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

531–540 of 714 posts

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#531

Post by JKCalhoun »

kranke155 wrote: post #527
toyg wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

I agree generally with what you're saying but feel you were all over the place in your comment.

The killer app on the iPhone was not "making calls" — I suspect instead it was Safari, the other 1st party apps, the touch screen and the slick integration of all of that to make it a no-brainer device that even my mom and dad could use (they were approaching their 70's when the iPhone debuted).

Your analogy that ChatGPT (or LLMs generally) are more akin to the Mac feels close to the mark to me. Your comment about the Mac's killer app, desktop publishing, suggests that LLM's killer app will follow, just hasn't arrived yet.

The analogy is a little shaky though since, some would argue, it was the laser printer (plus the Mac) that kicked off desktop publishing.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#532

Post by mproud »

WSJ had a great write-up that was very interesting about the plans Ballmer was trying to get rolling. I really gained additional respect for him after reading this.

He wanted to overhaul the company, but realized people would struggle doing so while he was in charge. He realized sometimes you have to let someone else do it.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303460004579194... [archive here](https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pdfiles/cfovhds/weekly...)

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#533

Post by ozim »

addicted wrote: post #182

This article doesn’t understand what was fundamentally wrong with Ballmer’s leadership and what Nadella actually changed. The specific technologies that were successful is irrelevant. Microsoft has and continues to invest in nearly every computer related technology that may come around the corner or they got late on. The problem with Microsoft was everything went through Windows. The entire company was designed to pr…

I would argue that specific technologies changing is super relevant fact.

In 90's and 00's "everything Windows" made loads of sense for a company so being hard on any competition was the right thing. Also I don't see people saying it about MacOs you cannot do software to this day for MacOs or iOS without having actual device and operating system from Apple.

What changed for MSFT was that operating system in 2010's and forward became irrelevant. Cloud is where the money is and now MSFT is "all in Azure or nothing company", entire company is designed to promote Azure and O365.

To properly promote Azure they need to run Linux on that cloud and they need mind share of developers that will develop products using Azure - earlier they could force developers to use Windows because that was where software was running.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#534

Post by adabyron »

hilux wrote: post #208
adabyron wrote: post #158

What Dan doesn't mention is that Steve was given the reins to a sinking ship if I recall. The US Govt was just finishing it's trial on Microsoft & was watching them closely. Tech bubble just burst. On day 1 of the transition after Steve, the stock jumped like crazy & continued that momentum. The stock was, as Dan mentions, at an unfairly low p/e ratio too. Idk if Steve was great but seems he was given the role of tra…

> On day 1 of the transition after Steve, the stock jumped like crazy & continued that momentum. Many people would interpret that as "investors had no faith in Steve Ballmer and were delighted to see his back." Do you have a different interpretation? Also, you seem to be implying that the trial was some external event, and not directly the fault of Bill and Steve. That is not how most people felt at the time.

> Many people would interpret that as "investors had no faith in Steve Ballmer and were delighted to see his back." Do you have a different interpretation?

You're 100% right. Starbucks just did something similar. I personally don't believe these jumps are warranted until the new CEO proves their ability to change the ship. It would be really interesting to hear from Microsoft insiders what changes were being made before the CEO changeover & what ones were heavily done by Satya.

> Also, you seem to be implying that the trial was some external event, and not directly the fault of Bill and Steve. That is not how most people felt at the time.

While many people may have felt they were being very anti-competitive at the time, the same standard has not been held to other companies or Microsoft much over the past 20 years in the United States.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#535

Post by makeitdouble »

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.

VSCode Server and other remote dev servers are a big deal. Before we had to sync or mount a remote partition to manage the gap between Windows and the *nix server. I remember just plain using vim over ssh to avoid the hassle.

That pain existed under macos and linux as well, but to such a lower extent as you could do so much more locally.

While Jetbrains does it too, VSCode being strong guarantees it stays a viable path in the future.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#537

Post by geodel »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #184
arandomusername wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What frugality? He was paying the full price that it was being sold at.

> 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.

Employer or customer?

Since tipping is done by customers. It is like employers tell employees you can let customers know good service is for good tippers. Maybe car repair mechanic can pour sweet tea in instead of engine oil since customer is known to be bad tipper.

I am sure that will go very well with that business.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#539

Post by cameronh90 »

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.

Indeed. Conversely, Apple are the ones now forcing you to buy into their walled garden if you want to support users on their devices.

We are a mostly Windows+Linux shop, but we need Macs to build and test iPhone apps, investigate issues with Safari on iOS, do certain iPhone support tasks, etc.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#540

Post by selimthegrim »

pheatherlite wrote: post #364
godelski wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I take it you meant form habits?
Post reply on HN