[HN Gopher] Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
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Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
Author : greggyb
Score : 47 points
Date : 2024-10-28 21:48 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (danluu.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (danluu.com)
| voidfunc wrote:
| Baller was the right CEO for 90s Microsoft up through about 2002.
| He was the wrong CEO for 2010-onward Microsoft but it took a
| chunk of years for the board to realize that.
| lysace wrote:
| Wow, gotta love the recent MS fanfic.
|
| Ballmer was just an average sales jock along for the ride.
|
| Edit: Seems like I was proven wrong. Assumptions are...
| assumptions :).
| FanaHOVA wrote:
| I don't have a strong opinion on his tenure at MSFT, but I
| don't know many sales jocks with a 1600 SAT score and a degree
| in applied math from Harvard.
| lysace wrote:
| Good point.
|
| https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2002/6/4/personable-
| ballm...
|
| > In high school, Ballmer scored a 1600 on his SATs and was a
| National Merit Scholar.
|
| Would the Crimson verify this or just trust the claim?
| vlovich123 wrote:
| He's listed on their page:
|
| https://www.nationalmerit.org/s/1758/interior.aspx?sid=1758
| &...
| lysace wrote:
| Thumbs up.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Effective sales and marketing is more dependent on math than
| most people realize.
| lysace wrote:
| ...how?
|
| I get that it correlates with intelligence, but with math,
| specifically?
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| [delayed]
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| I disagree. Tech companies need tech leadership, and Ballmer
| didn't have the chops for that, or imagination either. He got
| some deals done, I'm sure.
|
| How so? Missed mobile after working on it for a decade+
| previously. Despite developers4 they didn't implement a decent
| terminal until a few years ago, _thirty_ years late. Enough said.
|
| It's probably better for the industry Ballmer was mediocre or
| worse. I'm often forced to do business with Microsoft already.
| The horrible deal to buy Yahoo would have improved the playing
| field further.
| maxk42 wrote:
| I'm not going to give it up for him.
| OtomotO wrote:
| Ah, rose colored glasses never get old :)
|
| He was a CEO, that much can be said. The rest is up for debate.
| bmitc wrote:
| Isn't it pretty well documented that he made several decisions
| that turned out to not pan out and then were nearly immediately
| reversed by the current CEO that turned out to be massive
| successes? That doesn't scream "underrated".
| RandomThoughts3 wrote:
| It's so well documented you can't even come with an actual one
| while writing your comment.
| exabrial wrote:
| No 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 anything, it's only a matter of
| when, not if.
| abirch wrote:
| I remember when he retired and the MSFT jumped. Satya is
| underrated.
| parl_match wrote:
| 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.
| readyplayernull wrote:
| Recall Recall??
| p1necone wrote:
| Gamepass and the lack of first party exclusives both seem
| like moves to kill the console in the long term, but as of
| now it's still a serious competitor to playstation and
| switch no?
| Sakos wrote:
| In which region? It's basically irrelevant outside the
| US.
| noirbot wrote:
| Nintendo's always been on its own for these sorts of
| things, but even the folks I know with an XBox just use
| their Playstation these days if they have both. XBox just
| isn't really in the conversation any more. That could
| totally change in another generation of consoles, but
| their position wasn't great coming into this generation
| and it doesn't feel like it's gotten any better.
|
| Basic numbers I've been seeing on a quick search has PS5
| almost doubling the Series X sales.
| bydo wrote:
| Not really. The only generation of Xbox that was
| competitive was the 360, which still came in third in
| sales, just not as distantly.
| ytoawwhra92 wrote:
| 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 sins of the 3rd generation in addition to
| dealing with its own struggles. Really the only thing that
| can fix the situation is money, but the business is
| probably under pressure to show profits after two decades
| of heavy investment with minimal return.
|
| I don't necessarily think you can blame Ballmer for the
| missteps the Xbox team made, but I definitely think you
| can't blame Nadella.
| ThrowawayB7 wrote:
| The SDET role at Microsoft was eliminated under Satya and it
| shows in their products.
| analog31 wrote:
| I wonder if Windows is even their flagship app any more. I
| think people will give up Windows before they give up Excel.
| And they might not even notice a different OS, so long as it
| had the same file manager. In fact Excel is the last non-FOSS
| app that I still use, even if sporadically.
| dlachausse wrote:
| In some ways Office is actually superior on macOS. The fact
| that it still has a menu bar being my favorite thing it does
| better.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| It used to have much funkier icons as well! Sadly not
| anymore.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_for_Mac_20
| 1...
| analog31 wrote:
| Indeed, MacOS was where I first experienced Excel with VB
| macros, which is when it came alive.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Give them LibreOffice - Calc and most won't care.
| analog31 wrote:
| My mom is happy with LibreOffice. For myself, I try it
| every few years (usually when there's some big
| announcement) to see if it's improved. There's some kind of
| latency in the UI that makes it laborious, if not painful,
| to use. And recalculating a large spreadsheet, or
| reformatting a graph, takes an eon. I found that out when
| trying to graph data sets with thousands of rows. Now I use
| Python.
|
| This may be a place where the major paid apps still have an
| advantage. I think that MS sweats the details of Office the
| way that Apple sweats the details of the iPhone, and it's
| laborious work that can only be done by hiring a huge army
| of programmers and paying them a lot.
| harry8 wrote:
| http://www.gnumeric.org
|
| I still use it, it seems a little stagnant in development
| nowadays. No ssl on the website etc.
|
| The free software distros really lost something going all in
| on open/libre office which is just not nearly as good as a
| replacement for excel. I think if it was still the free
| software goto, installed by default first choice etc there
| would be more development. The feature list and quality is
| impressive and has been for many years.
| analog31 wrote:
| For better or worse, my last Excel use case involves a VB
| macro that I don't want to re-write, and printing to a Dymo
| label printer, for putting serial number labels in my
| product. For anything else, I now use Python.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Don't forget gaming. Gaming on Linux is possible but Windows
| still has the advantage in both software and hardware
| support.
|
| I particularly like the video series from LinusTechTips where
| they try to use Linux as their daily driver because it is
| very telling. They manage to do stuff, but it isn't great. I
| find it interesting because it is done from the point of view
| of computer enthusiasts but not IT professionals or
| programmers. The kind who know about the command line, but
| are not very comfortable with it and would rather do without.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| there was no windows outage
| wbl wrote:
| Steve Ballmer has not been CEO for a decade. At 10 years later
| it is very much Nadella's ship.
| belter wrote:
| Still Bill Gates: "Bill Gates never left - Insiders say he's
| still pulling the strings at Microsoft" -
| https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-still-pulling-
| str...
| belter wrote:
| Same culture at Azure: "Azure's Security Vulnerabilities Are
| Out of Control" -
| https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/azures_vulnerabilities_ar...
| burnte wrote:
| Agreed. He was the "put windows everywhere" guy because he
| forgot that Microsoft and Windows weren't the same thing and
| thus he failed Microsoft AND Windows.
|
| Microsoft is a software company, they sell software (and now
| software services). Steve thought that because their main
| product was Windows, that Windows was the only product that
| mattered and everything else had to depend on being run on
| Windows. Office sells very well on Macs. Office in the browser
| is really improving every year. XBox 360 was a huge hit while
| not really running "Windows" at all, just a related kernel and
| DirectX APIs; it wasn't even x86!
|
| Steve made MS a Windows First company, and the entire company
| stagnated for years. He may have been a great number two to
| BillG but that doesn't mean he was suited to being CEO. Being
| the XO is a very different job from being the Captain, and a
| lot of times they take two very different types of people.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| I'm assuming that "this years massive Windows outage" refers to
| the Crowdstrike thing, which wouldn't have happened if
| Microsoft had been able to lock down the kernel, which
| antitrust regulators prohibited. (The essay extensively deals
| with antitrust, I'm sure you have thoughts on this.)
| Sakos wrote:
| 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.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Developers, developers, developers, developers.
| walrus01 wrote:
| YARRRRGGHHHHH!!!!!!
| suprjami wrote:
| We did get the Developers music video:
|
| https://youtu.be/rRm0NDo1CiY
|
| and for that I'm thankful.
| walrus01 wrote:
| And Domokun Developers
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7ZDH45OAt8
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I think that a lot of people are commenting here without actually
| reading the article. The article lays out a concrete (and imo
| pretty persuasive) argument as to why the author thinks that
| Ballmer was a decent CEO. You should really read it, but the TLDR
| is:
|
| * Some of the big feathers in Microsoft's cap today (O365 and
| Azure) started during Ballmer's tenure
|
| * While the company had plenty of failed initiatives during his
| time, what matters in the end is that the hits made up for the
| misses in terms of profit, and they did
|
| * Metrics like revenue and so on were all positive during his
| tenure
|
| Frankly, unless the author is factually incorrect on these points
| (which I don't have the knowledge to assert either way), I think
| it's a good argument.
| chucke1992 wrote:
| He was a good CFO type of a leader. Unlike a lot of other
| companies like Intel or Boeing, that were run by CFOs, he did
| not last long enough to run MSFT into the ground due to being
| too late to modern trends.
|
| Sure he build the foundation, but he was not smart enough to
| lead the path forward. With him MSFT would have never reached
| top 3 most valuable companies - I would say it would be at
| 500-600b maybe at best.
|
| Even with Azure and Office, he was too much into "bundle with
| Windows" type of guy. Similar to how he was saying that
| touchscreen would never work as businesses needed buttons to
| type. I think with Satya, they would have tried multi touch
| screen at least for sure.
|
| By and large, Ballmer was not the very open minded person. And
| his attempt to buy Yahoo...Oof.
| RandomThoughts3 wrote:
| > Unlike a lot of other companies like Intel or Boeing, that
| were run by CFOs, he did not last long enough to run MSFT
| into the ground due to being too late to modern trends.
|
| 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?
|
| > Even with Azure and Office, he was too much into "bundle
| with Windows" type of guy.
|
| Seriously? Ballmer started Office365 you know. Also the
| Microsoft Phone with, you know, touch screens. The sheer
| amount of historical revionism in this thread even in the
| face of hard facts is mind numbing.
|
| Honestly, even discarding all the rest, Ballmer would deserve
| more respect than he gets there for getting Microsoft out of
| the antitrust lawsuits alone.
| chucke1992 wrote:
| > 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 late to the market. It does
| not matter if he thought of it later - he famously
| disregarded iPhone saying that it did not have keyboard.
| They had Windows Mobile, but they were busy competing with
| Blackberry instead of going after innovation.
| RandomThoughts3 wrote:
| [delayed]
| underdeserver wrote:
| I read the entire article, and I love how virtually every comment
| here is what Dan wrote about.
| underdeserver wrote:
| 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.
| RyJones wrote:
| If Microsoft had just tracked the market while he was CEO: what
| is the delta in market cap? His vision destroyed multiple Enrons
| of shareholder value.
| colonCapitalDee wrote:
| > Even Bing, widely considered a failure, on last reported
| revenue and current P/E ratio, would be 12th most valuable tech
| company in the world, between Tencent and ASML.
|
| A tiny slice of the search market (4% IIRC) is worth this much?
| Incredible. Everyone knows Google is swimming in money, but I
| guess it never really computed for me that managing to grab a
| tiny slice of the search market would be so valuable. If I was
| making a guess prior to reading this, my intuition would have
| been that Bing was some kind of loss leader. Shows what I know!
| Hah
| greggyb wrote:
| Bing Ads is big business. Digital marketing is _enormous_.
| Google and Facebook have larger portions of the pie, but a
| sliver of a huge pie is still a lot of pie.
| legitster wrote:
| There are a lot of services that just repackage and resell
| Bing! DuckDuckGo being probably the most successful example.
|
| Which, to OP's point, is a testament to the particular style of
| business that Ballmer was good at - building enterprise and
| partner channels.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Is there a name for this phenomenon when past leaders are viewed
| in a better light than they objectively deserved? I see this in
| politics a lot (eg Dubya) but in business too.
| bydo wrote:
| Hagiography?
| unfunco wrote:
| Rosy retrospection?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection
| ralegh wrote:
| I think this is a facet of human memory - eg thinking childhood
| was better than it was because the bad/boring parts aren't
| memorable. I also get this with anxious/stressful periods of
| time, which are overwhelmingly bad at the time but very quickly
| forgotten.
| hermanradtke wrote:
| > Much like Gary Bernhardt's talk, which was panned because he
| made the problem statement and solution so obvious that people
| didn't realize they'd learned something non-trivial
|
| I really want to see this video, but I cannot find it anywhere. I
| checked
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcGKfGEEONaDvuLDFFKRf...
| but I believe Gary asks that his videos not be shown (which I am
| fine with). I also checked
| https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks but I do not see it
| there either.
|
| Should I be looking somewhere else?
| mastertask wrote:
| The only thing missing from the article was to say that Ballmer
| loved Linux and open source but that he was misunderstood lol.
| Ballmer was a fucking despot and a piece of shit. That article is
| an ode to the disgusting despotism that Microsoft had.
| pram wrote:
| I don't think Ballmer was underrated as CEO personally (windows
| phone lol) but goddamn he's the platonic ideal of a hype guy. The
| amount of energy and enthusiasm emanating from him is always
| incredible. I'd at least say theres a good chance he was
| instrumental in Microsoft being as successful as it was.
| edm0nd wrote:
| Bill Gates: can jump over an office chair -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxaCOHT0pmI
|
| Steve Ballmer: developers developers developers developers
| developers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs
|
| Two of my favorite videos haha
| fnord123 wrote:
| > Steve Ballmer: developers developers developers developers
| developers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs
|
| If you haven't seen the remix, here you go:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gI_HGDgG7c
| chucke1992 wrote:
| The problem with Ballmer is that he missed a lot of
| opportunities.
|
| Satya is much better in that regard.
| RandomThoughts3 wrote:
| Is he? What did he start? Most of MS current successes were
| launched under Ballmer most notably Azure.
|
| Satya has been good with acquisitions but what else?
| chucke1992 wrote:
| But here is the thing - launching the initiative means
| nothing. Satya is able to expand and develop it.
|
| Like with Ballmer we certainly would not have got O365 to iOS
| for example. It would be 100% bundled one way or another to
| Windows services or something or browser or whatever.
|
| Even with Azure we would not have got such aggressive
| expansion and attempts to push services across Windows and
| Linux or playing with Open Source platforms like K8S. I think
| Ballmer was closer to the modern Google who is hell-bent on
| not using anything Windows.
|
| Ballmer's attempt to buy Yahoo and disregard for touch screen
| phones is what defined his legacy. He was a good CFO who knew
| how to run business, but not a great CEO.
|
| > Satya has been good with acquisitions but what else?
|
| Ability to buy right things is important too. Like Ballmer
| wanted to buy Yahoo, while Satya bought Github. One cost 80b,
| while another created a whole foundation for Copilot push.
| Linkedin purchase was great and with OpenAI I am 100% sure
| that Ballmer would have missed AI train (like AWS did).
| RandomThoughts3 wrote:
| [delayed]
| bawolff wrote:
| > One part of the plan to kill Google was to redirect users who
| typed google.com into their address bar to MSN search.
|
| Crazy they were ever considering this.
| RandomThoughts3 wrote:
| It's funny how all the comments here are falling in the trap
| described in the beginning of the article of disliking Ballmer
| because he comes from the sales side and they can't fathom
| someone not coming from the tech side leading a tech company.
|
| What's undeniable in the article is that Ballmer literally built
| what remains Microsoft best asset even before being a CEO there:
| it's incredibly good relationship with its corporate customers.
| Honestly, it's really what sets Microsoft apart for me. When you
| do deal with them as a corporate customer, you really get the
| feeling that they understand the way things work in a big corp IT
| department and will be reliable and predictable.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| He's underrated in the sense that a lot of CEOs of his era
| completely destroyed their companies, see Intel, GE, GM, Yahoo,
| etc and he didn't. So that's already a win, he set up the company
| in a decent position so that when someone with more vision takes
| over they'll have something to work with, even if he didn't have
| the talent to pull things off himself. He had a couple of wins
| (Azure, Office 365) along with many many losses, and they're good
| enough to secure him a 6/10 on my ratings.
| greggyb wrote:
| 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 several decades?
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| 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 well in enterprise sales and was fast in
| picking up OpenAI, but they have lost the ability to use
| their strategic resources to save xbox, help azure overcome
| competition, or push a mixer or Surface or whatever.
|
| Edit: For people who don't understand the last sentence think
| about the way that O365 was able to help MS push Teams to
| stave off Zoom and others despite being objectively trash. MS
| should've been able to keep control of the internet, but they
| lost their moat to Google (Chrome), and the same story for
| various consumer products. Bing was a decent win but with a
| better consumer story they should've also been able to
| threaten social and youtube and so on. But now they're
| completely irrelevant there.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| 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?
| cheaprentalyeti wrote:
| "To sum it up, for the past twenty years, people having been
| dunking on Ballmer for being a buffoon who doesn't understand
| tech and who was, at best, some kind of bean counter who knew how
| to keep the lights on but didn't know how to foster innovation
| and caused Microsoft to fall behind in every important market."
|
| It's important to keep the lights on while waiting for the next
| new development to take off. I think it's an undervalued skill.
| fnord123 wrote:
| A rare miss by Mr. Luu.
|
| > Ballmer wins... 2010: Microsoft creates Azure
|
| The Azure project was run by Nadella before he became CEO. And it
| succeeded despite Ballmer. Azure was seen as the Microsoft cloud,
| where people ran Windows Servers. But Microsoft had long lost the
| battle for the server space to Linux.
|
| When Ballmer stepped aside, only then could Nadella drop the
| limiters and push the Microsoft <3 Linux perspective to get the
| message out that Azure is a home for Linux workloads too.
| sublinear wrote:
| I'm still somewhat bitter about the failure of Windows Phone and
| can't believe it even happened. The iPhone wasn't even that good
| at the time and Android was a total mess. Microsoft dropped the
| ball on their first party app dev, and several flagship phones
| had great hardware but terrible driver support.
|
| Microsoft clearly wasn't interested in the consumer market
| anymore and it shows through to today.
| devinegan wrote:
| "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.
| codeflo wrote:
| I'm not informed enough to rebut this, and don't want to be
| quoted in the follow-up article that suggests HN is still too
| dumb to get the genius of Ballmer, but here's my take.
|
| It's only the footnote of the article that mentions Ballmer's
| "stage persona". I think that's the important point, and I would
| add that his "interview persona" might have been even worse. Back
| then, he was quoted as saying insanely dumb shit _all the time_.
| Like when he literally publicly laughed about the iPhone. Or when
| he called a Zune feature to share files between devices
| "squirting".
|
| Maybe he did make all kinds of brilliant decisions internally. I
| wouldn't know, but neither would the stock market. If the CEO
| comes across as not understanding tech, it's likely the market
| will price that in.
| legitster wrote:
| I think a better way of understanding Ballmer is that he really
| struggled to relate to end consumers, but he understood their
| business partners very well.
| legitster wrote:
| 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 fact that it was developed to Microsoft's strengths
| (enterprise support) that it didn't piss off too many of their
| partners and sales channels. Same with Office 365 and all of
| their other successful services. None are glamourous - but all
| are impressive with how not awful they are given their design
| constraints.
|
| Even things like Surface, while considered a failure, did its
| intended job of getting hardware partners to get their act
| together and make better consumer products.
| ajkjk wrote:
| When I judge someone I compare them to what they ought to have
| been able to do. Bing, Azure, and Office 365 were mid and it's
| the person in charge's responsibility to do better than that. The
| world would be a better place if he had done a better job.
|
| But maybe he was a fine CEO, dunno about that. I guess that's
| measured in profits.
| nopurpose wrote:
| Balmer launched Get the facts smearing campaign. It says all
| about who Balmer is.
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