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Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

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Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#561

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

paulluuk wrote: post #545
kranke155 wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'd say the killer "app" for the iPhone was the touch-screen. There were plenty of other phones that could be used to make calls, at the same quality for a lower price. Frankly, I still find the iPhone to be way too expensive for what you get in return. For LLMs, the "killer app", for me, is already here. And there's two of them right now. The first is the chatbot (like chatGPT or Pi or Claude). Having someone who yo…

A killer app in the like-an-iphone context is something that provides obvious value - if not outright delight - to a huge demographic.

Coding doesn't do that, because the demographic interested in coding is not huge compared to the rest of the population.

Chatbots don't do it either because they're too unreliable. I never know if I'm going to get a recommendation for something the LLM hallucinated and doesn't exist.

There's also huge cultural resistance to AI. The iPhone was perceived as an enabling device. AI is perceived as a noisy, low-reliability, intrusive, immoral, disabling technology that is stealing work from talented people and replacing it with work of much lower quality.

It's debatable how many of those perceptions are accurate, but it's not debatable the perceptions exist.

In fact the way OpenAI, Anthropic, and the others have handled this is a masterclass in self-harming PR. It's been an unqualified cultural disaster.

So any killer app has to overcome that reputational damage. Currently I don't think anything does that in a way that works for the great mass of non-technical non-niche users.

Also - the iPhone was essentially a repackaging exercise. It took the Mac+Phone+Camera+iPod - all familiar concepts - and built them into a single pocket-sized device. The novelty was in the integration and miniaturisation.

AI is not an established technology. It's the poster child for a tech project with amorphous affordances and no clear roadmap in permanent beta. A lot of the resistance comes from its incomprehensibility. Plenty of people are making a lot of money from promises that will likely never materialise.

To most people there is no clear positive perception of what it is, what it does, or what specifically it can do for them - just a worry that it will probably make them redundant, or at least less valuable.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#562

Post by Tostino »

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.

Hell, even Sql Server wasn't originally developed by Microsoft. They have taken it a long way since though.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#563

Post by ethbr1 »

itsoktocry wrote: post #451
throwaway2037 wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty heartless reply. I will be downvoted for expressing my view here. > It is the workplace's responsibility to pay their staff adequately. NOT YOURS. Yeah, except that most of these (low income/low skill) service workers don't have the negotiation power to change this power dynamic. Thus, you, someone with enough means to eat out, can offset that gap, just a little bit, by tipping.

> Yeah, except that most of these (low income/low skill) service workers don't have the negotiation power to change this power dynamic This has no bearing in reality. Most of these places can't staff their stores because no one will work for prevailing wages. > Thus, you, someone with enough means to eat out Oh yeah, the people grabbing coffee at Starbucks are all rich. Raise your prices and pay your staff.

> Oh yeah, the people grabbing coffee at Starbucks are all rich.

Relatively speaking? Yes.

Someone spending $4+ on one coffee mean they can easily tip.

And if your argument is that they can't afford that?

Then those same customers won't be able to afford the price increase if Starbucks simply raised labor costs and passed it on.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#564

Post by kstrauser »

agurk wrote: post #472
kstrauser wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been involved with computer networking since approximately 1982, and I've never once heard someone use "squirts" outside talking about Zunes. I don't doubt that it was jargon inside very specific niches, but it has never been common elsewhere.

Before the Ballmer/Zune use of the term I remember my father talking about data being squirted to A2A missiles (he was military) prior to launch, so perhaps that is one of the niches.

I take that back. An old issue of Wired had a jargon watch mention of “squirt the bird” as bouncing something off a satellite, which I remembered only because they misspelled it and I wondered what “quirt” meant.

So yeah, maybe that’s a military or adjacent thing.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#565

Post by GVIrish »

fsckboy wrote: post #546
FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #530

Everyone forgetting about Lisa Brummel and "stack ranking"? That nearly ruined Microsoft... https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft-ditches-syst...

"grading on a curve" is a good idea, and if athletics wasn't run that way, nobody would watch. that doesn't mean it's easy to implement, manage, or impossible to game, or that it plays nice wrt human factors, but to attack the core idea as essentially wrong is anti math, science, and rationality. Microsoft always suffered from rewarding egotists and political animals over people who did actual work.

> but to attack the core idea as essentially wrong is anti math, science, and rationality

The way Microsoft implemented stack ranking was anti math. You're supposed to measure the data then calculate the level of fit to a distribution, not artificially shoehorn the data into buckets to create the curve. If you analyze the data honestly you may find you have a bimodal distribution, or a heavily skewed distribution, who knows.

Stack ranking just clumsily says, I'm gonna give x% a bad score, y% a middle score, and z% the top score.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#566

Post by lenkite »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #557
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.

Windows Phone is surely symptomatic of Balmer's milking the cow rather than innovating approach. A smart phone is not a small desktop computer - it needed a complete rethink of user interface as Apple had done. It's also a bit strange that the success of Windows was based on the ubiquity of clone PCs rather than single vendor, yet Microsoft instead tried to follow Apple here and let Google become the "clone PC" (Andr…

The user interface did have a complete re-think. Windows phone popularized tiles and live tiles which was not just innovative, but an order of magnitude easier and more ergonomical compared to icons, esp for older people. The comforting common-cross-app back button, the metro UI, the smooth performance, ability to store all apps on SD card, best phone keyboard of that era, integration with windows PC - they had the bare-bones down fine. But simply gave up after a few years, instead of incrementally improving.

I thought it was a bad mistake to bow, kneel and surrender the smart-phone market space. Today, I am fully convinced it was a critical, life-threatening mistake as more folks move to the Apple ecosystem - buying both iPhones, Macbooks and Apple Watches because of a fully-integrated ecosystem. The funny thing it was Microsoft who popularized Continuity, but after they gave up due to lack of willpower, it was Apple who took over, executed better and won. Really frustrating to see the state of Windows OS and device market today.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#567

Post by wombat-man »

kaon_ wrote: post #380
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.

I really wanted windows phone to be a success and am still sad it wasn't. I loved the interface. The native integration between my desktop/laptop and phone would have been great. Nowadays with so many apps being PWAs and built with nativescript or ionic, maybe windowsphone has a chance again? I have no idea tbh.

Feels a bit late at this point. Surface Pros run snapdragon but it still feels like too much of a lift to spin up an entire new mobile OS.

I'd be pretty intrigued but they're still struggling to nail the tablet market imo.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#568

Post by lesuorac »

fsckboy wrote: post #546
FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #530

Everyone forgetting about Lisa Brummel and "stack ranking"? That nearly ruined Microsoft... https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft-ditches-syst...

"grading on a curve" is a good idea, and if athletics wasn't run that way, nobody would watch. that doesn't mean it's easy to implement, manage, or impossible to game, or that it plays nice wrt human factors, but to attack the core idea as essentially wrong is anti math, science, and rationality. Microsoft always suffered from rewarding egotists and political animals over people who did actual work.

Athletics is an actual competition where the expectation is that "you win".

When you hire 12 baristas are they competing to make the most coffees or is their job to handle customer's orders? If their job isn't to compete with each other then don't stack rank them. Use other metrics like #of incorrect orders or w/e and decide what you think they should've done and if they did more than that give them a bonus. If they do less then maybe you need a new employee.

> Microsoft always suffered from rewarding egotists and political animals over people who did actual work.

That has nothing to do with grading on a curve. You can assign people to the top of a curve based on "egotist" criteria or based on "work". Nothing about a curve or stack ranking requires it to be based on "real work".

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#569

Post by nilamo »

saghm wrote: post #520
_thisdot wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 basically already is, at least for consumers. You can download an .iso of whatever the latest Windows version is and install it, and although it will prompt you to put in a product key, nothing stops you from continuing to use it if you don't. You can't customize certain cosmetic settings, and there's a small watermark in the bottom left corner, but it's hard to imagine that it being fully functional otherwise is…

This is true: my gaming PC had that watermark for nearly 10 years. You can't change the wallpaper, remote desktop doesn't work, but that's the only downside to not paying for windows (and using Microsoft's free iso, instead of pirating a key).

It's quite clear to anyone who's tried it (at least since Win10), that Microsoft does not care at all if you pay for Windows.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#570

Post by nojvek »

I was at Microsoft under both Ballmer and Nadella leadership.

Ballmer was stuck on the old ways. I was connected to a team that had made iOS office apps but Ballmer blocked because MSFT jewel apps on Apple meant Apple would gain marketshare over Windows Mobile. That team was fairly pissed and some folks quit.

Nadella was leading cloud division at that time, but they were not getting the firepower to go against AWS. Azure succeeded despite Ballmer. Nadella clearly saw Cloud was going to be the next big revenue firehose.

Ballmer closely held onto Windows walled garden. His bet on acquiring Nokia and Skype had spectacularly failed. Android and iOS had won, they entirely lost on Windows Mobile.

VSCode had just started but it was seen as an experiment and the sentiment was it could absolutely not jeopardize actual Visual Studio. Linux was seen a competitor to Windows.

Under Nadella, he saw an entirely different Microsoft. He was playing bets on the future, while Ballmer held onto the past. The game had changed.

Nadella didn't care about Windows walled garden. He wanted Microsoft on every platform where developers and Enterprises were. VSCode wanted to cannibalize VS go for it. MSFT apps on iOS go for it. Linux on Windows, go for it. All of MSFT switches to git, to for it. Acquire github and cannibalize Azure pipelines, go for it. Use chromium base for Edge instead of mshtml, go for it. Nadella made good bets over and over again. Ballmer doesn't have the same record.

Nadella + Scott Guthrie went all out on Azure to be #2. The infra spend alone was in billions. Remains to be seen how OpenAI bet pans out.

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