To the list of misses he forgot to add Skype and Nokia purchases, IE market share decreasing from something like 90% to less than 20%, Windows losing the battle in the data center, deriding iPhone and open source.
Ballmer blocked Office on iPhone even though it was ready to go: Office on iPhone was released on Sep 2014; Satya became CEO on Feb 2014.
Never-mind stack ranking (which he copied from Jack Welch) and the cut-throat culture it inspired (seeing Somasegar bicker with the head of Excel over porting Excel code base to VS .Net in 2003 at a DevDiv 'morale' event was something)
So yeah, good riddance!
Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
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Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#92No he wasn’t haha. The only thing he did was slide the company sideways via pre existing illegal monopoly. In fact, they lost most of their monopoly under his supervision . At no point did the quality of their products improve, and that’s evidenced with this year’s massive massive Windows outage, or Garmins mega ransomware, out a hundred other people who’ve been hacked via Windows. If you’re running Windows for anyth…
Ballmer's tenure started with XP and eventually gave us Windows 7. Nadella gave us 10 and 11. Though 10 was largely developed under Ballmer before its initial launch, it's been under Nadella's stewardship ever since. I'll take Ballmer, thanks.
Ballmer also gave us the maligned Windows Vista and Windows 8. Microsoft has also been way more open source friendly during Nadella's tenure, whereas Ballmer was openly hostile to FOSS. I'll take Nadella, thanks (although he should fix his user-hostile spyware).
Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#93I read the entire article, and I love how virtually every comment here is what Dan wrote about.
Also, I agree with the gist of the article, in that a lot of Nadella's success is stuff that takes more than 3-4 years to execute. Ballmer, or Microsoft under Ballmer, had to have been laying the groundwork for Azure, TypeScript and VS code before they took off under Nadella.
> Ballmer, or Microsoft under Ballmer, had to have been laying the groundwork for Azure, TypeScript and VS code before they took off under Nadella.
More specifically: Nadella under Ballmer laid the groundwork for those things.
Dan lists three big wins for Ballmer: Bing, Azure, Office365.
Nadella led Bing and Azure. Not sure where Office365 sat in the org chart, but even if he wasn't managing it a _lot_ of services at Microsoft at that time relied on technology that was developed in Bing and Azure.
He was promoted for good reason.
Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#94I read the entire article, and I love how virtually every comment here is what Dan wrote about.
Also, I agree with the gist of the article, in that a lot of Nadella's success is stuff that takes more than 3-4 years to execute. Ballmer, or Microsoft under Ballmer, had to have been laying the groundwork for Azure, TypeScript and VS code before they took off under Nadella.
But weren't those the areas Nadella was over before becoming CEO? One could argue that Nadella was laying his own groundwork.
Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember when he retired and the MSFT jumped. Satya is underrated.
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.
Windows was already losing relevance in the data center when Nadya took over -because of Linux. At AWS in 2008 / 2009 adoption was all about LAMP stack - AWS's tools were all geared for LAMP. AWS offered some Windows + SQL Server licenses on their cloud, however it was a struggle to get a deal (any deal) with Microsoft.
On the mobile side Windows was losing relevance to iPhone - which Ballmer so famously derided.
Satya figured out that with cloud computing Microsoft would still interpose between hardware makers and the customer - and the results show. (Why hardware makers do not figure this out for themselves is a different topic..)
Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#96Earlier 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 fall of Xbox started with the Xbox One, which was developed and released while Ballmer was CEO. They put an enormous amount of investment into that console, but made some bad calls in both its development and marketing that put them in a deep hole that they've been unable to get out of since. The increasing backwards compatibility of modern consoles means that the current 4th generation Xbox is paying for the sin…
Yes, one can't blame Ballmer for the missteps of the Xbox team directly (that honor goes to Don Mattrick, VP in charge of IEB at the time of the Xbox One launch). Divisional VPs get a lot of latitude in how they run their org. However, Ballmer does have to accept ultimate responsibility for allowing Mattrick to head up IEB and how long he allowed him to stay there.
Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#97"When Ballmer became CEO in January 2000, Microsoft's stock was around $53. When he stepped down in February 2014, it was around $38." By that metric, no he wasn't underrated.
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Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How can you right this in good faith while replying to a comment laying out to you that Microsoft most successful investments a decade later were all started by Ballmer and that he took a lot of risks with R&D? Investment in R&D means nothing if you can't deliver. Intel has enormous R&D budget. Boeing too. Did it help them? No. > Also the Microsoft Phone with, you know, touch screens With Windows Phone he was too l…
> Investment in R&D means nothing if you can't deliver. Intel has enormous R&D budget. Boeing too. Did it help them? No. The most profitable current divisions at Microsoft were started under Ballmer. That’s literally stated in the original comment in the thread you are replying to.
We cannot tell if the currently most profitable divisions would become that profitable under Ballmer.
That's the whole point - Satya somehow was able to develop the platforms through acquisitions and business vendor lock much better than Ballmer ever could. And we saw what happened with Windows division under Ballmer - it was profitable but it had no future. MSFT could become another IBM.
With Ballmer we could get some Windows hubris like "Azure only with Windows OS license" or something.
My only issue with Satya is that he is not "a cult of personality" type of person like Jensen Huang or Phil Spencer. He is basically a guy who "walks softly and wields a big stick".
Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#99Earlier 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.
Windows was already losing relevance in the data center when Nadya took over -because of Linux. At AWS in 2008 / 2009 adoption was all about LAMP stack - AWS's tools were all geared for LAMP. AWS offered some Windows + SQL Server licenses on their cloud, however it was a struggle to get a deal (any deal) with Microsoft. On the mobile side Windows was losing relevance to iPhone - which Ballmer so famously derided. Sat…
Valve figured it out when making the Steam Deck. But they're a brilliant exception that makes your point.
Re: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you trust the article, then Azure and O365 are each, independently, easily Fortune 100 companies if separated. These "couple of wins along with many many losses" are some of the most valuable products in the world. Imagine a VC fund that invested in a few dozen product companies, two of which were Azure and O365. Is that a 6/10 VC company? Why is the logic different for a CEO making bets for a company's next sever…
Because the company has more strategic resources than a VC, and has need to defend existing businesses. MS should've been able to simply just extend their OS monopoly into all platforms and all architectures, but they didn't, and to a vast swath of the world have become irrelevant, and worse, have lost their ability to become relevant. It's a decline from being the monopolist to simply a player, sure they executed we…
> MS should've been able to simply just extend their OS monopoly into all platforms and all architectures, but they didn't, and to a vast swath of the world have become irrelevant, and worse, have lost their ability to become relevant.
Microsoft is, pretty famously, on the receiving end of one of the most significant antitrust judgments in modern history. Choosing to further a monopoly seems that it would be a phenomenally bad decision for the company.
Despite that, Windows remains the dominant operating system for businesses worldwide. So I would argue that the OS is far from "irrelevant".
Beyond the OS, they are comfortably #2 in the public cloud market, with little threat from #3. Indeed, #1 has been relatively stagnant in market share, while Azure has been steadily growing.[0] It seems that a consistently growing market share in such a large industry shows that not only are they relevant, but they are becoming more so, and have not "lost their ability to become relevant". Additionally, it seems that they are "overcoming competition".
> It's a decline from being the monopolist to simply a player ....
> MS should've been able to keep control of the internet, but they lost their moat to Google (Chrome),
They legally could not maintain that monopoly. Again, see the antitrust ruling. The antitrust case was about the impact on Netscape, and was too late to save Netscape. But it is a pretty straight line from a case about bundling IE with the OS.
To be clear, the finding in this case originally held that Microsoft needed to be broken up.[1] Microsoft won on appeal, because of impropriety by the original judge in the case, but the appeals court upheld all findings of fact.[2]
Much of what you are saying Microsoft should have been able to do on the basis of their OS monopoly would have been begging for further antitrust action.
> Bing was a decent win
Bing, on its own, would be the 12th largest tech company in the world, per the original article.
And Microsoft is worth $3T today, largely on the basis of investment under Ballmer (and continued strong execution under Satya). Is the argument that Microsoft should instead be a $10T or $100T market cap company today if you graded Ballmer better than a D?
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/967365/worldwide-cloud-i...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...