Balmer presided over Microsoft's transition into irrelevance. He wanted developers to write software for Windows. He did not want them to write software for the world that was changing, opening (the internet, Open Source, etc.) which is why developers gave him a middle finger. Just like any large corporation Microsoft stopped leading and started chasing and could not keep up until they struck gold with the XBox.
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?
#42Re: Is Steve Ballmer the Most Underrated CEO of the 21st Century?
#43During 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 demonstrates Ballmer's failures and Nadella's new vision. Had he remained at the helm Microsoft would have continued to stagnate and sink with the likes of IBM, Cisco and HP rather than stay on top of technological shifts and become the biggest company in the world.
Re: Is Steve Ballmer the Most Underrated CEO of the 21st Century?
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think Gates has given away ~$50B - which would seem to be enough to tip the scales? I'd rather compare the billionaires by what they redistribute vs. the size of their hoard.
Re: Is Steve Ballmer the Most Underrated CEO of the 21st Century?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
jack welch ?
> jack welch ? Perhaps when he was actually still at GE, but after his retirement, it is now know that GE did all sorts of 'sideways accounting': * https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releas... So he is no longer viewed as highly as he once was: * https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/vqr30e/jack_...
> So he is no longer viewed as highly as he once was:
What does it say about sam altman if 'winning by jack welch' is his all time favorite book.
Re: Is Steve Ballmer the Most Underrated CEO of the 21st Century?
#46Steve Ballmer is worth $147 billion.
Not by any stretch of my imagination is the man underrated. I'd say, like many American CEO's, he has vastly been overrated through a failure in capitalism.
If I do some back of the envelope calculations, a teacher makes about 50k a year, so about 2 million in a career. In his career so far, Steve Ballmer has made as much as 75k teachers do in their career. For comparison, Arizona has about 50k teachers.
Now, the man has achieved a lot, maybe even a lot compared to other CEOs. But by this measure, he must be overrated.
Re: Is Steve Ballmer the Most Underrated CEO of the 21st Century?
#47This article is borderline comical. The thin list of his accomplishments focus on increasing revenue ($15B to $70B) and launching or acquiring successful initiatives (Xbox, Skype, Azure). Then the rest is a recollection of his biggest embarassments, like terrible mobile products, misguided Windows strategy and trailing AWS by 7 years.
Reporting on business issues is always muddled by a lack of proper comparisons, along with cherry picking. For example, this article makes the argument that increasing Microsoft's revenue by 4x was very impressive, even though the stock value stagnated. However, when evaluting his tenure as owner of a basketball club, he is declared successful because its value doubled. The problem is that Microsoft was eclipsed compared to its peers at the time - Google, Amazon, etc. -, and likewise the average basketball club doubled in value as well.
Re: Is Steve Ballmer the Most Underrated CEO of the 21st Century?
#48Honestly we as consumers might have been better off with Microsoft’s vision of a Windows computer in each home acting as the hub of digital life and monetization through purchase of hardware and software instead of our current model where the hubs are large centralized services and monetization is through ads.
Microsoft's ORIGINAL vision. Microsoft products are now all about the centralized services, ads and subscriptions.
Re: Is Steve Ballmer the Most Underrated CEO of the 21st Century?
#49I 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.
Re: Is Steve Ballmer the Most Underrated CEO of the 21st Century?
#50We 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.)
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