iPhone wasn't even that good at the time and Android was a total mess. Microsoft dropped the ball on their first party app dev, and several flagship phones had great hardware but terrible driver support. Microsoft clearly wasn't interested in the consumer market anymore and it shows through to today.

I worked at Nokia Maps at the time the Microsoft acquisition of the phone business was being negotiated. I never met Ballmer but I heard some stories of people that did. Intense guy apparently. I was at two joint meetings with MS to discuss some of the details of things related to the thing I was working on. Ultimately that wasn't transferred to MS.

MS made a big mess of the whole windows phone project. First it royally screwed Nokia over by deciding to do a big overhaul of Windows Phone OS internals and effectively leaving Nokia dead in the water with now obsolete products that they just launched. I'm sure this was intentional on Ballmer's side: weaken Nokia and acquire their phone business. But he threw out the baby with the bathwater. The first generation of windows phone was basically windows CE repackaged. The second one was a whole new kernel (windows NT based, I guess). The transition took crazy long. MS announced early and this made the old generation of Lumia phones a really hard sell. There was a vague promise of upgrades that of course never happened. And then the acquisition rumors destroyed the OEM ecosystem because they'd be competing with MS on phones.

Then MS bought what remained of Nokia's phone division and it got busy demolishing it right away (including an actual Nokia Android phone that existed). When Nadella inherited this train wreck, he unceremoniously put an end to the whole thing and fired pretty much the whole team. At that point it very little hope of catching up because the OEMs and users had left. As much as I loved Nokia, it was the right decision at that point. All the good stuff had long been killed/cancelled already.

It was Ballmer's fixation on Windows that led to this. Nokia had a bonafide Android competitor in the form of Meego. Backing Linux would have been the right move. Nadella might have approached this differently.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#393

Post by ywvcbk »

EasyMark wrote: post #275
unixhero wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tipping for a convenience item at the till really really sucks. Am I the only one sane on this? Best regards Norway

Baristas in Norway get paid far more than here in the USA except in the fanciest of coffee shops. Tip culture is simply a part of the restaurant scene here, while I don’t agree with it, I don’t see hurting the baristas/waitstaff as an option either. I may not give exorbitant tips, but I give a reasonable 10-15%

> Baristas in Norway get paid far more than here

Are they? Google claims the average is about NOK 200 per hours? That’s barely above the tipped minimum wage in Washington or California. So it would be considerably less with tips?

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#394

Post by creesch »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #344
ThrowawayB7 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except Steven Sinofsky, longtime head of the Windows division and one of the internal forces preventing Microsoft from going in alternate directions, was pushed out under Ballmer's tenure, not Nadella's. Granted, Ballmer made the mistake of putting Terry Myerson, who headed up the failed Windows Phone effort, in charge of Windows but that's another story.

Not just that everything was going through windows as GP said, whatever market they entered, they acted like their product will be like windows in that sector too from day one. Zune was like that, but the best example is windows phone, version 8 more precisely which is the first proper modern smartphone version. Google realized that if they want to stand a chance in catching up to the iPhone, they need to shove andro…

> The windows phone experience was: sign up for a dev account to download visual studio with WP support. Start up VS, asked for your account again.

This is something that Microsoft still struggles with. Some things have improved, but a lot of the dev experiences on the Microsoft side are still cumbersome and not aimed at small time devs.

My experience here is with browser extensions and publishing these for both old Edge (pre chromium) and the newer Edge. The entire publishing dashboard is/was overly complex and assumes you are either a single person or a big organization with (azure) AD set up. With Mozilla AMO you can just add individual developers to your extension by mail, and with Google it is as easy as setting up a group.

With browser extensions specifically (and Edge as well) you can also clearly see where it is still a dedicated motivated internal team setting things up and where things were handed over to more general teams and support was also outsourced to somewhere else.

Anyway, my main point is that even now, many years later, Microsoft still struggles in this area making me think this is more fundamental to the company culture and way of operating.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#396

Post by bravetraveler »

paulddraper wrote: post #323
pinkmuffinere wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read “everyone chill” to mean “there’s a lot of bad takes here”, not literally “remain calm”. In that context, I think the comment makes sense — they’re illustrating just how wrong the common take is

I've literally never heard that expression before

I have, now what do we do? Which of us controls the language?

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#397

Post by ywvcbk »

xandrius wrote: post #229
AdieuToLogic wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What frugality? He was paying the full price that it was being sold at. By that logic, most reading these comments should expect to hear from their employer: What annual bonus? What stock options? The company is paying full price that your time was being sold at.

Annual bonus is either performance based or as a retainer to make up for differences in the wages since the person was hired. Stock options are because you could be paid more or you are taking risks for future rewards. A mandatory tip is because your employer doesn't want to pay you full wage and instead of increasing the price and pay you more, they pass it over to the customers. So they get the same profits without…

A mandatory fixed/clearly defined tip is effectively a service tax. Nothing wrong about that if it’s clearly advertised (e.g. you don’t have to pay it if you take out). Quite a few countries in Europe have stuff like that.

Variable, pseudo-optional tips seem like a much bigger problem.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#398

Post by wslh »

I’m really looking forward to his autobiography, not just another Isaacson-style biography, but something from the man himself, even if he has some help writing it. Reading Paul Allen’s autobiography gave me a deep understanding of his and Bill Gates’ journey long before Microsoft. Their story started much earlier than the usual DOS narrative!

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#399

Post by sunaookami »

This is what I always said. Nadella ruined Microsoft for consumers. Ballmer literally saved the Xbox business during the RROD fiasco and he made sure Windows Phone could thrive - it was an established 3rd operating system in Europe with over 10% market share and it could've been more but Nadella killed it because it wasn't popular in the US. Also, Windows was definitely better under Ballmer.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#400

Post by [deleted] »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #254
itake wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But in this culture that Steve exists within, those positions are paid mostly by tips. False. Presumably this was in WA, employers have to pay full wages. there is no carve out "tipped" wage (most) of the rest of the USA has. Currently, min wage in Redmond (King County) is $20.29/hr. Many businesses in King County do not allow tipping.

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…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN