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

521–530 of 714 posts

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#521

Post by actionfromafar »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #503
actionfromafar wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VS Code is also low-key keeping Windows relevant as a developer OS. If something else came along which was truly very excellent but was only working well with Linux, and VS Code was not there to be the de-facto go-to solution for most new devs, it could eat away more of Windows marketshare. So I see VS Code as a slight moat, also in its promulgation of dotnet-isms. So I think VS Code drives some revenue Microsofts wa…

I'm not sure how it's improving Windows relevancy, second most popular IDE group - Jetbrains ones - are on Windows too.

That's why I wrote slight. VS Code is more of a backstop to make sure developing on Windows doesn't suck. Don't let Windows fall behind kind of thing. Every cross platform thing is biggest on Windows by default because Windows is the biggest platform.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#522

Post by actionfromafar »

dangus wrote: post #517
actionfromafar wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thesis is WP8 was already the first huge misstep where they lost developers.

Yeah, the idea that Nadella killed Windows Phone only makes sense in the context of Windows Phone already having failed under Ballmer. I was a Windows Phone user during 8 and 8.1. There was a short period where I felt like some traction was taking place. My bank even had a Windows Phone app, until they didn’t. Windows 8.1 was the most competitive version against contemporaries, but then the delays and issues surround…

That's exactly it. There were a bunch of hardcore Windows dev shops getting ready to support Windows Phone who jumped on WP7, ready to dig down, but who felt betrayed when WP8 was a clean break. You lose that hardcore bunch, then you are just evaluated on the generics and Windows Phone had no edge.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#523

Post by hiatus »

_thisdot wrote: post #507
StableAlkyne wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he is doing is alienating a lot of customers with his terrible decisions Windows doesn't even make up 1/5 of their income, and in contrast a bit over half of their income is Office and Cloud* The real money is in enterprise IT and cloud services. The average consumer doesn't keep their prebuilt computer long enough to buy another version of the OS. They don't need to keep a niche within a minority (privacy-oriented…

It's a mystery to me why they haven't made Windows free yet. Surely they make much more money from users using Windows than buying Windows

It comes preinstalled on most computers. The consumers don't pay, OEMs do. And they'll continue to pay because most people don't want an OS-less machine.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#524

Post by meekins »

tylerchilds wrote: post #499
raxxorraxor wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They bought it. If Microsoft had developed it, we would get something like sourcesafe (was that the name?). Sure, the investment was quite sensible, although I don't think they can change it for their ambitions too much. Microsofts conquest against open source was of course a wrong strategy of Balmer.

this is the funny thing about microsoft they are way better at buying and selling software than ideating and creating it. successful microsoft products are acquisitions.

Same story with Azure. All the good services are acquisitions, rest is low quality feature catch-up with AWS augmented by a terrible IAM system.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#525

Post by gtirloni »

_thisdot wrote: post #507
StableAlkyne wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he is doing is alienating a lot of customers with his terrible decisions Windows doesn't even make up 1/5 of their income, and in contrast a bit over half of their income is Office and Cloud* The real money is in enterprise IT and cloud services. The average consumer doesn't keep their prebuilt computer long enough to buy another version of the OS. They don't need to keep a niche within a minority (privacy-oriented…

It's a mystery to me why they haven't made Windows free yet. Surely they make much more money from users using Windows than buying Windows

Only PC enthusiasts buy Windows. 99% of the population gets it bundled with their computers and who knows how much MS is charging those OEMs. Probably pennies.

Windows already has a de facto monopoly in desktop OS. They don't need to be nicer and give it for free to get more market share. They have all market share they every will.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#526

Post by gtirloni »

globalise83 wrote: post #480
rowanG077 wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true for me as well. I do have a VR gaming machine which I don't think will linuxify soon but I would if I could. Nadella has grown Microsoft no doubt. But in the process has trashed Windows. One of the most valuable pieces of software. I wouldn't be surprised this will bite them in the long run a lot.

Our company is absolutely full of Microsoft products (all the Office 365 stuff, PowerBI, Azure, Microsoft SSO etc. etc.), yet most of our teams use Macbooks. Windows is no longer a necessity to work in a mostly-Microsoft environment, and that strategy is making Microsoft fabulous amounts of money.

> yet most of our teams use Macbooks.

Exactly this. Today I can switch from Linux to macOS to Windows and 99% of what the average users does can be done in the browser. Worse, in a smartphone.

So it was very smart of Microsoft to realize Windows was going to stop being a hard requirement for most use cases.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#527

Post by kranke155 »

toyg wrote: post #502
_heimdall wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lately it has definitely felt as though Microsoft is resurrecting Ballmer's old meme as "AI! AI! AI!" I was at Microsoft for the last couple years of Ballmer and the first few years of Nadella. He definitely did change the company and I remember at the time feeling that he handled the change really well, but from where I sat he spent the first part of his tenure evolving Ballmer's final push to move focus from Window…

> Now the company seems fully baked I to LLMs with everything they do chasing that Them along absolutely everyone else . ChatGPT was an iPhone moment.

I would press X to doubt just because of profitability.

It’s cute that we now have image and video gen AI. Also we have now Turing test passing chat bots (Id say). But although they are very impressive, and I know lots of people who use them for various tasks, I haven’t seen a “killer app” yet.

For iPhone the killer app was making calls. It was the best phone you could get. Then it had apps. It was undeniably better.

LLMs are good at a lot of things, but they don’t seem to excel any particular task - yet. I’m not sure they are a revolution yet.

I’d say they’re more of Macintosh moment. A hugely useful technology no doubt - but useful for what exactly? For Mac it was desktop publishing.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#528

Post by gtirloni »

rbanffy wrote: post #470
lenkite wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows phone was damn good and was growing in popularity when Nadella came in and killed it. When you are #3 in a market, you need persistence to win. One cannot expect immediate, massive profits in a saturated market. Yet, Windows phone by itself was a growth multiplier for Windows which Nadella annihilated in order to turn Microsoft into a cloud & ad services company.

> you need persistence to win. You also need a plan. How would Windows Phone displace either Apple or Android?

Open source has a lot of momentum in Microsoft now but it wasn't the case when Windows Phone was released.

Had they made it open source, it would have been a different story with Android and Windows Phone fighting to win the OEMs.

But that ship has sailed. Unless there's a paradigm shift in smartphones (doubtful), we're stuck with Android and iOS for the foreseeable future.

Post reply on HN