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Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

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Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#591

Post by geodel »

ethbr1 wrote: post #563
itsoktocry wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Thats exactly the point. Raise the price then customer can decide if they can afford it or not. With fake low prices customers may not know what they are getting into.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#592

Post by randomdata »

lesuorac wrote: post #568
fsckboy wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> When you hire 12 baristas are they competing to make the most coffees or is their job to handle customer's orders?

Both? Handling customer orders is how the sport is played, but at the same time they are competing for the most points (money) in that gameplay.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#593

Post by chucke1992 »

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…

> for Microsoft, internet, mobile and AI

I don't think they missed AI boat. Their culture would not have allowed them to create OpenAI, but they were fast to leverage their moat and push AI into their office and windows suites and azure. Hell, they are even trying to catch up with search using AI and are trying to push Azure for various AI startups and stuff.

MSFT rarely leads on anything - arguably even Windows is something they created being inspired by something else, while not going deep into hardware. Which what became the undoing of IBM. They are much better at being second. Azure - they were behind AWS, but not as late as Google.

I bet with Satya, even with mobile they would have grabbed Nokia much earlier and pushed Windows Mobile before Android took off.

AWS missed AI boat though.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#594

Post by chucke1992 »

Hypergraphe wrote: post #463
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'm not sure that devaluating Windows is a good strategy at all...

The thing is that OS is not important these days as you can apps on thin clients now and a lot of folks are spending most of the time within apps and doing nothing else.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#596

Post by layer8 »

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…

As an end user, I lament the devaluation of Windows and the general drive to cloud-based solutions. It has made everything worse.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#597

Post by rowanG077 »

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.

So you agree or disagree with me? I'm not sure how this is a response to my comment?

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#598

Post by alexawarrior4 »

exmicrosoldier wrote: post #555

I disagree with Dan due to my experience as an low level employee under Ballmer. He encouraged political infighting and backstabbing and dog eat dog internal competition, while praising and desiring tight integration between teams. He wanted "cloud first, moblie first" - two firsts! The culture at the time was built around RAID - the internal bug datadbase and that there should be clear prioritization for everything.…

So Ballmer-era Microsoft was the inspiration for Amazon's current culture, I see.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#599

Post by bradlys »

andrewla wrote: post #559
bradlys wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does Microsoft do now? Most every major tech company I’ve seen uses stack ranking - even if they don’t use that name. Hell, a lot of startups I’ve been at even use that. The founders and executives love it as far as I can tell - why else would they do it?

At Microsoft in particular, stack ranking has always been used in the sense of trying to put together a rough ordering of employees at similar levels. But "stack ranking" in scare quotes at Microsoft referred to the specific practice of the 20/70/10 rule -- the top 20% were the standouts, 70% was fine, and 10% was "this person needs to be eased out". This was applied for any org with more than a certain minimum numbe…

This is pretty much what I see at almost every company I’ve been at in the last decade though… The review process is always toxic and has always lead to my peers in the industry being more likely to sabotage than help me since that’s the best way to look good in reviews. That with 80% of my peers being permanent H1B means they will do whatever it takes to stay employed.

I would be happy to know big tech companies that aren’t doing this but I don’t know any?

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#600

Post by _ea1k »

dblohm7 wrote: post #579
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.

> Them along absolutely everyone else. ChatGPT was an iPhone moment. Old guy here, but it feels more like a Netscape moment than an iPhone moment. We'll end up with our pets.com of the LLM age, the whole thing will implode, and the few companies that were actually doing useful stuff with LLMs will survive.

Are those moments really that different? Motorola was practically the Netscape of the iPhone era, as those early Droids were everywhere. There were tons of others too, then it all imploded with only a few companies really surviving in the smartphone space.
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