having worked there for a long time (left in 2013), i'd say the best thing that happened under ballmer was getting rid of sinofsky. sinofsky was the worst - windows8 had some great low level bits, but the shell and app models were total crap. and wait until the jeffrey epstien connections comes out...
Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
671–680 of 714 posts
Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#672Earlier quoted context omitted.
They bought it. If Microsoft had developed it, we would get something like sourcesafe (was that the name?). Sure, the investment was quite sensible, although I don't think they can change it for their ambitions too much. Microsofts conquest against open source was of course a wrong strategy of Balmer.
> SourceSafe was originally created by a North Carolina company called One Tree Software.
Visual SourceSafe was Microsoft's source control software, terrible by the way.
Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#673Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think calling gaming on linux "possible" gives it the justice it deserves, with the arrival of the Steam Deck and all the improvements Valve contributed to the upstream. The experience is practically _seamless_. I agree though that linux _on desktop_ is pretty janky, or at least it always was for me, having tried daily driving numerous distros.
It's only seamless if you buy everything through Steam. Third-party stores need not apply.
So, steamless is not seamless.
Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#674This 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…
This sounds right until you realise how much market share Windows captured, held and now even solidifies from the Ballmer era.
I don't agree with you, and I believe the Ballmer era did wonders for Windows and was a turbulent period. The new era of MS now is quite stable because of this.
Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#675Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use all three regularly. AWS has a horrible , inconsistent UI, and the Azure portal is mostly ok (although I think GCP is the best of the three) But OTOH AWS generally works and usually does what you think, whereas I'm never surprised when Azure breaks or some random Azure API works nothing like we expect.
> GCP is the best of the three I must have very different needs. In my perception, AWS is the best of the three, Azure is second, and Google would be #3. Depending on your unique news, you might choose different CSP's, from Digital Ocean to Oracle or IBM (the only place you can get AIX, IBMi, and z/OS)
Interesting.
Do you do cross-region work in AWS? For me that is just bad. I usually want to work at a service level and see across all regions, where as AWS wants me to work at a region level and see everything I have running there.
Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#676Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What frugality? He was paying the full price that it was being sold at. By that logic, most reading these comments should expect to hear from their employer: What annual bonus? What stock options? The company is paying full price that your time was being sold at.
Employer or customer? Since tipping is done by customers. It is like employers tell employees you can let customers know good service is for good tippers. Maybe car repair mechanic can pour sweet tea in instead of engine oil since customer is known to be bad tipper. I am sure that will go very well with that business.
> Employer or customer?
In the scenario I set forth, an employer assumes the role of customer during annual reviews of their employees.
> It is like employers tell employees you can let customers know good service is for good tippers.
This is non sequitur as clarified above.
Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#677Earlier quoted context omitted.
Employees are paid for the work they are expected to perform during the hours they are at the office. The company doesn’t expect them to do more than that, however if they do, they get a nice bonus for it. Baristas are paid to make iced tea. The customer doesn’t expect them to do more than that, but they can be nice, learn your name, prepare your tea ahead of time, change the tea recipe to something you enjoy more. D…
Sure. From their employer, not from their customer.
> Sure. From their employer, not from their customer.
In the scenario I set forth, an employer assumes the role of customer during annual reviews of their employees.
Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#678Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is hindsight bias. Because other people took some of his later initiatives and made them successful, it’s tempting to look back and grant him these as wins. We should resist that temptation and judge him on the results he delivered. MS was the essential tech company, king of the world, and under his leadership their innovation stalled, they lost in markets where they were leading, the stock stagnated, and huge p…
> under his leadership their innovation stalled, they lost in markets where they were leading, the stock stagnated, and huge piles of money were vaporized on acquisitions that were poorly planned or executed. A lot of this sounds like Google under Sundar's leadership, although I'm not sure if there is a parallel to the failed acquisitions, and some of the rot had set in well before.
Microsoft was under consent decrees and anti-trust / anti-monopoly scrutiny for much of Ballmer's tenure and had to tread very carefully in the marketplace. Pichal doesn't have that excuse. In fact, Google is staring down the barrel of a barrage of anti-trust / anti-monopoly lawsuits itself and the real test of Pichal is how well he is able to get Google to perform over the next decade when it's laboring under similar restraints. I would not bet money on him doing a better job than Ballmer did.
Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#679Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except Steven Sinofsky, longtime head of the Windows division and one of the internal forces preventing Microsoft from going in alternate directions, was pushed out under Ballmer's tenure, not Nadella's. Granted, Ballmer made the mistake of putting Terry Myerson, who headed up the failed Windows Phone effort, in charge of Windows but that's another story.
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 was indeed damn good. I held on to my WP 10 phone a lot longer than anyone sane would have. However, the only growth for WP was in the negative direction. There were no apps for WP because of past compatibility breaks, Google was sabotaging access to their services, carriers and OEMs were unhappy because of low sales volumes of WP phones. Windows Phone was already very clearly dead before Nadella took over.
Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#680Earlier quoted context omitted.
> While it may be true that the OS itself isn't really a cash cow anymore (if it ever was), I still think Microsoft's greatest failure of the previous decade was exiting the smartphone OS space and ceding it to Google and Apple. I mean, Microsoft was too early and too late on smartphones. I never cared to look into the pre WP7 history. But the more recent Windows Phone died with WM10, which I don't think is fair to b…
My thesis is WP8 was already the first huge misstep where they lost developers.
WP7 was the first misstep with extremely limited API and no native code for apps.