Ballmer was a fucking moron.
Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
701–710 of 714 posts
Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#702Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 f…
Ah, "participation trophies" and "if you disagree you're a snowflake." Took this long down the thread for the thought-terminating cliches to start flying around.
>Ah, "participation trophies" and "if you disagree you're a snowflake."
actually, my comments have all been about math, and i gave an explanation as to why some people don't like the math. It's your comment that talks about snowflakes.
Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#703Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you need persistence to win. You also need a plan. How would Windows Phone displace either Apple or Android?
Just a spitball idea, but rather than focusing on the consumer market, they could've been the new blackberry for businesses (that give employees phones). Native active directory and group policy integration would be a good solution for the myriad of third party apps/services/devices that attempt to control the other phones.
That's what Blackberry did and it didn't work, despite great technology (QNX) and good Android compatibility.
Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#704Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Currently, min wage in Redmond (King County) is $20.29/hr. I'd love to know if that is a livable wage in King County.
My gripe with "living wage" is the term (to me) is too subjective. MIT's living wage [0] seems to include car ownership (despite King county having a decent public transit system and I know several people that don't have cars working in tech). My first place in a great part of town was $1,400/mo in a roomshare. The podments are as low as $750/mo, but MIT says you need at least $2k/mo. [0] - https://livingwage.mit.edu…
>My gripe with "living wage" is the term (to me) is too subjective.
Yes, what is considered "livable" varies wildly from person to person.
Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#705Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#706Everyone forgetting about Lisa Brummel and "stack ranking"? That nearly ruined Microsoft... https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft-ditches-syst...
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Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#707Earlier quoted context omitted.
Satya's tenure has seen the fall of Xbox, the lost relevance of Windows. While moving to a services model is going to be very lucrative for them, they risk competitors offering swap-out models.
> the lost relevance of Windows. Yes but this doesn't matter. The market has evolved. macOS has also lost a lot of relevance in Apple's world, but it doesn't matter. Because they are raking it in by the billions on the iPhone.
In Apple's case, the lost relevance of one platform lead to the increase in relevance of another one - that they controlled. Microsoft has no such "luck".
Also, it does matter, because there's over a billion Windows PCs in active use. It's still relevant, but it's getting eroded. That's a huge issue.
Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#708Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The web UI makes that easier with GCP, but the main "UI" for me is Terraform, with only occasional usage of the "human-rated" interfaces. BTW, I hate Terraform with a passion, but I don't have the energy to write something that can describe infrastructure in Lisp.
Why do you find GCP 3rd then? They have Terraform templates for all (?) their services includes in the docs.
Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#709Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One thing I don't really like about Satya Nadella by the way, his AI strategy is a mess. They're slamming stuff on the market way too quickly (see the recall fiasco) Google did an even worse job in that regard, Gemini's reputation is still greatly tainted in the tech world despite now being competitive with the other frontier models.
Gemini is currently atrocious compared to Chatgpt, they cant even do a good integration with the data they have on other google products like search, maps, youtube, gmail, calendar.
The frontend of the B2C product, on desktop, sure. I was talking about the LLM itself, i.e. API-based usage. And there's a good number of tasks it's better at than any other model. Same goes for GPT and Claude FWIW, each have tasks they beat the competition on.
Even on the consumer side though, the overwhelming majority of usage will be through mobile apps, and I find the Gemini app significantly better than e.g. the Claude app - one of their two main competitors.
Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#710Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One thing I don't really like about Satya Nadella by the way, his AI strategy is a mess. They're slamming stuff on the market way too quickly (see the recall fiasco) Google did an even worse job in that regard, Gemini's reputation is still greatly tainted in the tech world despite now being competitive with the other frontier models.
I don't really agree. Google is great at AI development, they're just not so good at marketing. And I think they're right not to push it too hard like MS is doing. Because the tech still needs work. Personally I use neither, but I use llama locally which is amazingly good considering the limited resources it has to work with here.
What I'm getting is that Google did push too hard, they gave Bard/early Gemini demos when the product was still miles from ready and compared awfully to GPT, and they're still suffering from it.