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Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

danluu.com

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Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#601

Post by trympet »

gtirloni wrote: post #528
rbanffy wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Had they made it open source

That would have necessitated open sourcing Windows

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#602

Post by codegeek »

archerx wrote: post #313
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…

Well since Nadella I have been using less Microsoft products and probably won’t be using Windows anymore once my Windows 10 LTSC stops working. I keep hearing praise for Nadella but all he is doing is alienating a lot of customers with his terrible decisions.

Since Nadella took over, Microsoft stock has gone up from $30 to $400 with a market value of over $3T. Satya understood that for MS to compete, they have to get out of the "Windows Only" mentality. For example, .NET Core was a huge thing when it finally came out. I don't think that he has made any terrible decisions for the company. May be for some users like you, sure. But not for the company overall.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#603

Post by xkqd »

alexawarrior4 wrote: post #598
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.

This one’s on Jack Welch - a pioneer in short term gain over long term building. You absolutely can juice a company’s performance by going dog-eat-dog, but inevitably when the smoke clears you’re left with jackals and hyenas stretched too thin.

Always worth mentioning that this culturally altered America in a way that we’ll probably never unwind.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#604

Post by lesuorac »

randomdata wrote: post #592
lesuorac wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So, all your baristas working a graveyard shift are going to be at the bottom of the stack ranking in terms of revenue/time. What do you now do?

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#605

Post by sangnoir »

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.

...or it could turn out to be a 3D-TV moment - the jury is still out.

For a while, all OEMs had 3D TV models, and it seemed their ubiquity was inevitable by sheer force of manufacturers ramming the products down consumers throats (like AI). The only debate was over which solution was superior: active or passive. 3D movies are still with us, so the tech didn't completely disappear - only from the consumer space.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#606

Post by fsckboy »

GVIrish wrote: post #565
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.

> 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, wh…

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

as long as the ordering top/middle/bad is preserved, I don't see a problem. there are entire respected statistic methods based on rank ordering, not raw metrics.

People don't have a right to fall on a normal distribution. Employers do have a right to grow or trim the workforce, and those numbers are driven by factors that are not necessarily normally distributed.

the people who downvote me simply want participation trophys, and "no" is the answer.

You absolutely can argue that Microsoft pursued a system that hurt both Microsoft and its employees, but not by attacking rank ordering.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#607

Post by toyg »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #560
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.

except the iphone delivered. we're still holding our breath for AI

Manufacturers started pivoting almost immediately when the iPhone debuted. Yes, eventually it delivered, but nobody waited for that before they started aping it.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#608

Post by jobigoud »

datavirtue wrote: post #234
legitster wrote: post #75

Having spent some time at the Microsoft campus, I can tell you this is basically the consensus view from employees today. Ballmer was not a cool, trendy, or fun CEO who people rallied behind - but he more or less "got the job done". He was the captain of a massive ship with a turning radius the size of a continent guiding it through icebergs. Azure's success was specifically set in motion under Ballmer. Owed to the f…

Surface is selling like hotcakes.

Ha! It was a trap, they are likely talking about Surface, the big table-computer. It was such a failure that they repurposed the name for something else and you might have never heard about it. We had one at work circa 2013.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#609

Post by randomdata »

lesuorac wrote: post #604
randomdata wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

So, all your baristas working a graveyard shift are going to be at the bottom of the stack ranking in terms of revenue/time. What do you now do?

What do you do in athletics? Do you tell the kids (graveyard shift) they aren't allowed to participate in sports anymore because they can't compete with the big leagues (peak hours)?

Probably not. More likely you would look at the different leagues individually. I'm surprised this idea is novel to you.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#610

Post by krisoft »

randomdata wrote: post #592
lesuorac wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's great. If you regularly fire the barista who brings in the least amount of money then you will find that nobody sane will take the slower shifts.

Because how much money a barista brings in is mostly a factor of how busy the coffeeshop is. Which is largely a factor of what time the clock shows, and that's not something a barista will be able to influence. (baring circumstances where a barista is so incompetent that costumers walk out of the shop.)

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