Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

Post by cyberax » Tue, Oct 29, 2024, 5:23 PM UTC

datavirtue wrote: post #235

cyberax wrote: post #144

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I remember working with Microsoft as a client in 2000-s, it was awesome. We started as a startup, and enrolled in a BizSpark program. It gave us basically free access to Microsoft tools and with very responsive support. We later transitioned into volume licensing, that also was simple and straightforward. The business side of Microsoft was a streamlined unstoppable train at that point. The technical side, not so much…

WPF is still unmatched.

Post by freejazz » Tue, Oct 29, 2024, 5:29 PM UTC

_ea1k wrote: post #600

dblohm7 wrote: post #579

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> 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.

Post by sedawk » Tue, Oct 29, 2024, 5:36 PM UTC

_heimdall wrote: post #497

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…

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…

Post by psunavy03 » Tue, Oct 29, 2024, 5:41 PM UTC

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.

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Oct 29, 2024, 5:45 PM UTC

kranke155 wrote: post #527

toyg wrote: post #502

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> 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.…