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Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

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Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#61

Post by analog31 »

ipaddr wrote: post #33
analog31 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if Windows is even their flagship app any more. I think people will give up Windows before they give up Excel. And they might not even notice a different OS, so long as it had the same file manager. In fact Excel is the last non-FOSS app that I still use, even if sporadically.

Give them LibreOffice - Calc and most won't care.

My mom is happy with LibreOffice. For myself, I try it every few years (usually when there's some big announcement) to see if it's improved. There's some kind of latency in the UI that makes it laborious, if not painful, to use. And recalculating a large spreadsheet, or reformatting a graph, takes an eon. I found that out when trying to graph data sets with thousands of rows. Now I use Python.

This may be a place where the major paid apps still have an advantage. I think that MS sweats the details of Office the way that Apple sweats the details of the iPhone, and it's laborious work that can only be done by hiring a huge army of programmers and paying them a lot.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#62

Post by chucke1992 »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #19

I think that a lot of people are commenting here without actually reading the article. The article lays out a concrete (and imo pretty persuasive) argument as to why the author thinks that Ballmer was a decent CEO. You should really read it, but the TLDR is: * Some of the big feathers in Microsoft's cap today (O365 and Azure) started during Ballmer's tenure * While the company had plenty of failed initiatives during…

He was a good CFO type of a leader. Unlike a lot of other companies like Intel or Boeing, that were run by CFOs, he did not last long enough to run MSFT into the ground due to being too late to modern trends.

Sure he build the foundation, but he was not smart enough to lead the path forward. With him MSFT would have never reached top 3 most valuable companies - I would say it would be at 500-600b maybe at best.

Even with Azure and Office, he was too much into "bundle with Windows" type of guy. Similar to how he was saying that touchscreen would never work as businesses needed buttons to type. I think with Satya, they would have tried multi touch screen at least for sure.

By and large, Ballmer was not the very open minded person. And his attempt to buy Yahoo...Oof.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#63

Post by [deleted] »

parl_match wrote: post #24
abirch wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember when he retired and the MSFT jumped. Satya is underrated.

Satya's tenure has seen the fall of Xbox, the lost relevance of Windows. While moving to a services model is going to be very lucrative for them, they risk competitors offering swap-out models.

[deleted]

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#64

Post by analog31 »

harry8 wrote: post #49
analog31 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if Windows is even their flagship app any more. I think people will give up Windows before they give up Excel. And they might not even notice a different OS, so long as it had the same file manager. In fact Excel is the last non-FOSS app that I still use, even if sporadically.

http://www.gnumeric.org I still use it, it seems a little stagnant in development nowadays. No ssl on the website etc. The free software distros really lost something going all in on open/libre office which is just not nearly as good as a replacement for excel. I think if it was still the free software goto, installed by default first choice etc there would be more development. The feature list and quality is impress…

For better or worse, my last Excel use case involves a VB macro that I don't want to re-write, and printing to a Dymo label printer, for putting serial number labels in my product. For anything else, I now use Python.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#65

Post by analog31 »

_mlbt wrote: post #32
analog31 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if Windows is even their flagship app any more. I think people will give up Windows before they give up Excel. And they might not even notice a different OS, so long as it had the same file manager. In fact Excel is the last non-FOSS app that I still use, even if sporadically.

In some ways Office is actually superior on macOS. The fact that it still has a menu bar being my favorite thing it does better.

Indeed, MacOS was where I first experienced Excel with VB macros, which is when it came alive.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#66

Post by sublinear »

I'm still somewhat bitter about the failure of Windows Phone and can't believe it even happened. The iPhone wasn't even that good at the time and Android was a total mess. Microsoft dropped the ball on their first party app dev, and several flagship phones had great hardware but terrible driver support.

Microsoft clearly wasn't interested in the consumer market anymore and it shows through to today.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#67

Post by Sakos »

exabrial wrote: post #8

No he wasn’t haha. The only thing he did was slide the company sideways via pre existing illegal monopoly. In fact, they lost most of their monopoly under his supervision . At no point did the quality of their products improve, and that’s evidenced with this year’s massive massive Windows outage, or Garmins mega ransomware, out a hundred other people who’ve been hacked via Windows. If you’re running Windows for anyth…

Ballmer's tenure started with XP and eventually gave us Windows 7. Nadella gave us 10 and 11. Though 10 was largely developed under Ballmer before its initial launch, it's been under Nadella's stewardship ever since. I'll take Ballmer, thanks.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#68

Post by ThrowawayB7 »

abirch wrote: post #18
exabrial wrote: post #8

No he wasn’t haha. The only thing he did was slide the company sideways via pre existing illegal monopoly. In fact, they lost most of their monopoly under his supervision . At no point did the quality of their products improve, and that’s evidenced with this year’s massive massive Windows outage, or Garmins mega ransomware, out a hundred other people who’ve been hacked via Windows. If you’re running Windows for anyth…

I remember when he retired and the MSFT jumped. Satya is underrated.

The SDET role at Microsoft was eliminated under Satya and it shows in their products.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#69

Post by greggyb »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #45

He's underrated in the sense that a lot of CEOs of his era completely destroyed their companies, see Intel, GE, GM, Yahoo, etc and he didn't. So that's already a win, he set up the company in a decent position so that when someone with more vision takes over they'll have something to work with, even if he didn't have the talent to pull things off himself. He had a couple of wins (Azure, Office 365) along with many ma…

If you trust the article, then Azure and O365 are each, independently, easily Fortune 100 companies if separated. These "couple of wins along with many many losses" are some of the most valuable products in the world.

Imagine a VC fund that invested in a few dozen product companies, two of which were Azure and O365. Is that a 6/10 VC company? Why is the logic different for a CEO making bets for a company's next several decades?

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#70

Post by RandomThoughts3 »

chucke1992 wrote: post #62
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #19

I think that a lot of people are commenting here without actually reading the article. The article lays out a concrete (and imo pretty persuasive) argument as to why the author thinks that Ballmer was a decent CEO. You should really read it, but the TLDR is: * Some of the big feathers in Microsoft's cap today (O365 and Azure) started during Ballmer's tenure * While the company had plenty of failed initiatives during…

He was a good CFO type of a leader. Unlike a lot of other companies like Intel or Boeing, that were run by CFOs, he did not last long enough to run MSFT into the ground due to being too late to modern trends. Sure he build the foundation, but he was not smart enough to lead the path forward. With him MSFT would have never reached top 3 most valuable companies - I would say it would be at 500-600b maybe at best. Even…

> Unlike a lot of other companies like Intel or Boeing, that were run by CFOs, he did not last long enough to run MSFT into the ground due to being too late to modern trends.

How can you right this in good faith while replying to a comment laying out to you that Microsoft most successful investments a decade later were all started by Ballmer and that he took a lot of risks with R&D?

> Even with Azure and Office, he was too much into "bundle with Windows" type of guy.

Seriously? Ballmer started Office365 you know. Also the Microsoft Phone with, you know, touch screens. The sheer amount of historical revionism in this thread even in the face of hard facts is mind numbing.

Honestly, even discarding all the rest, Ballmer would deserve more respect than he gets there for getting Microsoft out of the antitrust lawsuits alone.

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