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Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

danluu.com

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Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#651

Post by AdrianB1 »

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.…

I worked a long time ago in the same company that Steve Ballmer worked, both as juniors. Same culture. I think I know where he got it from.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#652

Post by DowagerDave »

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…

Yep, aside from the legacy desktop environment & gaming I don't really have any ties to MS anymore, and I was a pure MS developer for 20+ years. Now with .NET superior on non-windows platforms and the nonsense their hostile consumer & enterprise side keeps pulling why would I stay in the ecosystem? I agree that Ballmer was unfairly used as a punching bag, but MS today (both the good and bad) is all Nadella.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#653

Post by red-iron-pine »

gtirloni wrote: post #526
globalise83 wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> yet most of our teams use Macbooks. Exactly this. Today I can switch from Linux to macOS to Windows and 99% of what the average users does can be done in the browser. Worse, in a smartphone. So it was very smart of Microsoft to realize Windows was going to stop being a hard requirement for most use cases.

honestly that was the case about a decade ago. small / boutique MSP I was at cut costs by buying everyone white-label laptops, since one of the manufacturers was a client in LA and SF.

anyone who really wanted a windows license could get one, but most of the staff used Unbutu, with some AD and other stuff on the backend

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#654

Post by wetpaws »

itsoktocry wrote: post #457
lysace wrote: post #3

Wow, gotta love the recent MS fanfic. Ballmer was just an average sales jock along for the ride. Edit: Seems like I was proven wrong. Assumptions are... assumptions :).

> Ballmer was just an average sales jock along for the ride. Classic "nerd" prejudice; Ballmer was not dumb.

[dead]

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#655

Post by mixmastamyk »

486sx33 wrote: post #573

Nadella has been horrible and a huge mistake for Microsoft. They will continue to suffer under his leadership. At least ballmer had goals and pretended to care what customers want. Windows is an unmitigated disaster under nadella and it doesn’t need to be. No new innovation is happening and hardware is more performant than ever. Windows had issues under ballmer because the hardware wasn’t there yet and they were tryi…

There's no evidence Ballmer would have avoided spyware. Especially for money. Who was the first boot-licking corp in the NSA Prism slides? That's right—MS 2007.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM#/media/File:Prism_slide_...

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#656

Post by Hypergraphe »

ozim wrote: post #558
Hypergraphe wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that devaluating Windows is a good strategy at all...

It is in "everything is cloud" and "most of software runs in browsers anyway" world where operating systems don't matter . I would not say it was by any means one or the other CEO "insightful" choice but it was more of market choosing on its own. Microsoft had to make own cloud or die that was the choice and better to put loads of investment in that. Ballmer started Azure because Amazon of course was first and Google…

Running a cloud and developping an operating system are two separare activites that don't need to be tied together. There is a lot of proprietary software in companies around the globe that rely on windows low level APIs and it will last for decades. There is a lot of things that are running outside the browser. The whole gaming industry is still tied to Windows directx.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#657

Post by psunavy03 »

randomdata wrote: post #632
psunavy03 wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the hell are your baristas competing? Why are you not just measuring whether or not they are acceptably good at their jobs? If they are superior, promote them. If they are acceptably OK, keep them. If they suck, fire them. You shouldn't have to arbitrarily put someone at the bottom of the curve; that's ridiculous.

> Why the hell are your baristas competing? Because that's what is necessary in a market economy? If they don't put in effort to compete, the customer will find another team of baristas that will. It is not like it is hard to find another coffeeshop. > you shouldn't have to arbitrarily put someone at the bottom of the curve What is arbitrary about it? The reality is that more coffeeshops open than can actually be sup…

You compete with your competitors, not with your fellow employees. That's some dog-eat-dog toxic crap.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#659

Post by Hypergraphe »

chucke1992 wrote: post #594
Hypergraphe wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think that it is not exact. OS is as important as yesterday since you need them to run your containers that provide your services used by your thin clients. This is still the backbone of everything. But you have a point windows kinda lost the servers battle.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#660

Post by stackskipton »

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…

I had a Windows Phone for a while. I still miss the tiles.
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