Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

#711

Post by Roboprog » Sat, Aug 24, 2013, 11:11 PM UTC

robotresearcher wrote: post #515

Aaronontheweb wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Failed Windows 7 launch? What the hell are you smoking? Has a lot of failures on his plate for one man? Please hand this comment an award for middlebrow remark of the year. Let's put Steve Ballmer's accomplishments in perspective: Have you tripled a multi-billion dollar company's revenue over ten years? Did you launch the Xbox? Did you launch Windows Phone (10% marketshare in 3 years)? Did you launch Bing (growing fa…

"Did you grow .NET into the most widely adopted application development platform in the world?" They already had the most widely adopted platform in Win32. The transition to .NET was horrible. No one was sure what .NET actually meant for a while, as it was used in marketing for all kinds of things. They also seemed to change their minds every few months about how which platform people should use. Finally it converged…

I don't know if MS took out Borland, or Linux took out Borland. Maybe Borland took out Borland.

All I know is that for a sample of 1, me, I used to use (and really like) the Borland (Pascal, C, ...) compilers in the late 80s and early 90s. Then, I started doing more unix and then Linux work. GCC, perl and later Java was there. By the time Delphi was there, it was too late - Java had already provided a free equivalent. (Java is just Modula + OOP + UCSD-P-code in C++ clothing)

Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

#712

Post by Roboprog » Sat, Aug 24, 2013, 11:15 PM UTC

gnaritas wrote: post #560

CamperBob2 wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not from RIM, by any chance, are you?

Not at all, and the iPhone kicked the blackberries ass, but that has shit to do with enterprise space. All business != enterprise space. Enterprise != mobile. Mobile created a new space, apples and oranges.

Our sales guys at $COMP all have iPhones and iPads. They don't like to use their laptops.

Blackberry's are going away, we have remote email via iOS, and its only a matter of time before other people get the gear sales has.

Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

#713

Post by bosch » Sat, Aug 24, 2013, 11:44 PM UTC

Help!

On the off chance anyone at Microsoft reads this, my Microsoft account got deleted by a bug in Live Domains and I haven't been able to successfully contact anyone to report it or fix it. The forums have been useless and now I can't do anything MS related without my account including my phone!

My e-mail is in my profile.

(Apologies for posting this as I know it doesn't add to the discussion but I have no idea how else to contact an MS engineer.)

Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

#714

Post by Roboprog » Sun, Aug 25, 2013, 12:18 AM UTC

antidaily wrote: post #689

hvs wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 7 was hardly a failure.

It shipped a lot of copies. But it's an ugly OS with a lot of legacy baggage.

I hate the UI in Vista/7 and the corresponding Office versions. I managed to trim most of the eye-cruft off of the default, which trims down the edges of most programs, but that god-ahhhwful UI in office just won't go away.

Good thing I don't have to run that crap at home.

Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

#715

Post by jodrellblank » Sun, Aug 25, 2013, 12:20 AM UTC

ShirtlessRod wrote: post #589

biot wrote: post #572

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Some people don't see computers as fungible computing commodities priced in $/GHz and $/GB. Much like they don't see cars as fungible transportation commodities priced in $/Watt and $/N·m.

aka " Some people just have more style." What would we do without our shiny status symbols?

We'd start by pointing out that your superior cynicism is also a status symbol/signal.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/ym/cynical_about_cynicism/

Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

#716

Post by jodrellblank » Sun, Aug 25, 2013, 12:27 AM UTC

vinceguidry wrote: post #679

tanzam75 wrote: post #658

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> Windows laptops are packed full of hardware and software crap that nobody really wants. Fingerprint readers are unsafe toys. 17 inch monitors make it impossible to use comfortably on your lap. Doesn't matter how many cells are in your battery, it won't outlast mine because Windows drinks juice like a sailor. You're making a logical fallacy: "I don't want this feature, therefore nobody wants this feature." I just he…

I can't believe you actually took me seriously when I stated that "nobody really wants" certain features. Obviously there are outliers with strange needs like your friend's. He should count himself lucky that he's able to find any machine that fits his requirements for any price. That's the nature of the new economy we live in. If it's not profitable, if millions of people don't want it, it's relegated to the back-ch…

I just went to the Dell website, and you can't even look at their laptops until you identify as a member of an organization. They don't sell to consumers anymore. You have to go to Best Buy.

Ridiculous claim. Visit http://www.dell.com, click on "For Home" on the menu at the top, then in the menu click "laptops & ultrabooks".

That puts you on a page showing consumer laptops you can buy, right there, two clicks from the homepage. Or you can search/filter on ten different fields (including 17" screen size which finds a choice of 34 laptops).

Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

#717

Post by Roboprog » Sun, Aug 25, 2013, 12:34 AM UTC

Pxtl wrote: post #359

hybridweb wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that .NET was being developed some time before Ballmer ascended to the CEO throne. Gates probably had more to do with it than him. Ballmer is/was probably a good CEO for a conservative, old school company, which can derive profits from a stable and well used product line. But that's not what MS is/was advertised as being about. In that circumstance, Ballmer is the wrong type of CEO.

And it's worth noticing that many parts of the .NET framework have gone through horrible hiccups. I mean, while the C# language is great, it feels like every framework built around a .NET seems to be implemented and then dropped without substantial improvements about 3 years later. As a developer, nothing ever seems to get fixed . They get replaced , and the replacements bring a new learning curve and a suite of new…

I hate Microsoft, but... there are crappy frameworks in Java-land, too. I don't know that Oracle is going to do any better with future Java frameworks.

Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

#718

Post by jamieb » Sun, Aug 25, 2013, 4:13 AM UTC

Silhouette wrote: post #661

SiVal wrote: post #654

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I'm speechless. Well, almost. Apple revolutionized the music industry, how music is sold, and how it's listened to. It revolutionized phones. Its iPad changed consumer computing, media consumption, user interface expectations.... Five year olds are totally at home on an iPad and think a screen without touch "isn't working". As they get older, all screens will have to conform to the new reality. They revolutionized sh…

Then there's Microsoft, with thousands of smart people working for decades with billions of dollars of resources to work with---the most powerful of them all until what feels like "recently" to me. And the evidence of their innovative power: we have one of several game platforms, a billion-dollar write-off tablet that they can't give away, and a kind of keyboard that accounts for less than 1% of keyboards in use toda…

>We have a standardised desktop operating system that is familiar to nearly every computer user on the planet,

And then there's Windows 8.

Also, while we're on the subject, my 8 year old can put together an amazing Keynote presentation on an iPad. She has never used a Windows OS.

Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

#719

Post by raverbashing » Sun, Aug 25, 2013, 5:37 AM UTC

corresation wrote: post #701

raverbashing wrote: post #694

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At this point, it's you who's looking like an idiot, unless you really never used a computer with an OEM install of Windows. I suggest you smash a finger with a hammer, when I did that it hurt but of course it's only anecdotal evidence

Would you like to see my Tiger Deterrence Rock? I have used countless installs of Windows, through MSDN, retail, Technet, and through vendors like Dell. I happen to avoid being a suggestible simpleton so I don't simply adopt the sophistry that is so common. Sorry if this offends you into hilarious insults.

No, what I'm saying is that if you claim "consumes exactly 0% of processor or I/O time,", (I repeat: exactly 0%) you don't know how computers work.

It's not a matter of benchmark, it's about computing 101.

Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

#720

Post by vl » Sun, Aug 25, 2013, 5:44 AM UTC

scholia wrote: post #599

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #335

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> Except that IE was just a clone of Netscape and XBox was an attempt to duplicate PlayStation. Neither of these were original or ground breaking products. This is completely irrelevant. By the same logic, iPod was nothing special, just another mp3 player. IE and XBox managed to muscle into an established market. This is harder than making a new market, and should very much be congratulated. > In fact with IE 6 he so…

Originally, of course, Netscape was a rewrite of Mosaic (they even tried to rip off the name) and Microsoft licensed the Mosaic code to get a quick start in the browser business. Microsoft did a complete re-write to componentize the browser and after IE3 (I think), IE was generally better than Netscape. At least, Walt Mossberg said so. Hard to know why Microsoft stopped developing IE6 and you may be right. However, t…

>Hard to know why Microsoft stopped developing IE6 and you may be right.

Surprisingly little known story: in short MS was afraid of Linux as desktop OS, OSS world was seen as capably of quickly copying any innovative single feature. This is resulted in idea of "integrated innovation": produce innovation in app development, app framework, data access, communication, os based on it and ship it all at once, so Linux would never catch up (.Net Framework, Avalon - WPF, WinFS, Indigo - WCF, Longhorn). Obviously, plan failed (well, Linux failed to come to desktop too).

So IE was seen as done and future to be elsewhere. After IE6 ship with XP, IE team was transformed into Avalon team, consumed bunch of other teams and at it's peak Avalon project had something like 500 people working on it (after much struggle and numerous delays it shipped as WPF). So for something like two years, starting at summer of 2001, only 4-6 people worked on IE - IE Sustained Engineering team, patching security vulnerabilities. Then it became obvious that they can't keep up and some rearchitecture and refactoring are required in order to fix security problems for real. So IE Security Team was created, and some old timers were transferred from Avalon to do this security fix up, probably around 20 people.

Then it became obvious that "integrated innovation" is, in fact, too integrated to ship on time, Avalon and Longhorn are nowhere is sight, and browser war is effectively being lost for the second time to Firefox, of all things (MS management couldn't take fork of OSS fork of NN seriously for awhile). So IE Security Team was expanded, became IE7 team and happily started to work on a browser again, 3-4 years too late.

>However, the next browser was scheduled to appear with the next OS, which was Vista, which turned into a debacle.

As you can see from the story above, initially it's wasn't scheduled to appear at all.