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Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

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Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#681

Post by jnieman21 »

al_borland wrote: post #110
RandomThoughts3 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ballmer's attempt to buy Yahoo and disregard for touch screen phones is what defined his legacy. You are weirdly obsessed with that but Ballmer actually started Bing and bought Nokia to make touchscreen phones. I think you are extremely biased to the point of being entirely disconnected from the facts at hand. > Ability to buy right things is important too. Ballmer bought Skype and launched the foundation of what w…

Not OP, but Ballmer's attempt to reinvent Windows Mobile to compete with modern smartphones was too little too late. Microsoft during that era was one bad call after another. When Apple saw multitouch they made a phone; Microsoft made a giant table[0] (very little imagination beyond the Jeff Han demo[1]). When Microsoft saw the iPhone reception, they sunk 2 years an $1B into the Kin line of phones[2], which lasted al…

"Microsoft made a giant table[0] (very little imagination beyond the Jeff Han demo[1])"

This is a wild take. Both the original Surface 1.0 table and the second SUR40 had some really amazing, highly-imaginative multi-user compute paradigms (a multi-user interface with no concept of “up”? Come on now.).

Commercially successful? No. But calling them "very little imagination" is a real head-scratcher.

What’s also interesting about this comment is that, in this very same Ballmer era, Microsoft later acquired Jeff Han’s Perceptive Pixel to create the Surface Hub product.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#682

Post by linhns »

znpy wrote: post #487
madisp wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With GitHub, TypeScript and VS code I'm probably using more Microsoft products than before.

> With GitHub, TypeScript and VS code I'm probably using more Microsoft products than before. cool, how much money have you paid to Microsoft to use those? Except for Github (which they bought, by the way) probably not much. And github has some serious competitors (Gitlab which is just great and to a lesser extent, bitbucket).

GitHub is still a lot better than GitLab. Nice CLI, simple user interface that's not a pain in the eye like what GitLab has.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#683

Post by junto »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #51

Mostly agree, but curious about the claim that Bing is profitable: how does that account for being the default search engine in the windows start menu and microsoft edge?

I hate to say this but I’ve been using Bing for two years now on my corporate notebook and it’s pretty good. I could change it to Google if I want to, but quite honestly since Google’s search results have gone so spammy, I haven’t seen the need to switch.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#684

Post by rvba »

dblohm7 wrote: post #579
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.

> 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.

Microsoft seems to be a company that has 1) working chat: Copilot 2) chat integrsted with their tools (e.g. ms office and teams, although quality depends on product) 3) subscriptions to actually monetize it

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#685

Post by rvba »

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

Copilot works with MS office apps and is monetized by microsoft via subscription.

Of course it could be better, but of all companies it seems that Microsoft managed to monetize best - sice copilot gets integrrted to the MS Office package

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#687

Post by Hypergraphe »

chucke1992 wrote: post #661
Hypergraphe wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yeah. I think they have did some refactoring in OS though, to make it more modular. Not sure what are their long term plans for Windows. They probably would have benefitted from some handheld UI for sure.

They tried a handheld UI, with Windows phone but it failed. I think mostly because their UI was too far from what people expected aka something looking like ios (Android UI is almost a copy of iOS UI) and also because they came into the market too late with too few product innovations to be appealing. With 5% of market shared, this was not worth the cost, for devs on the plateform. If they want a comeback in the smartphone industry, maybe they have something to play with copilot and AI. Like an Android with free AI agents out of the box.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#688

Post by rvba »

psunavy03 wrote: post #627
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.

This is ridiculous. You grade people to a standard, not against each other. Stack ranking Jack Welch-style is basically operating under the assumption that if you had Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Satya Nadella, and Jeff Bezos on a team, that one of them would have to get a shitty grade and be fired. All it does is make true talent not want to work with other true talent for fear…

Nadella didnt build anything though. He is there to outsource. Microsoft products start to feel cheap and buggy. But hey, they are probably made by people who are earn less.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#689

Post by krisoft »

randomdata wrote: post #642
krisoft wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because that's what the discussion is about...? The thread seems to be about how one would manage baristas. It spawned off where lesuorac pointed out that baristas working for a coffe shop are different from athletes in that they are not competing with each other. > Did you forget to read the thread? > You've lost your sense of reality. I guess that’s a no then. I hope you have a good day.

> The thread seems to be about how one would manage baristas. What gives you that impression? It isn't not about baristas, but namely about a parallel between baristas and athletics. That was the context that was setup at the head of this particular thread branch, and we haven't change the subject (aside from that irrational attempt related to being "put down", whatever that was). > I guess that’s a no then. Correct.…

> It isn't not about baristas, but namely about a parallel between baristas and athletics.

And what is the paralel? That is what i was asking and that is what you are dodging to answer. Why do you feel that the management of baristas can be usefully inspired by lessons from the management of athletes?

> Save it for human interactions.

Thank you for your candor. It is good to know that you don’t characterise our conversation as a human interaction. Puts it into perspective, and explains a lot.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#690

Post by actionfromafar »

garaetjjte wrote: post #680
actionfromafar wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, then making WP8 phones incompabitle with WP7 apps was the second misstep. Developers, developers, indeed! Not wanted here.
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