Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO • Hacker News Board

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#711

Post by rbanffy » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 9:58 AM UTC

nl wrote: post #708

rbanffy wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it's a bit the services - I am very impressed with Aurora on AWS for instance, and there isn't really anything equivalent to it anywhere else. Also, some of the services elsewhere seem easier to deploy or more convenient to use.

In any case, all three big ones are pretty good for almost anything, and I don't think there is anything that's doable on one that's impossible to do in the others (IBM is the exception here - if you need AIX, IBMi or Z, they are the only ones who can offer that).

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#712

Post by neeleshs » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 2:53 PM UTC

stouset wrote: post #639

neeleshs wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither is stiffing the customers to the tune of 15-20 percent.

Nobody is arguing that tipping culture isn’t stupid. But it’s the society we live in and you know that before you step into a restaurant.

And nobody has stopped paying tips either. It is very socially awkward not to pay it. But i won't agree that in principle not paying is stiffing the staff. It is stupid, the industry has arm twisted customers to make it socially mandatory to pay and calling it stiffing the staff is blaming another victim.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

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Post by hansi2001 » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 3:13 PM UTC

dyauspitr wrote: post #120

legitster wrote: post #75

Having spent some time at the Microsoft campus, I can tell you this is basically the consensus view from employees today. Ballmer was not a cool, trendy, or fun CEO who people rallied behind - but he more or less "got the job done". He was the captain of a massive ship with a turning radius the size of a continent guiding it through icebergs. Azure's success was specifically set in motion under Ballmer. Owed to the f…

Azure happened because of Nadella (who led the project) despite Ballmer.

Azure, AWS and CPQ are all platforms that are good enough. If you need a cloud which is standing out and will be the best place for you workload over the next decade or more you have to look to OCI.

Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

#714

Post by vjust » Fri, Nov 01, 2024, 9:01 PM UTC

wslh wrote: post #402

vjust wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ballmer hated Linux & open source. He would've driven their cloud division to the ground trying to sell Windows servers in the cloud. It would've taken him another 20 years to accept that Linux was key to the cloud. VSCode (Visual Studio Code) - would never have taken birth. Microsoft survived and thrived once Ballmer had no option but leave. In this era of Python development, Microsoft Windows still feels a step or…

You can run Linux servers on Azure (and Hyper-V), so it’s worth taking the ‘hate’ against Linux with a grain of salt.

Support for linux was there, since the very early days of Azure. But at the time this was clearly Nadella's baby. AWS was running away with market share, and Azure gained some decent marketshare, at one point they said 25% of Azure revenue was on Linux, this was about 5 years ago or more, that can only have grown to now. No one lays that credit to Ballmer.

Microsoft's documentation wouldn't even acknowledge the present of Linux, I kid you not, till maybe 2012 or so. For example, pathnames like "My Folder" (spaces in folder names) - which are a no-no on any kind of server code (leave alone the block letters). This was as someone pointed out, Gates, since he was the tech architect (and hated linux or feared it ). In a sense, Linux rescued Azure, and Microsoft. Quite ironic, today we see Gates smiling (cluelessly imo), but Window's is still not a good environment for development - be it C# (a fine language), or Web. My colleagues on Windows struggle to run any Python code - all you need to do is git clone, followed by Pip install - that's still a challenge comparatively on Windows.