[HN Gopher] Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
___________________________________________________________________
Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
Author : greggyb
Score : 339 points
Date : 2024-10-28 21:48 UTC (1 days 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.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Gates was CEO during the 90s.
| 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:
| Lots of metrics to analyze and statistics to crunch.
| Knowing where to focus the schmoozing is as important as
| the schmoozing itself.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _Ballmer was just an average sales jock along for the ride._
|
| Classic "nerd" prejudice; Ballmer was not dumb.
| 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.
| His 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.
| wbl wrote:
| Having Halo as an exclusive was huge.
| 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:
| 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.
| ytoawwhra92 wrote:
| I agree with this. And it wasn't just Don Mattrick. Late
| in Ballmer's tenure there were a lot of VPs with poor
| track records who weren't being held accountable (or, in
| some cases, were being given more responsibility).
| Microsoft is still feeling the impact of those people
| today.
| jfim wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what do you see as the fall of Xbox? It
| seems to work fine to play games, even if they had
| missteps with certain things (eg. Kinect being deprecated
| after being mandatory, some hardware issues).
| ytoawwhra92 wrote:
| > Out of curiosity, what do you see as the fall of Xbox?
|
| The ever-declining hardware revenue and market share. If
| the decline that started in 2013 continues long enough it
| will stop making sense for Microsoft to sell consoles at
| all. They seem to be planning for this, as they're
| clearly pivoting the Xbox business towards "content and
| services".
|
| This is a stark contrast to how Xbox was positioned prior
| to the 3rd gen. Xbox One. They had taken significant
| market share away from PlayStation and they were
| expecting to continue to do so, particularly outside the
| USA. They were also trying to get a foothold in the
| household computing market (this market was in its
| infancy then, now: Alexa/Fire TV, Nest/Chromecast, Apple
| TV/HomePod). Those ambitions are gone.
| dh2022 wrote:
| 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..)
| kristianp wrote:
| Valve figured it out when making the Steam Deck. But
| they're a brilliant exception that makes your point.
| cyberax wrote:
| > Why hardware makers do not figure this out for
| themselves is a different topic
|
| Have you _seen_ the typical software produced by hardware
| makers?
| wkat4242 wrote:
| > 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.
| Maxatar wrote:
| XBox's irrelevance is thanks to Don Mattrick for ruining
| the XBox One release.
|
| It is fair to point out that XBox continues to stagnate and
| despite many billions of dollars that Microsoft has pumped
| into gaming and acquiring numerous studios and publishers,
| they still have yet to succeed in that area.
| ThrowawayB7 wrote:
| The SDET role at Microsoft was eliminated under Satya and it
| shows in their products.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Satya's success is built on stuff that began under Ballmer.
| Azure's core services are all from Bing, which was something
| Ballmer pushed for.
| 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.
| p_l wrote:
| Default UI configuration in LibreCalc is such that until
| recently it always resulted in enraged searching of the MS
| Office support status in Wine.
|
| Funnily enough recently I found out the UI style switch and
| lo and behold, when you switch from default to emulating
| Excel 2007 ribbon, the critical "cell data type" button is
| front and center just like it was in every version of excel
| since 1997 that I have used.
| 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.
| Kuraj wrote:
| I don't think calling gaming on linux "possible" gives it
| the justice it deserves, with the arrival of the Steam Deck
| and all the improvements Valve contributed to the upstream.
| The experience is practically _seamless_.
|
| I agree though that linux _on desktop_ is pretty janky, or
| at least it always was for me, having tried daily driving
| numerous distros.
| Uvix wrote:
| It's only seamless _if_ you buy everything through Steam.
| Third-party stores need not apply.
| 71bw wrote:
| >The experience is practically _seamless_.
|
| IF you buy through Steam. IF you have an AMD GPU. IF by
| seamless you mean that regardless of the aforementioned
| BIG assumptions you still have to go and play with
| winetricks or whatever to get some stuff working and it
| can take you hours of tinkering.
| stackskipton wrote:
| Windows Desktop still feels very important to them. Windows
| Server on the other hand feels very "Fine, since you are
| willing to pay for it." _Thud_ "Is there any features?" "More
| money and your welcome I'm even giving this to you."
| 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.)
| trelane wrote:
| Only if you believe that executing in the kernel is necessary
| and that there could not be another way to do this, with
| public interfaces.
| Ragnarork wrote:
| At this point I wonder if half the commenters have read the
| article.
| 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.
| SoothingSorbet wrote:
| 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).
| Krssst wrote:
| Windows 8 was misguided but not user-hostile. I miss not
| being repeatedly asked by my OS to create an account or
| share my data. If it was a human doing it rather than
| software I am not sure it would be legal.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| These are both valid takes really. I'll take neither
| Ballmer nor Nadella thanks.
| cyberax wrote:
| WinXP was developed mostly during Gates' tenure. Ballmer is
| responsible for the disastrous Windows Vista, Microsoft phone
| operating systems, and Windows 8.
| Sakos wrote:
| You mean the best mobile phone OS that we ever had?
| Unfortunately disastrously managed and then squandered, but
| still.
|
| Also, Vista was a mess, but it was ambitious and it laid
| the foundation for 7 and it was only around for a few years
| before being replaced. Unlike 10, where Nadella has doubled
| down on the worst choices and even worse ones were made
| going into 11 (HOW THE FUCK DO YOU SET DEFAULT APPLICATIONS
| NOW, THIS IS FUCKING NONSENSE).
| legitster wrote:
| > 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
|
| Window's massive install base is not really a testament to
| their failure.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Vista was released under his watch too.
| kasabali wrote:
| Vista was underrated, too.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Developers, developers, developers, developers.
| walrus01 wrote:
| YARRRRGGHHHHH!!!!!!
| dhaavi wrote:
| Scrolled through all the comments to find this and upvote.
| 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:
| > 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.
| chucke1992 wrote:
| 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".
| RandomThoughts3 wrote:
| > And we saw what happened with Windows division under
| Ballmer - it was profitable but it had no future.
|
| Microsoft under Ballmer was insanely profitable, more
| than its competitors and far more than before he took the
| helm. And despite that Ballmer launched Azure, started
| the push towards Entreprise software and at no point
| stopped investing.
|
| I don't think Ballmer was the best CEO ever but his poor
| reputation is very much undeserved.
| chucke1992 wrote:
| > Microsoft under Ballmer was insanely profitable, more
| than its competitors and far more than before he took the
| helm.
|
| Yeah, that's the thing - he was a good CFO. He was able
| to maximize profit and stuff. But people remember CEOs by
| their achievements - "a founder", "made MSFT into top
| three world companies"...With Ballmer people remember the
| lost decade and that's it.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| He was good at sales but their products were and are still
| inferior. Only Excel and SQL Server are two products I would
| personally buy.
| 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.
| ytoawwhra92 wrote:
| > 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.
| underdeserver wrote:
| Good point. I wasn't aware of that, and I think it should
| have been mentioned in the blog post.
| al_borland wrote:
| But weren't those the areas Nadella was over before becoming
| CEO? One could argue that Nadella was laying his own
| groundwork.
| 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?
| hyperhopper wrote:
| His "using you're types good" talk being censored is my go-to
| example for how "cancel culture" and "wokeness" has gone too
| far, a good useful talk not meant to be harmful to anybody,
| with no evidence that anybody was hurt by it, is removed from
| the world for the far reaching fear that one day some person
| might not be happy about it.
|
| The fact that years later people still want to learn from it
| and nobody has every talked about it being an issue shows we
| have gone too far as a society on the side of caution and never
| doing anything that wouldn't stand up to a fortune 10 HR exec
| panel.
| spookie wrote:
| What was "wrong" about the talk exactly?
| hyperhopper wrote:
| He effectively pretended to be dumb. And that included
| using the wrong "you're" and very simple dialects of
| English and mannerisms which he thought could potentially
| be seen as disparaging some groups.
|
| I think it was so generic and so clearly a joke it would be
| insane to pretend it was making fun of a group that existed
| in real life.
|
| For reference in the talk he also listed strongly typed
| languages as "weekly typed", static as dynamic, and had a
| MacBook on stage display a BSOD.
|
| The talk was comedic genius and a fun tongue in cheek
| commentary on the industry in 8 minutes. But it has been
| deemed to dangerous to society to be allowed to exist.
| gs17 wrote:
| Is this a real thing that happened? It's framed as a
| young child making a lot of misconceptions, you'd have to
| be pretty darn sensitive to get offended by that.
| great_tankard wrote:
| I must have missed this drama. Who was offended by it? When
| was Gary "cancelled?"
| Jgrubb wrote:
| Look, I don't know the video but how do we know - or why do
| we assume - that it was taken down out of fear of future
| weaponized wokeness? Maybe Gary took it down for Gary's
| reasons.
|
| Edit: from the couple of descriptions in this thread I could
| totally envision an empathetic individual waking up one day
| and deciding that talk felt too much like punching down and
| taking it down because they felt like they could do better.
| nvader wrote:
| I found it here: https://archive.org/details/usetypes
| hermanradtke wrote:
| Thank you for the link but I was looking for the
| reproducibility talk.
| hermanradtke wrote:
| I cannot edit anymore, but this is the talk descrption:
| https://www.thestrangeloop.com/2016/reproducibility.html
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| Ballmer was a gorilla in an expensive suit.
| 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
| oaththrowaway wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GM4Lt5k24s
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgPt6mvjr5Q
|
| Here's a few more to add to your favorites
| edm0nd wrote:
| this basketball one is glorious!
| rightbyte wrote:
| That chair jump is actually kinda impressive...
| gattilorenz wrote:
| Steve Ballmer: REVERSI!
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgJS2tQPGKQ
| 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:
| > Ballmer's attempt to buy Yahoo and disregard for touch
| screen phones is what defined his legacy.
|
| You are weirdly obsessed with that but Ballmer actually
| started Bing and bought Nokia to make touchscreen phones. I
| think you are extremely biased to the point of being
| entirely disconnected from the facts at hand.
|
| > Ability to buy right things is important too.
|
| Ballmer bought Skype and launched the foundation of what
| would become Teams - you know - arguably the most important
| corporate piece of software after Covid.
| chucke1992 wrote:
| I am biased but I am not disconnected from the facts. I
| am still pissed at Ballmer with how they missed search
| and mobile market. They were late with Search and they
| were late with mobile.
|
| With Teams it was just luck, but even then Team's growth
| happened years years after Ballmer and can be attributed
| to the multiplatform push of O365 by Satya.
| RandomThoughts3 wrote:
| Bing is insanely profitable. I fail to see how they
| missed search.
|
| You are not disconnected from the facts but you happily
| discount Ballmer wins when they don't suit your
| narrative.
| chucke1992 wrote:
| > Microsoft under Ballmer was insanely profitable, more
| than its competitors and far more than before he took the
| helm.
|
| Being profitable means nothing if your marketshare in low
| 10%. You are leaning too much on "profit". Ballmer was a
| good CFO (finance guy), but not CEO.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| Azure Search is still broken FWIW. A lot of Azure is
| still vapor ware; it works in the tutorial but not in
| real life. Every time my company signs/re-up a contract
| with Microsoft, I die a little.
| al_borland wrote:
| Not OP, but Ballmer's attempt to reinvent Windows Mobile
| to compete with modern smartphones was too little too
| late.
|
| Microsoft during that era was one bad call after another.
| When Apple saw multitouch they made a phone; Microsoft
| made a giant table[0] (very little imagination beyond the
| Jeff Han demo[1]). When Microsoft saw the iPhone
| reception, they sunk 2 years an $1B into the Kin line of
| phones[2], which lasted all of 2 months before being
| pulled from shelves. It was several years later when they
| bought Nokia, when then iPhone was already 6-7
| generations in. By this time the world was already moving
| to "mobile first", and Microsoft was being left behind
| without a platform.
|
| For a couple decades Microsoft worked to convince the
| world that Windows, Office, and Microsoft as a whole was
| needed to get real work done. It was during Ballmer's
| time at the helm that this belief eroded. People saw they
| didn't need Microsoft to make a good smart phone. They
| found they could get work done with Google Docs and
| didn't always need MS Office. They found macOS could be
| used to get work done just as well as Windows... and in
| fact, a desktop OS might not be needed at all. Ballmer's
| biggest failure was giving his competitors time to show
| the world that Microsoft wasn't as necessary as the world
| was led to believe.
|
| As far as Teams goes... it is used a lot by companies
| that are all-in on O365, but Slack and Zoom were the two
| household names in the space during the pandemic. Once
| again, the world was shown that work could be done
| without Microsoft.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PixelSense
|
| [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_the_radical_promis
| e_of_th...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin
| RandomThoughts3 wrote:
| > As far as Teams goes... it is used a lot by companies
| that are all-in on O365, but Slack and Zoom were the two
| household names in the space during the pandemic.
|
| Tell me you have no idea of what's happening in the real
| world outside your small tech bubble in one sentence.
|
| Nobody uses Slack outside of tech. They are virtually
| unknown in Europe.
| al_borland wrote:
| I don't use Slack personally, but it's always what I hear
| mentioned online. It's also what I hear friends mention
| (who don't work in tech) who aren't working at big
| cooperations.
|
| I've also heard many people use the phrase, "it's like
| Slack", when trying to explain what MS Teams is to a non-
| technical friend. It was all over the news during the
| pandemic, so people learned what it was. Same with Zoom.
| 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.
| gitaarik wrote:
| It's Microsoft
| everfrustrated wrote:
| Folks have forgotten how truly aggressive Microsoft was pre-
| antitrust days.
| gitaarik wrote:
| I guess I'm getting old :P
| 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.
| kjs3 wrote:
| _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._
|
| Just got done negotiating our E5 license last year and omfg is
| this laugh-out-loud untrue. Don't even get me started on how we
| have to check the Azure websites before every meeting with our
| M$ counterparts to figure out what Azure services they've
| changed the name of since the last call.
|
| But yes, completely agree it's the corporate customers that are
| the wind beneath their sales. But it's because they understand
| that for almost any large corp IT department on the planet,
| telling the 85% of their employees who don't give a steaming
| crap what the nerds think about Windows or Ballmer, "you have
| to dump Excel & Word and learn something else"[1] is not a hill
| any of them are willing to die on. We have people that won't
| use Excel on a Mac because once they found a place where it
| didn't work _exactly_ like the Windows version.
|
| [1] No. LibreOffice is not the answer.
| RandomThoughts3 wrote:
| > We have people that won't use Excel on a Mac because once
| they found a place where it didn't work exactly like the
| Windows version.
|
| Then again, Excel on a Mac is significantly inferior to the
| Windows version to be honest.
|
| > Don't even get me started on how we have to check the Azure
| websites before every meeting with our M$ counterparts to
| figure out what Azure services they've changed the name of
| since the last call.
|
| Not my experience at all and we spend millions of dollars a
| year with them.
| kjs3 wrote:
| _Not my experience at all_
|
| Really? You mean you missed Azure AD renamed to Entra ID?
| How about Microsoft Azure Security Center + Azure Defender
| combined into Azure Defender for Cloud? All the products
| that were "Azure Defender _something_ " that became
| "Microsoft Defender _something_ "? Yammer -> Viva?
| MyAnalytics -> Viva Insight? How about the 20-something
| products that changed to the "Microsoft Purview" branding.
|
| By our count, Microsoft renamed something like Azure 60
| products in the last 5 years. And you didn't "experience"
| any of that?
|
| _we spend millions of dollars a year with them_
|
| Oh my...I sure hope you don't think spending "millions" of
| dollars a year with Microsoft makes you special; our
| mid-8-figure USD yearly spend sure doesn't move us to the
| front of too many lines. But they do let us know when they
| change product names...
| julianeon wrote:
| I wouldn't use that language exactly. I think they've set up a
| very effectively profitable relationship with the industry -
| part carrot and part stick. But I don't think AWS usage
| would've exploded as it did if their clients truly felt both
| respected and understood.
| greggyb wrote:
| AWS was the first mover, and they execute very well on
| products. Despite this, AWS market share has been pretty flat
| for a while.
|
| Azure was a second mover. Microsoft executes on platform and
| partner ecosystem very well. Azure is still growing market
| share pretty quickly.
| gitaarik wrote:
| Yeah so you're basically saying Microsoft is a perfect company
| for sales focussed companies that need some technical stack.
|
| Fair enough
| 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.
| greggyb wrote:
| > 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._Microsof
| t_Cor...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsof
| t_Cor...
| ytoawwhra92 wrote:
| > > 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.
|
| They tried and failed to extend their OS to other
| platforms and architectures many times. That they weren't
| successful wasn't due to some big brained decision to
| avoid antitrust issues. They just couldn't execute.
| greggyb wrote:
| Windows runs in more places than it probably should. And
| the OS is just fine on other platforms. Windows on ARM
| works quite well. As I understand it, it worked just fine
| on Itanium. NT launched with support for PowerPC. I'm
| sure RISC-V support will be there pretty quickly. NT was
| designed for this sort of portability.
|
| Most user software is not ready for the transition.
| Microsoft doesn't impose the same kind of control over
| its application ecosystem as Apple does. This prevents
| Microsoft from being able to make architectural shifts
| like Apple has. Arguably, this more open and flexible
| ecosystem (and bending over backward compatibility) has
| been one of the driving factors in Windows's popularity
| over MacOS. I have no strong opinion about which is a
| better business strategy.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| I don't buy the "MS purposefully let IE die to avoid
| anti-trust" story. Ballmer was an enterprise sales guy,
| no wonder his enterprise software business did great, IE
| lacked focus and died. Just keeping IE around, they
| didn't have to kill Google, but just keeping it around
| would've been interesting in 2020 as they can conceivably
| use it to move onto rivals. Similarly, windows phone
| didn't die because of anti-trust but because of Ballmer
| failure. Windows server is a fail because of Ballmer. Yes
| MS should've been a ~6T company today. Operating systems
| were their territory and Ballmer lost ground. There are
| 6ish other major battlefields: search, e-commerce,
| social, consumer devices, enterprise software, cloud.
| Ballmer lost 4/6 despite major advantages going into the
| last 4 of these.
|
| I'll give credit to Ballmer for being early enough on
| supporting Azure where it's ahead of GCP, but for how
| well Azure is doing now that's on Nadella.
|
| Am I supposed to give Ballmer credit for Bing? I'm not
| going to do so. With enough money any CEO would've been
| able to crank out a Bing (Same way I'm not impressed by
| Tim Cook's Apple Watch).
| kfajdsl wrote:
| Was there ever a world where a proprietary OS could win
| out against Linux? Or for that matter, a proprietary DB
| as opposed to MySQL/Postgres.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| If it's better, by tying it in with your other products,
| by making it compatible with the market, and by building
| an ecosystem moat on top of it. You can also lower the
| price to capture marketshare. Plenty of proprietary
| systems won despite being late and the open source system
| had become incumbent. See discord/slack, MATLAB, Spotify.
|
| If Windows Server had a better DX, had supported
| everything Linux did, AND had proprietary features on top
| of that, it would've done well I reckon.
| greggyb wrote:
| See my sibling comment. Windows Server dominates server
| OS revenue share at ~70%. They get most of the money that
| people are willing to spend on server OSes.
| sirjaz wrote:
| In addition on-prem Windows Server share is 70%+ as of
| 2023 of all Server usage.
| greggyb wrote:
| > I don't buy the "MS purposefully let IE die to avoid
| anti-trust" story
|
| I don't know who you'd buy it from, certainly not me. If
| that's what you've read into my comment, that is
| reflective of your perspective, not mine. IE was never
| that good. It was bundled with the predominant operating
| system, so had massive market share. As soon as Microsoft
| had to open the OS more and draw a line between OS and
| IE, it was pretty much inevitable that there would be
| other browsers. And too-aggressive positioning of IE
| would be highly legible to regulators.
|
| I agree that, absent regulatory scrutiny, Microsoft could
| have flexed muscle here to effect different outcomes in
| the general internet space. I disagree that such a
| decision would be a good idea for Microsoft in the
| climate of the aughts.
|
| Server market share is tougher to find, but it appears
| that Microsoft captures a large majority of revenue in
| the server OS space. I know the install base proportion
| is smaller than the revenue proportion, but it seems to
| me that they are capturing most of the market willing to
| pay for a server OS.[0]
|
| As to your 7 major battlefields and Microsoft's major
| advantages:
|
| 1. Operating systems. Most other major OS vendors
| collapsed or were collapsing in the 90s. It seems naive
| to expect that there would continue to be no pressure on
| the OS front. Part of their dominance was circumstantial.
| Nevertheless, they continued to dominate desktop market
| share and server market share (both by revenue). Losing
| install share to OSes that people don't pay for is
| expected, especially as those options improve.
|
| Apple came over to x86, making MacOS (again, an OS that
| people don't pay directly for) much more viable, because
| application developers no longer had to target two ISAs.
|
| And mobile came to the fore. Consumer devices is a
| separate category, though.
|
| Overall, I'd consider this a win for Microsoft and a
| continuing area of dominance, in the face of many new
| entrants and threats: ChromeOS; tablets becoming a viable
| option; Linux becoming usable for laypeople; and much of
| computing moving to the browser such that the OS doesn't
| matter as much, yet Windows still dominates when OS
| doesn't matter.
|
| 2. Search. Google was already positioned for market
| dominance in the early 2000s. Microsoft began their
| indexing project in the early 2000s. Other players
| entered and left the market. Amazon had a search engine,
| and they are all about the consumer market (especially
| before AWS). That folded in the mid aughts. Yahoo
| collapsed. AOL, Excite, Lycos, and many others failed.
| Yahoo now uses Bing's index. DuckDuckGo uses Bing's
| index.
|
| Bing is a solid #2 in search, earning $10Bs annually.
| That is an entire business.
|
| Microsoft started from a disadvantage on search and is
| #2. #2 is not a loss. Also definitely not an overwhelming
| victory, but the world is not binary. Writing off a
| business with $10Bs of revenue as a loss seems absurd ...
| may we all be so blessed as to lose like this.
|
| 3. E-commerce. Amazon was already positioned for
| dominance and was solely focused on this for the early
| aughts, and primarily focused on this for the duration of
| the aughts. Microsoft had no major presence here.
|
| To make significant headway, Microsoft would have had to
| go against one of the most single-minded and aggressive
| companies that was out there. (Amazon is less single-
| minded today). And we know what Amazon's successful
| strategy is in retail, and that is essentially no profit.
| Microsoft, both in terms of its corporate culture and in
| terms of its major shareholders, would never have been
| able to compete with Amazon in that way.
|
| Microsoft had no major advantage here. This is certainly
| not a win, but they didn't want a piece of it anyway.
|
| 4. Social. Do we count messengers as social media? If
| yes, then yeah Microsoft had MSN messenger. If we don't
| count messaging, then they had no specific expertise or
| advantage here. In fact, many of their attempts at more
| lighthearted computing were panned: clippy, Microsoft
| Bob, Comic Sans. Microsoft has always been nerdy and
| never cool until others made nerds cool.
|
| Regardless, they purchased Skype and LinkedIn and have a
| combined MAU of ~1.2B, putting them comfortably in the
| top 10 of social media companies.[1] I'll note that this
| list includes Teams, but I'm going to count that as
| enterprise software, because it is included with almost
| every O365 SKU.
|
| LinkedIn was a Satya purchase, so Ballmer can't get
| credit there. Nevertheless, I wouldn't argue that
| Microsoft had a major advantage for social media. I'd
| agree that they lost in this space.
|
| Arguably you could put github in here, too, but also a
| Satya acquisition.
|
| 5. Consumer devices. Microsoft is a software company to
| its bones. Windows was a definite advantage here. But
| Microsoft does not have a strong history of device
| manufacture to lean on. They tried to acquire for this
| with Nokia. And yeah, they failed here.
|
| Again, though, they were against one of the most single-
| minded and aggressive companies out there, this time
| Apple. And Apple already had the pedigree for prestige
| consumer devices. Apple was defining hip and cool with
| regard to technology through the aughts. Again, Microsoft
| is neither.
|
| Additionally, they were up against another competitor for
| whom smart phone market share was an existential concern,
| Google. Google does not have the single-minded focus of
| Apple, but when it comes to threats to their core
| business (selling ads), they can execute well enough.
|
| Microsoft does not have the single-minded focus of Apple,
| nor did they have the fundamental imperative to make
| something work on mobile that Google had. Still,
| Microsoft should have done better here, and in fact
| Windows Phone OS and devices were largely well reviewed.
| Nevertheless, they couldn't make headway against their
| rivals.
|
| Microsoft had an advantage here and lost.
|
| 6. Enterprise software. Microsoft was the dominant player
| and remains the dominant player in this space. O365 is
| undisputed. You will pry Excel from many people's cold,
| dead hands. Microsoft may not be cool, but no other tech
| company has a product on ESPN. The Excel championship is
| something else.
|
| And I will note, specifically, that O365 began under
| Ballmer.
|
| Microsoft is also a huge player in data platforms. They
| have specific product wins and losses, but as a whole,
| they do very well in this space. Data is a specific niche
| of mine, and I can tell you that there is no other vendor
| than Microsoft that companies will routinely go all-in on
| for their data platform. Don't get me wrong, this is not
| the norm, but I only ever see it happen on Microsoft,
| never for another vendor's platform all-in.
|
| I covered Windows Server above, but again I will note
| that they capture a large majority of server OS revenue
| share (which I argue is the category to measure this in).
|
| Microsoft is a dominant player in this space, and I would
| count this as a win. It was part of their core business,
| and that business tripled sales and doubled profit under
| Ballmer.
|
| 7. Cloud. Amazon moved first. Microsoft followed quickly.
| They are #2 in the market and growing fast. Google is no
| threat to either Azure or AWS. Alibaba probably will be
| in the next 10 years.
|
| Azure would not exist in the way it does today without
| significant investment under Ballmer.
|
| #2 for a second mover (using "second" as "non-first",
| here) is not at all a loss. And threatening to overtake
| the first mover is a powerful position to be in.
|
| I expect you'll disagree that any #2 position is
| worthwhile, or at least that seems to be your stance.
|
| Regardless, I'd put the counts as:
|
| Advantage: 4: OS, Enterprise software, cloud, consumer
| devices
|
| Disadvantage: Search, E-commerce, Social
|
| Competed: 6: OS, Enterprise software, cloud, consumer
| devices, search, social (questionable)
|
| Success: 4/5: OS, Enterprise software, Cloud, Search,
| Social (social only by acquisition, mostly post-Ballmer,
| but they were in a position to make multi-billion dollar
| acquisitions, so Ballmer can't have ruined things)
|
| Failure: 1/2: Consumer devices, Social (if you want to
| argue that only Satya's acquisitions count, and no credit
| toward Ballmer).
|
| Did not compete: E-commerce
|
| [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/915085/global-
| server-sha...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platform
| s_with_...
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| > I don't know who you'd buy it from, certainly not me.
| If that's what you've read into my comment, that is
| reflective of your perspective, not mine. IE was never
| that good. It was bundled with the predominant operating
| system, so had massive market share. As soon as Microsoft
| had to open the OS more and draw a line between OS and
| IE, it was pretty much inevitable that there would be
| other browsers. And too-aggressive positioning of IE
| would be highly legible to regulators.
|
| I was not thinking about being more aggressive with
| bundling, but was commenting on the quality of IE. Not
| sure why you're giving a pass on IE sucking. It's not a
| coincidence that Ballmer, the Enterprise sales guy,
| developed an excellent enterprise sales machine at
| Microsoft. If he were a good tech guy he would've
| developed good tech there too. So yes, that Microsoft's
| tech sucked is on him.
|
| There's a certain inertia to a huge company, if we're
| talking about executive wins I expect something above
| what I consider the bare minimum. For example everyone
| agrees that Intel is a failed company, but if you
| actually look at them they still have majority
| marketshare of x86 CPUs in both client and server. So
| would you say that they successfully defended their
| traditional business or would you call them a failure? I
| think it's pretty clear that if you strip away everything
| else about MS, and just look at Windows by its lonesome,
| it would be considered a loss today. It's only bigger by
| dint of the entire market being larger. But in the market
| it has lost a lot of power vs the day Ballmer started.
|
| So
|
| 1. OS - Loss IMO.
|
| 2. Search - Loss, similarly to above Bing is a bare
| minimum for what I expect a company of this size to do.
| Look at Sogou vs Baidu in China for example for what
| other companies are able to achieve. But all in all I'm
| knocking Ballmer less for Bing than for how late Bing
| was. For 9 years of his time as CEO we had trash MSN as
| MS's search engine and the default through IE. Gave away
| all that time to Google to build incumbency, develop an
| ecosystem around gmail, etc, and grow their cash
| position. IE was a huge advantage for a long time... but
| by the time Bing came out it had eroded and Google Chrome
| was released. Microsoft was in a great advantageous
| position due to their Windows monopoly but acted too late
| to serve relevant products.
|
| 3. E-commerce - Loss, I wasn't thinking about competing
| with Amazon but more the Windows Store, bookings.com,
| airbnb, and steam. Why did the windows store take until
| the app store to come out to copy them? Why did steam
| come out in 2003 and Microsoft did nothing? It's because
| Ballmer isn't smart enough to understand how these things
| work. By the time windows store came out it was very
| late, and once again the software sucked. Owning the
| operating system was an advantage that a good CEO
| could've made something of, and he didn't.
|
| 4. Social - Loss, yeah MSN was a huge deal, along with
| windows to push it and later acquisition of skype, MS
| certainly did try. You can also consider something like
| Steam or xbox Live to be a social network. Regardless
| went nowhere and loss of opportunity. Certainly he made
| acquisitions too late and failed to make much of the
| social networks he had. Also anyone could've bought
| Instagram, anyone could've bought Youtube, he just
| didn't. Bought Skype instead. Sure after him there's more
| acquisitions but it has nothing to do with this
| discussion really.
|
| 5. Consumer devices - Loss, this one I'm most willing to
| give him a pass on actually. MS is mostly a software
| company, and partnerships are hard. But Zune was an
| alright product, and here is mostly a marketing fail. But
| wouldn't you place blame for bad marketing on the CEO?
| You can also imagine there's a lot more you can do with
| Zune. Microsoft had xbox too but never tried to get these
| parts together, letting Nintendo DS take the handheld
| market. Today zune is dead and xbox is not successful.
|
| 6. Enterprise Software - Unequivocal win, probably the
| best thing Ballmer did and most of his score.
|
| 7. Cloud - Win, acted not too late and was okay with it,
| Nadella fixed it though.
|
| So definitely I would put E-commerce and social up into
| "advantaged but loss" and I tried to explain why I count
| search and OS as loss.
| greggyb wrote:
| > For example everyone agrees that Intel is a failed
| company, but if you actually look at them they still have
| majority marketshare of x86 CPUs in both client and
| server. So would you say that they successfully defended
| their traditional business or would you call them a
| failure?
|
| I do not think we live in the same world. As one data
| point, the majority of analysts still list Intel as a buy
| or a hold.[0] In the very same industry, AMD showed us
| that it can take more than a decade to turn around a poor
| architectural turn in semiconductor manufacturing. Their
| stock price peaked at the beginning of 2006 and then were
| in the doldrums until 2017-2018 (depending when you want
| to count their return). It may well turn out that we are
| witnessing Intel's death spiral, but to claim that with
| certainty, and further to ascribe that belief to
| "everyone" tells me that we see the world incredibly
| differently.
|
| [0] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/INTC/analysis/
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| What does analyst have to do with anything? Intel can
| still be a buy even if it's failed because it's either
| very cheap or there's the possibility of geopolitics or
| acquisitions. In fact being failed sometimes makes it
| even easier to buy.
|
| It's obviously failed even beyond the massive share loss
| in the semi industry. It's stock price is down 60% since
| 2018 (not even a particularly interesting year), and its
| value is now literally lower than its book price. That's
| when you know everyone agrees it's a piece of junk.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > For example everyone agrees that Intel is a failed
| company...
|
| You are literally the first person I've ever seen say
| this. It is _definitely_ not true that everyone agrees
| with you on that.
| cadamsau wrote:
| Irrelevant unless you happen to use LinkedIn, Github, or
| vscode, or own an xbox. Or you use openai's products
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| I said operating system, and all those things except xbox
| are after ballmer...
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Stagnating your company into a "lost decade" while not
| technically going bankrupt barely counts as a "win."
| 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.
| noen wrote:
| He didn't keep the lights on while waiting for new development
| to take off. He actively lost 40+ billion dollars on horrible
| acquisitions, and actively stifled internal innovation to
| ensure existing product lines weren't threatened.
|
| On the sales side he streamlined Microsoft into a single
| monolithic sales motion that killed dozens of products before
| they started because the target customer/market didn't fit the
| EA model.
|
| This included Azure that took nearly a decade after his
| departure to unwind so the sales force could actually sell
| consumption based products and services.
|
| I honestly can't think of anything substantially positive he
| achieved in his tenure other than promoting Satya and Scott G
| and a handful of others.
|
| All of the contemporary media reports don't know about the
| laundry list of near sighted, anti competitive, anti innovation
| shit he put on the company.
| RandomThoughts3 wrote:
| > I honestly can't think of anything substantially positive
| he achieved in his tenure other than promoting Satya and
| Scott G and a handful of others.
|
| Ok, but apart from fostering a great generation of new
| executives, investing in currently extremely profitable
| products and business lines, streamlining our sales
| operations and getting us out of these life threatening
| antitrust cases, what did Steve Ballmer ever do for us?
| 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.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Agree .Balmer was a disaster. Microsoft stock basically
| languished from 2003-2013 as everything else went up.
| datavirtue wrote:
| I was looking at the candles for all of Microsoft the other
| day and was surprised (and kind of pissed) that Microsoft
| didn't really take off until 2015. You could have gotten
| Microsoft dirt cheap for decades compared to the current
| issue price.
| dingaling wrote:
| Which only means he was a 'disaster' from the speculative
| trader's perspective.
|
| Stock trading has no benefit to a company unless they need to
| go to the markets for another round of funding, which
| Microsoft didn't.
| kortilla wrote:
| This is not true when your employees' compensation depends
| on the stock. They all implicitly become speculative
| traders and watching the employees at Amazon/Google become
| millionaires in a couple of years caused a lot of brain
| drain at Microsoft.
| dvt wrote:
| Azure launched as (and still is) a complete dumpster fire.
| Unless your company has business ties to MS (e.g. your usage is
| heavily subsidized, which is most of their large clients from
| what I understand), I would never in a million years use it
| over GCP or AWS.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| I'm guessing you don't know any Microsoft employees who were
| from that era and sufficiently senior to know. Azure was not
| run by Nadella. Its predecessor was Bing and much of Azure then
| was just a reselling of Bing services. Bing was something
| Ballmer invested in and pushed for. Nadella didn't drop any
| limiters or push the Azure perspective - that was people closer
| to Azure.
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| Almost instinctive disagree -- this guy doesn't miss much.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Azure#Key_people
|
| Also elsewhere in this post:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41978577
|
| That said, have never been a Microsoft watcher and basically
| will never run it in the server context so... Happy to be
| corrected.
|
| I do agree that the current phase of Microsoft is remarkable --
| the turn around in strategy/sentiment is huge.
| miffy900 wrote:
| Yep, people forget, but Azure launched as Windows Azure in 2010
| - they dropped Windows from the name a few years later, but it
| was obvious what it was trying to be at launch.
| 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.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I worked at Nokia Maps at the time the Microsoft acquisition of
| the phone business was being negotiated. I never met Ballmer
| but I heard some stories of people that did. Intense guy
| apparently. I was at two joint meetings with MS to discuss some
| of the details of things related to the thing I was working on.
| Ultimately that wasn't transferred to MS.
|
| MS made a big mess of the whole windows phone project. First it
| royally screwed Nokia over by deciding to do a big overhaul of
| Windows Phone OS internals and effectively leaving Nokia dead
| in the water with now obsolete products that they just
| launched. I'm sure this was intentional on Ballmer's side:
| weaken Nokia and acquire their phone business. But he threw out
| the baby with the bathwater. The first generation of windows
| phone was basically windows CE repackaged. The second one was a
| whole new kernel (windows NT based, I guess). The transition
| took crazy long. MS announced early and this made the old
| generation of Lumia phones a really hard sell. There was a
| vague promise of upgrades that of course never happened. And
| then the acquisition rumors destroyed the OEM ecosystem because
| they'd be competing with MS on phones.
|
| Then MS bought what remained of Nokia's phone division and it
| got busy demolishing it right away (including an actual Nokia
| Android phone that existed). When Nadella inherited this train
| wreck, he unceremoniously put an end to the whole thing and
| fired pretty much the whole team. At that point it very little
| hope of catching up because the OEMs and users had left. As
| much as I loved Nokia, it was the right decision at that point.
| All the good stuff had long been killed/cancelled already.
|
| It was Ballmer's fixation on Windows that led to this. Nokia
| had a bonafide Android competitor in the form of Meego. Backing
| Linux would have been the right move. Nadella might have
| approached this differently.
| 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.
| throw4950sh06 wrote:
| Msft had a stock split during that time.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Unfair thing to measure him by in my opinion. Steve Ballmer
| inherited Microsoft when the stock traded at a P/E of 60. When
| he left it was 14, in line with many other tech stocks during
| that time. (Even Apple was lower)
|
| He took earnings per share from $0.70 to $2.63 during his
| tenure. A CAGR of 10.5% across 13 years in one of the world's
| biggest companies. He couldn't control multiple compression
| following the dotcom bust.
| 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.
| toyg wrote:
| He was very much an '80s/'90s exec. Back then, execs were not
| "visionaire rockstars"; they were wisecracking boomers in
| suits. Microsoft walked a very thin line between very
| different worlds, and Ballmer was closer to the old-world
| type than the new.
| causality0 wrote:
| Brief data transmissions being called "squirts" is common, and
| was more common at the time.
| wsc981 wrote:
| I squirt all the time on Twitter.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I've been involved with computer networking since
| approximately 1982, and I've never once heard someone use
| "squirts" outside talking about Zunes. I don't doubt that it
| was jargon inside very specific niches, but it has never been
| common elsewhere.
| agurk wrote:
| Before the Ballmer/Zune use of the term I remember my
| father talking about data being squirted to A2A missiles
| (he was military) prior to launch, so perhaps that is one
| of the niches.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I take that back. An old issue of Wired had a jargon
| watch mention of "squirt the bird" as bouncing something
| off a satellite, which I remembered only because they
| misspelled it and I wondered what "quirt" meant.
|
| So yeah, maybe that's a military or adjacent thing.
| 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.
| signa11 wrote:
| do you think if azure would have even _happened_ if mr. jeffrey
| snover was not tenacious enough ?
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Azure happened because of Nadella (who led the project) despite
| Ballmer.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| Would love some sources cited for both your take and the
| parent's take.
| dexterdog wrote:
| Azure may be successful financially, but as someone who has
| finally used it for the last two years after 15 years of AWS
| and a little bit of GCP, I can't help but think the world
| would be a better place if it didn't exist or if some lesser
| player had that market share.
| wongarsu wrote:
| For most stuff Azure is pretty meh, but it seems to have
| the best features for running Windows servers and
| integrates well with Active Directory (or MS Entra or
| whatever they currently call it). Features that I don't
| need as a startup founder, but that would be very
| interesting for many places I worked at.
|
| Basically the cloud for everyone but the tech companies
| greggyb wrote:
| > Basically the cloud for everyone but the tech companies
|
| And most companies are not tech companies. This is
| something that tends to be lost in HN discussions (not
| saying that applies to you, specifically).
|
| I've spent a lot of time in the Microsoft world. I worked
| for AWS as well. In general, Microsoft executes on
| platform and ecosystem in a way that works very well for
| _a lot_ of customers. In general, AWS executes on
| products better, which tends to appeal more to those who
| are focused on technology, specifically.
| stackskipton wrote:
| As Azure SRE for a tech company, what feature is missing?
| We are using AKS with Linux, Blob storage and ServiceBus.
| Database is MySQL Flexible Server.
|
| I'm even using some Azure Tables for backend services
| just because it was easier to deal with.
| fragmede wrote:
| I think
|
| > Basically the cloud for everyone but the tech companies
|
| is referring to the idea that tech companies are
| competent enough to run their own computers, not that
| Azure is missing something specific.
| Uvix wrote:
| Maybe it's just "what you're used to", but I'd swap Azure
| and AWS in that statement. Going from Azure to AWS, I found
| it not nearly as nice to use or easy to understand. Even
| basic features like "see all the resources in my account"
| were missing from AWS.
| nl wrote:
| I use all three regularly. AWS has a _horrible_ ,
| inconsistent UI, and the Azure portal is mostly ok
| (although I think GCP is the best of the three)
|
| But OTOH AWS generally works and usually does what you
| think, whereas I'm never surprised when Azure breaks or
| some random Azure API works nothing like we expect.
| RandomThoughts3 wrote:
| > GCP is the best of the three
|
| Until you have to call Google. Google business services
| are awful.
| fragmede wrote:
| I feel your pain, also being on all three.
|
| The biggest difference IMO is in how they're handled by
| large organizations and how prod permissions are
| provisioned by them. In Azure you have one user account
| and one org, with subscriptions for your user account to
| activate to get permissions. You can have multiple
| subscriptions but they're under the same login/user
| account and you can have multiple active at the same
| time. In AWS, you get access to an account or accounts
| that have different logins, so you get to juggle those
| with login/logout, even if there's SSO. In GCP, there are
| multiple projects, under a single login, but you may have
| to juggle projects.
|
| The other aspect is how regions are dealt with. AWS
| global resource index/search thing is useful, but it
| totally feels like I spend more time juggling regions
| with AWS. Azure's regions themselves are, let's just say,
| interesting. GCP is better at it than AWS, and less
| interesting than Azure (which is a good thing).
| rbanffy wrote:
| > GCP is the best of the three
|
| I must have very different needs. In my perception, AWS
| is the best of the three, Azure is second, and Google
| would be #3. Depending on your unique news, you might
| choose different CSP's, from Digital Ocean to Oracle or
| IBM (the only place you can get AIX, IBMi, and z/OS)
| UltraSane wrote:
| AWS feels fundamentally better engineered than Azure but
| Azure's GUI and API feels more consistent. AWS has never
| had the kind of global outage that Azure has had.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| I disagree, I find Azure much easier to set up and use.
| achow wrote:
| Scott Guthrie is the one who drove Azure.
|
| Dated 2013, a year before Nadella became CEO:
|
| https://www.change.org/p/the-microsoft-board-of-directors-
| as...
| timsneath wrote:
| Azure existed long before ScottGu took over. It started
| with dueling projects from Ray Ozzie's world and Bob
| Muglia's world. Ray had great ideas but no idea how to run
| something like Azure at scale. Bob brought the enterprise
| mindset and retooled it, and of course Scott owns the
| lion's share of the credit for its growth and technical
| qualities.
| achow wrote:
| BobMu left Microsoft because he was not sold on cloud, he
| was an advocate for 'on-prem' solutions (and for its time
| it made sense since enterprise customers were against
| cloud).
| rozzie wrote:
| I began recruiting for what became Azure in Jan 2006. I
| was chief software architect / cto at the company.
| Amitabh Srivastava and the legendary Dave Cutler were the
| leads, with Dave focused on the hypervisor. (I'd met Dave
| in the 80's when he was at DEC and I was at DG.)
|
| The project was in my team (CSA labs) but was cross-
| funded behind the scenes by Kevin Johnson, the president
| of Server & Tools. KJ & I did this because there was
| passive-aggressive resistance to a 'cloud first'
| design/architecture philosophy from within his org, where
| there was a deeply-rooted belief that enterprise servers
| and ops management tools would adequately scale-up.
|
| KJ bought in and was all-in, as was the 'tools' part of
| his org (Soma & ScottGu). SteveB initially didn't quite
| know what to make of my desire and myriad efforts to
| fundamentally transform the company from packaged
| products toward services, and he had to cope with some of
| the wake I was leaving. It wasn't all smooth. But he
| believed in me and helped me to recruit internally, which
| was essential.
|
| My explicit cross-funding agreement with KJ, my peer, was
| that when I decided it was the 'right time', I'd hand off
| my Azure org and it would be re-merged into S&T in more-
| or-less a 'reverse merger', with cloud leadership taking
| over server.
|
| I launched Azure at PDC 2008 with what today we'd call
| lambda's (functions-as-a-service based on .net) & blobs &
| cloud database as the core services. Why no linux or
| windows VMs? They were absolutely part of day 1 plans,
| but a major political ploy from within KJ's team ('this
| will kill the server business') resulted in an active
| decision (mine) to defer until post-launch. It wasn't a
| technology issue, nor was it an OSS issue; the team
| believed in OSS & Linux. But shipping was top priority,
| and we shipped.
|
| When I ultimately left the company in 2011, it was time
| to do the reverse merger that KJ and I had planned. A
| proven, super-talented manager from Bing that everyone
| loved, Satya, was chosen to lead the org as it was moved
| into S&T upon my departure. James Hamilton, the architect
| of Azure's relational DB, left for AWS. Ultimately, under
| Satya, ScottGU & co ended up re-plumbing much of the
| original code with a by-then-ready Windows hypervisor,
| VMs & Linux, and all that you see today. By then the org
| finally was aligned and 'believed', and SteveB was
| genuinely 'all in'.
|
| Getting products from 0 to 1 is sometimes a challenging
| process involving incredible people and stamina from
| believers at every level. In this case I'd say it was
| worth the effort.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| This is hindsight bias. Because other people took some of his
| later initiatives and made them successful, it's tempting to
| look back and grant him these as wins.
|
| We should resist that temptation and judge him on the results
| he delivered. MS was the essential tech company, king of the
| world, and under his leadership their innovation stalled, they
| lost in markets where they were leading, the stock stagnated,
| and huge piles of money were vaporized on acquisitions that
| were poorly planned or executed.
|
| He tried to buy Yahoo for $44 billion! Only Yahoo's greater
| idiocy saved him from that gargantuan mistake. And that was
| just one of many.
| D13Fd wrote:
| One of the points in the article is that he made many bets,
| some of them panned out really well, others didn't, but on
| the whole he set Microsoft on a really good path.
|
| Buying Yahoo would have been a bet that didn't work out,
| probably, but I don't think it goes against the point in the
| article.
| legitster wrote:
| Hindsight works both ways.
|
| Developing OSes and software was clearly an unsustainable
| business. It's obvious in hindsight that cloud infrastructure
| was the way to go. But at the time placing a lot of different
| bets to find a few successful product-market fits was the
| best you could ask for.
| dangus wrote:
| While it may be true that the OS itself isn't really a cash
| cow anymore (if it ever was), I still think Microsoft's
| greatest failure of the previous decade was exiting the
| smartphone OS space and ceding it to Google and Apple.
|
| I think that Ballmer's management can take a lot of blame
| for that. I think a different CEO could have executed and
| possibly have kept Microsoft in that market with success.
|
| The Apple App Store by itself is a trillion dollar
| ecosystem. Microsoft being able to gain even a sliver of
| that size would be worth quite a lot.
|
| We might give Apple similar criticism on the other side of
| this coin by saying that it's somewhat insane that Apple
| _hasn 't_ tried entering the public cloud market,
| especially given the fact that they now design their own
| ARM processors that are essentially the market leaders in
| that architecture.
| toast0 wrote:
| > While it may be true that the OS itself isn't really a
| cash cow anymore (if it ever was), I still think
| Microsoft's greatest failure of the previous decade was
| exiting the smartphone OS space and ceding it to Google
| and Apple.
|
| I mean, Microsoft was too early and too late on
| smartphones. I never cared to look into the pre WP7
| history.
|
| But the more recent Windows Phone died with WM10, which I
| don't think is fair to blame on Balmer. WM10 came out in
| public beta in Feburary 2015, and Balmer was replaced in
| February 2014. Microsoft eliminated their legendary
| testing program in August 2014, and the WM10 betas and
| release in November 2015 had very poor quality. On my
| phones, I had to choose between annoying bugs in
| notifications in WP8 or WM10 with a subpar, laggy
| experience with mobile Edge that managed to be worse than
| mobile IE. They did manage to get a decent final release
| together in 2020, although mobile Edge was still crap.
| You _can_ blame Balmer for not letting Firefox on their
| app store, I think; a browser that didn 't suck would
| have helped _me_ stay on WP longer anyway.
|
| Still, I think Continuum with an x86 phone could have
| gotten market share, but Intel cancelled atom for phones
| in April 2016.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| My thesis is WP8 was already the first huge misstep where
| they lost developers.
| dangus wrote:
| Yeah, the idea that Nadella killed Windows Phone only
| makes sense in the context of Windows Phone already
| having failed under Ballmer.
|
| I was a Windows Phone user during 8 and 8.1. There was a
| short period where I felt like some traction was taking
| place. My bank even had a Windows Phone app, until they
| didn't.
|
| Windows 8.1 was the most competitive version against
| contemporaries, but then the delays and issues
| surrounding 10 really took the wind out of those sails.
|
| My perspective as a consumer is that Microsoft buying
| Nokia seemed to have made Nokia worse and delayed their
| phone development process. I found myself without any
| upgrade path, while Apple and Samsung users could get a
| pretty significant upgrade in capability every year at
| that time.
|
| Nokia was also better at making low-end phones and had
| very few flagship products that were iPhone and Galaxy
| competitors.
|
| On the business side Microsoft didn't focus on having
| their entire lineup available on all four US carriers.
| They had all these weird carrier exclusives where getting
| a new Windows Phone would mean switching carriers.
|
| I have to think that the break in compatibility between
| Windows 7 and 8 really screwed over developer relations
| as well. On the Apple side they were delivering an
| experience very familiar to Mac developers, and on the
| Android side the experience was an open source free-for-
| all playground.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| That's exactly it. There were a bunch of hardcore Windows
| dev shops getting ready to support Windows Phone who
| jumped on WP7, ready to dig down, but who felt betrayed
| when WP8 was a clean break. You lose that hardcore bunch,
| then you are just evaluated on the generics and Windows
| Phone had no edge.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| I tried various "weird phones" on my way to standard
| Android, among them a high-end WinCE phone (Xperia X1a)
| and a WP8 one (Lumia 520). Make no mistake about it, WP8
| was a good mobile OS, even if they did stick the dreaded
| "Windows" name in there. Smooth, reliable, battery
| efficient, well-thought-out UI. But alas, too late. By
| then Android had captured the "not iOS" market and it
| would have taken a miracle to bring a third OS to the
| mainstream.
|
| I very briefly tried WP10, and it actually seemed a step
| backwards; in their desperate attempt to somehow unify
| the desktop and phone thing, be it in code base or user
| experience or whatever, they tried too hard.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| _Developing OSes and software was clearly an unsustainable
| business. It 's obvious in hindsight that cloud
| infrastructure was the way to go._
|
| Cloud infrastructure has become a commodity though and you
| can replace your cloud provider easily (theoretically,
| lol). What moat can MS or anyone else build around cloud
| infrastructure? Compare to OS' where MS may never have had
| a competitor catch up if they'd kept up speed on their OS
| teams.
|
| Same with video games these days. Adding in digital casinos
| may seem nice but now you're just the same as every other
| digital casino offering.
| RandomThoughts3 wrote:
| > Cloud infrastructure has become a commodity though
|
| There are only 3 significant providers and the needed
| investments are a gigantic barrier to entry but sure it's
| a _commodity_.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Treating his tenure as just a bunch of vague bets that
| didn't pan out does not give Ballmer enough credit. He was
| a hands-on leader responsible for how MS executed, which
| had a direct impact on product success or failure.
|
| MS did not just have bad luck, they lost to competitors.
| nl wrote:
| Would Yahoo under different management have done better?
|
| Yahoo.com remains the _8th most visited website on earth_ [1]
| (I had no idea until I read that on HN some months back). It
| sits between Wikipedia and Reddit.
|
| [1] https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/
| toast0 wrote:
| Well, I think the Bing search deal would have been a lot
| different if Microsoft had owned Yahoo.
|
| Yahoo management was looking to reduce the cost of running
| web search and advertising platforms, but ended up still
| having a large expense to crawl the web and basically do
| web search in order to enhance Bing results. And then the
| Microsoft ad market managed to be worse in all sorts of
| ways (for advertisers and publishers) compared to the
| existing yahoo one, plus Microsoft took a cut of the
| revenue. Some of that should have been better if it was one
| company; plus, I bet Microsoft would have sent Yahoo
| employees an Xbox360 or something. (I worked for Yahoo
| Travel from 2004-2011)
| tdeck wrote:
| > under his leadership their innovation stalled, they lost in
| markets where they were leading, the stock stagnated, and
| huge piles of money were vaporized on acquisitions that were
| poorly planned or executed.
|
| A lot of this sounds like Google under Sundar's leadership,
| although I'm not sure if there is a parallel to the failed
| acquisitions, and some of the rot had set in well before.
| cyberax wrote:
| I remember working with Microsoft as a client in 2000-s, it was
| awesome. We started as a startup, and enrolled in a BizSpark
| program. It gave us basically free access to Microsoft tools
| and with very responsive support.
|
| We later transitioned into volume licensing, that also was
| simple and straightforward. The business side of Microsoft was
| a streamlined unstoppable train at that point.
|
| The technical side, not so much. Microsoft was still trying to
| be the only software company in the world, and it was pushing
| all kinds of WPF, WCF, and other WTFs. So they completely
| missed hyperscalers and the growing market of Linux-based
| servers.
| unixhero wrote:
| They missed the mark on mobile oses and appstores.
| addicted wrote:
| Wow. Microsoft Licensing was the stuff of nightmares.
|
| You could literally get certifications in Microsoft
| licensing. There were experts whose only job was Microsoft
| Licensing consultants.
|
| MS'es licensing was so bad you would get different quotes
| from the same person within a week of asking because almost
| no one understood it.
| cyberax wrote:
| Sure. MS had tons of resellers with somewhat different
| markups, although not that different.
|
| We needed only the basic stuff: Windows Server, Exchange,
| MSSQL, a bunch of XP licenses. And this all was
| straightforward. We also got MSDN subscription basically
| for free.
| datavirtue wrote:
| WPF is still unmatched.
| 71bw wrote:
| Exactly and I'm never going to change my opinion. Nothing
| in this area was ever so easy and yet so powerful.
| cyberax wrote:
| React Native is better...
| eastbound wrote:
| > The business side of Microsoft was a streamlined
| unstoppable train at that point.
|
| Surprising. As a startup I just couldn't understand how to
| subscribe to MS Office, seems like it required a hotmail
| account or something, it always bored me before completing
| the steps.
| vjust wrote:
| 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 two behind as far as using a Windows laptop for
| coding in the cloud. Python is the language of AI - not
| Asp.net, not C#. Ballmer would never have seen the writing on
| the wall. He would've pushed something wierd, like VBA .
| metadat wrote:
| I have as much disdain for the monkey man as the next OSS
| fan. But VSCode was always closed sourced crap at the
| arbitrary whims of a soulless zombie corp, and they never
| promised otherwise in a significant way. It's not relevant
| and not a good foundational signal or basis for any argument.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| ... https://github.com/microsoft/vscode? It's MIT licensed.
| Or are we here to start GPL vs MIT for the 10,000th time?
| signa11 wrote:
| oh please :)
|
| the old 'embrace-extend-extinguish' model is what it
| _truly_ is, f.e. , you cannot take extensions from m$
| store and use it.
|
| there have been large number of discussions around this
| topic, and folks have highlighted these concerns more
| articulately than i could ever hope to do.
|
| take your pick.
| cypress66 wrote:
| Idk, I use cursor which is a proprietary commercial VS
| code fork and it just works. So clearly the license/OSS
| situation is very workable.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| > 'embrace-extend-extinguish' model is what it _truly_ is
|
| With this mindset, what could MS possibly create that
| wouldn't make you say this?
| mynameisash wrote:
| This definitely seems like an unfalsifiable proposition
| for the MS haters.
|
| Microsoft does something shitty? See, they're a terrible
| company.
|
| Microsoft does something awesome? Well, we're currently
| in the "embrace" or "extend", so they're a terrible
| company.
|
| I'm as (or more) pessimistic than the next guy about the
| state of tech and capitalism, but at least give credit
| when and where credit's due.
| signa11 wrote:
| a previous discussion about something similar happened
| here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25719045
| coretx wrote:
| The destructive EEE strategy is replaced by a
| constructive poisoning the well strategy. That's arguably
| moral progress while there is no legal or financial
| incentive to do so. That's praise for Nadella, not
| Ballmer.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| That is Code OSS, MS official binary builds of Visual
| Studio Code, as explained at the top of the Readme,
| include proprietary code. MS also has several very
| popular proprietary extensions. Some of those extensions,
| older cersions were open source.
| solarkraft wrote:
| > they never promised otherwise in a significant way
|
| It's commonly promoted as ,,open source" and this seems to
| be commonly believed. Pretty much everyone I tell that the
| official builds of VSCode are proprietary (and how
| proprietary they are) is pretty surprised.
| smolder wrote:
| There's a working build of just the open source part of
| VSCode (with basically all the same functionality) called
| VSCodium
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Actually there was a lot of open source happening under
| Ballmer - not because of him but in that time. VSCode's
| beginnings were in an earlier similar product were from that
| time. He didn't interfere or stop those projects. Attributing
| that to Nadella is just false.
| wslh wrote:
| You can run Linux servers on Azure (and Hyper-V), so it's
| worth taking the 'hate' against Linux with a grain of salt.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Ballmer didn't hate linux and open source.
|
| He feared it as a threath to Microsoft's business model and
| revenue streams.
| dymk wrote:
| That's a distinction without a difference
| bsuvc wrote:
| That's just _why_ he hated it.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| > He would've pushed something wierd, like VBA .
|
| _That_ was Bill Gates. Bill Gates founded the company on
| BASIC and seemed to remain a fan of the language even as the
| rest of the world moved on to other languages.
|
| Ballmer wasn't technical so appeared to have no skin in the
| game of _which_ language "won", so long it was Microsoft
| Developer Tools like Visual Studio developers used to work on
| it (and what would become VS Code, which as many point out
| did start under Ballmer's tenure). That "Developers!
| Developers! Developers!" meme was directly an "I want to
| support developers wherever they are and however they want to
| work". Sure he was a huge Windows cheerleader and would want
| those Developers working on Windows machines, but he really
| did seem to want to see Windows be the best platform for
| developers to code for anything (including/especially the
| cloud).
|
| In terms of Python specifically, IronPython was active and
| interesting during Ballmer's tenure and Ballmer helped form a
| team that was actively contributing to open source projects
| like Python (and Node and Redis and others) to make them all
| run better (sometimes much better) on Windows. Ballmer may
| have been afraid of open source as a business model, but he
| also seemed to realize the usefulness of open source for
| bringing developers (back) to Windows and he did start
| efforts in that direction.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Surface is selling like hotcakes.
| jobigoud wrote:
| Ha! It was a trap, they are likely talking about Surface, the
| big table-computer. It was such a failure that they
| repurposed the name for something else and you might have
| never heard about it. We had one at work circa 2013.
| belter wrote:
| Memories get a bit fuzzy after 5-10 years.But this take from
| 2012 is a reminder of what a mess Steve Ballmer was as CEO:
| https://www.netnetweb.com/content/blog/blog/top-10-reasons-w...
| 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.
| dh2022 wrote:
| 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!
| whobre wrote:
| His biggest success was the failure to acquire Yahoo for 44 bn in
| 2008
| wkat4242 wrote:
| For me it was more his personality that made me dislike him. He
| acted like a baboon on stage. Nadella is much more composed and
| seems more intelligent as a result. I don't like that kind of
| extreme expression and this is important because I wouldn't
| respect such a leader at work. See also other stuff like the
| chair-throwing incident of course.
|
| Also something I didn't see covered, this was also the dark age
| where Microsoft hated linux. Now they say they love Linux and
| there is certainly some affection going around (though I remain
| sceptical).
|
| 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), they call everything
| 'copilot' so even their own people get confused which product
| does what because there are literally over 30 separate copilot
| products now. Stuff is changing by the day (until 2 weeks ago the
| copilot button controlled both consumer and corporate copilots,
| now it only works with consumer). It's the kind of overeager rush
| that makes it feel like nobody has a clue what they're doing
| anymore.
| maeil wrote:
| > 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.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| 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.
| kwere wrote:
| 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.
| Rastonbury wrote:
| Culturally everyone I've spoken to who has seen both Ballmer era
| and later Nadella complains how terrible the company was to work
| for back then
| not_a_bot_4sho wrote:
| Funny story. I used to see Steve almost every weekday for a
| couple of years.
|
| I can't speak to his business skills, but I can attest that he
| never once offered a tip for his daily black iced tea. We'd even
| have it ready for him before he showed up so he never had to
| wait! He would pay with cash, and I'd hand him his change and
| drink, and that was that.
|
| It's funny to me now: one of the richest men in the world and he
| never once offered a tip.
|
| Frugality aside, he was always very polite and warm so I can't be
| mad. Makes for a good ice breaker story.
|
| Edit: holy moly, this is a sensitive subject. Please remember
| this was from a time before tipflation. Tipping meant you left
| your change behind once in a while only if you felt the desire to
| show appreciation. It wasn't an obligation. Yes, I still do think
| it's a funny story. Roast me for being entitled lol
| arandomusername wrote:
| What frugality? He was paying the full price that it was being
| sold at.
| not_a_bot_4sho wrote:
| Seattle coffee culture is different than what you may be used
| to.
| AdieuToLogic wrote:
| > What frugality? He was paying the full price that it was
| being sold at.
|
| By that logic, most reading these comments should expect to
| hear from their employer: What annual bonus?
| What stock options? The company is paying full price
| that your time was being sold at.
| l33t7332273 wrote:
| The "full price" often includes a bonus and stock options.
| xandrius wrote:
| Annual bonus is either performance based or as a retainer
| to make up for differences in the wages since the person
| was hired.
|
| Stock options are because you could be paid more or you are
| taking risks for future rewards.
|
| A mandatory tip is because your employer doesn't want to
| pay you full wage and instead of increasing the price and
| pay you more, they pass it over to the customers. So they
| get the same profits without having to bother.
|
| Quite different reasons.
| godelski wrote:
| > Annual bonus is either performance based
| >>>> We'd even have it ready for him before he showed up
| so he never had to wait! -\_(tsu)_/-
| AdieuToLogic wrote:
| > Annual bonus is either performance based or as a
| retainer to make up for differences in the wages since
| the person was hired.
|
| Sounds like a tip to me.
|
| > Stock options are because you could be paid more or you
| are taking risks for future rewards.
|
| Sounds to me like the allure of a job in which tipping is
| expected.
|
| > A mandatory tip is because your employer doesn't want
| to pay you full wage ...
|
| Tips are not mandatory by definition.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >A mandatory tip
|
| evidently the tips under discussion were not mandatory.
| maronato wrote:
| Employees are paid for the work they are expected to
| perform during the hours they are at the office. The
| company doesn't expect them to do more than that, however
| if they do, they get a nice bonus for it.
|
| Baristas are paid to make iced tea. The customer doesn't
| expect them to do more than that, but they can be nice,
| learn your name, prepare your tea ahead of time, change
| the tea recipe to something you enjoy more. Don't you
| think they should get a nice bonus too?
| yxhuvud wrote:
| Sure. From their employer, not from their customer.
| ywvcbk wrote:
| A mandatory fixed/clearly defined tip is effectively a
| service tax. Nothing wrong about that if it's clearly
| advertised (e.g. you don't have to pay it if you take
| out). Quite a few countries in Europe have stuff like
| that.
|
| Variable, pseudo-optional tips seem like a much bigger
| problem.
| devsda wrote:
| Yeah no. Your annual bonus and stock options is between you
| and your employer. Your end customers don't pay for it
| directly, they are paid for within the cost of whatever
| product your employer is selling.
|
| When tipping is no longer customary to receive good service
| and seeps into other aspects of lives it leads to all sorts
| of problems and situations.
|
| This[1] is an extreme example of that situation in a
| different country but are we really ready to accept similar
| consequences and say they should've just paid the poor
| nurse ?
|
| 1. https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/up-mainpuri-
| infant-die...
| Talanes wrote:
| >Your annual bonus and stock options is between you and
| your employer. Your end customers don't pay for it
| directly
|
| In the service industry, you wouldn't need to say end
| customer, because the person you're delivering to is
| already the end customer. Either way is still a results
| based cash reward paid by the entity receiving the direct
| output of your work.
| csomar wrote:
| Bonus/Options are to be paid by the employer. Essentially,
| what you are asking for is that you go to Netflix
| subscription page and there is a dropdown saying "how much
| bonus to pay our employees this year?"
| arandomusername wrote:
| A lot of the times your contract will actually include
| bonus and stock options, so those are part of the price.
| And if not, then the employer absolutely does not have to
| pay bonus or offer stock options. The employee, ofcourse,
| has the right to move jobs if they desire.
| geodel wrote:
| Employer or customer?
|
| Since tipping is done by customers. It is like employers
| tell employees you can let customers know good service is
| for good tippers. Maybe car repair mechanic can pour sweet
| tea in instead of engine oil since customer is known to be
| bad tipper.
|
| I am sure that will go very well with that business.
| cryptozeus wrote:
| Interesting that he would pay by cash
| bena wrote:
| He'd be CEO during the early aughts, most places were still
| cash based
| ouddv wrote:
| Cash was often the fastest way to pay back then.
| corobo wrote:
| Maybe what he really wanted was a super duper whipped cream
| topped pumpkin spiced coffee and sprinkles but thought he'd
| save you guys the hassle and just order something that can be
| poured out of a jug
|
| Poor misunderstood Ballmer :(
| not_a_bot_4sho wrote:
| Now I feel bad.
| carabiner wrote:
| Servers make minimum wage in WA, but you weren't a server. I
| also don't tip if I order at a register.
| AdieuToLogic wrote:
| > Servers make minimum wage in WA, but you weren't a server.
| I also don't tip if I order at a register.
|
| And I assume you do not expect any non-required service from
| those transactions. Which is understandable, yet different
| from:
|
| >> We'd even have it ready for him before he showed up so he
| never had to wait!
|
| If this additional service were provided during your
| patronage, would that warrant a tip even though interaction
| was at a register?
| geodel wrote:
| That's why I think these premium additional services must
| not be offered gratis.
| ugh123 wrote:
| >If this additional service were provided during your
| patronage, would that warrant a tip even though interaction
| was at a register?
|
| Sounds like a convenience for everyone involved. Maybe they
| should have tipped him?
| pensatoio wrote:
| [flagged]
| 01100011 wrote:
| We allow wages you can't live on but then expect customers to
| randomly make up the difference but only for some jobs.
|
| Make too little to afford an apartment, healthcare and food
| and you work in the food service industry? You deserve a tip.
| You work in a meatpacking plant? Oh, get screwed.
| adventured wrote:
| Waiters in the US make more than their peers in: Britain,
| France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan, Canada, New Zealand,
| etc.
|
| That's thanks entirely to the tip system.
| cryptoz wrote:
| Got a citation for that? Lots of waiters in the US make
| $2/hour or something before tips (can anyone correct me
| here?) where the expectation is that tips will bring them
| up to $7-8/hour, more in line with other minimum wage
| jobs.
| labcomputer wrote:
| In California (the most populous state), there is no
| "tipped minimum wage". Everyone earns at least $20/hr. In
| fact, about 1/3 of states don't allow employers to pay
| less for tipped employees.
| cryptoz wrote:
| Oh wow really, 2/3 of states let employers pay below
| minimum wage for tipped employees?
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| If they get insufficient tips to meet the minimum, the
| employer makes up the difference. Nobody makes $2/hour.
| cryptoz wrote:
| Right. Are waiters in other countries listed above making
| less than US federal minimum wage?
| ywvcbk wrote:
| Do costumers in Washington, California, New York etc. tip
| less, the same or even more than in those other states?
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| Back in 2008 my sister would easily make $200 a night
| working at Red Lobster in a town of 80,000. That was just
| the tips, not wages. Prices have probably doubled now,
| along with the tips.
|
| Very few waiters are making as little as you say. Just
| think of what you pay as a tip for one table for 2-4
| people and remember they're handling quite a few tables
| at a time. Quite often if they get a bachelors degree and
| the attached salaried job they take a significant pay
| cut, but the hours are better for having a family.
| ywvcbk wrote:
| > will bring them up to $7-8/hour
|
| Maybe 20 years ago? Almost nobody in the US is making
| that little these days regardless of the Federal minimum
| wage.
|
| And in nicer states you get $15-20 + tips.
| walthamstow wrote:
| Britain has tips. Every restaurant adds 12.5% as an
| 'optional' charge but they know full well that Brits are
| allergic to causing a fuss and will never ask it to be
| removed.
|
| Do US waiters really get paid more than UK with
| PPP/forex? You seem to have the data to hand.
| ywvcbk wrote:
| Seattle is allegedly about on par with London CoL wise.
|
| Min wage for tipped workers is $17.25 per hour. London is
| ~$18. So with exorbitant tipping it should be
| considerably higher?
|
| Also taxes might be lower.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| > Britain has tips. Every restaurant adds 12.5% as an
| 'optional' charge but they know full well that Brits are
| allergic to causing a fuss and will never ask it to be
| removed.
|
| That "service charge" is usually (mandated?) listed on
| the menu, so it would lead to quite an awkward
| conversation if you then complained after sitting and
| eating the meal. It's quite often specified for groups
| over a certain size and it makes more sense than getting
| into a "tipping" argument after the meal.
| miffy900 wrote:
| This ignores how feast-and-famine tipping is; there's a
| high ceiling for potential earning, but it's not always a
| reliable income; and this also ignores how only those
| working in front-line service roles benefit.
|
| Are you the kitchen hand washing dishes? Are you the chef
| or cook who makes the meals and food that the customers
| eat? Are you a cleaner mopping the floors after business
| hours? Nope - none of you get a tip, unless the
| restaurant has a policy of collecting all tips and
| redistributing them to all employees. But how often does
| that happen? It's really easy to just pocket the tip and
| keep it for yourself.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| > Waiters in the US make more than their peers in:
| Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan, Canada,
| New Zealand, etc.
|
| That seems unlikely - do you have any figures to back
| that up?
| cryptica wrote:
| Yes it's weird. It's basically charity re-framed as
| capitalism. As if it's the waiter's performance which
| determines their tip as opposed to just blind luck.
|
| If each waiter could provide their own menu on which they
| could set their own prices individually and take their own
| hidden cut, then that would be fair capitalism.
|
| They'd make a lot more money because consumers would be too
| lazy or too embarrassed to ask a different waiter for their
| version of the menu...
|
| That would be a much better culture for workers.
|
| Unfortunately the current system is set up to make every form
| of payment for labor into a charity. So workers are always in
| the position of begging their boss or customers and they are
| never in the position of intermediating transactions.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Lick the hand.
| ywvcbk wrote:
| Seems a bit more like price segmentation. Basically
| everyone is socially forced to pay as much as they can
| regardless of the actual price.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Absolutely. I hope the tip screen on tablets goes away soon.
| geodel wrote:
| I think they are just getting started. Soon there will
| announcement on speakers for non-tippers "Congratulations!
| You won cheap ass of the day award"
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Being part way through the third Dungeon Crawler Carl
| book, this really amuses me.
| bityard wrote:
| Not even close. They are showing up anywhere a person might
| open their wallet. I have seen tip screens in gas stations,
| fast food restaurants (where you order at a kiosk), vendor
| booths, etc.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| I'm going to the US in a couple of weeks and I'm already
| abhorring the prospect of spending some time looking at the
| specific tipping requirements of the state I'm going to, to
| then spend a week awkwardly guessing if I'm tipping enough,
| too much, or offending someone in the process; while having
| uncomfortable feelings about the people serving me food,
| drink, tour guidance, etc. (on the one hand because they all
| seem to be hunting for my money and being a foreigner, they
| might be hoping that I will tip too much, on the other hand
| because they might be underpaid and I might be an asshole to
| them if I tip too little).
|
| I suppose people who have lived there all their life just
| don't notice it, but for me as an outsider the amount of
| stress and awkwardness that the tipping culture produces in
| daily life is ludicrous.
| throw16180339 wrote:
| If you don't want to think about it, just consistently tip
| 20%. It's generous and no one will complain.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post nationalistic flamebait to HN.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| pensatoio wrote:
| I apologize, dang. I thought that was an appropriate
| response.
| unixhero wrote:
| Tipping for a convenience item at the till really really sucks.
| Am I the only one sane on this? Best regards Norway
| skyyler wrote:
| It does suck.
|
| But in this culture that Steve exists within, those positions
| are paid mostly by tips. He certainly could afford to help
| out the people that prepared his iced tea ritual for him in a
| timely manner, but he did not.
| itake wrote:
| > But in this culture that Steve exists within, those
| positions are paid mostly by tips.
|
| False. Presumably this was in WA, employers have to pay
| full wages. there is no carve out "tipped" wage (most) of
| the rest of the USA has. Currently, min wage in Redmond
| (King County) is $20.29/hr.
|
| Many businesses in King County do not allow tipping.
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| Minimum wage != Prevailing wage in that occupation
| skyyler wrote:
| >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.
| itake wrote:
| 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/counties/53033
| locusofself wrote:
| I live in Redmond. A _decent_ house is 1.2 million
| dollars here.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| If you make more than 1x your wage in tips, then you are
| mostly paid in tips - regardless of whether your state
| has a tipped minimum wage law.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Even in states with a lower tip worker's minimum wage,
| they are still _guaranteed_ to make the standard minimum
| wage if the tips don 't make up the difference.
|
| Serving up food you didn't even cook isn't an intensely
| difficult or skilled job. Nobody should expect a 20% cut
| for doing that. It is not a customers responsibility to
| ensure unskilled service workers are rolling in largesse.
| Just making minimum wage is fair for that kind of work
| provided the minimum is livable.
| casey2 wrote:
| >Serving up food you didn't even cook isn't an intensely
| difficult or skilled job.
|
| Then it should be easy to automate, but the best I've
| seen is a conveyor belt or a box on top of a roomba. In
| reality it's a very skilled job, it's just that most
| everyone is capable of doing it. And "fair" is any wage
| were you can live and increase the quality of your life
| over time as much as your work has increased the quality
| of others.
| pennybanks wrote:
| lol forreal? its not skilled work i dont know what to
| say. your definition everything is skilled but thats not
| how people use it in this context and it becomes a
| useless term. also have you seen a vending machine? its
| already automated.. its literally what this person is
| doing: taking order, giving correct drink. yes they have
| ones that pour it and everything. even give the correct
| change.
|
| and i dont even know where to start of your ideology of
| fair either. i feel like its flexible enough to use it
| however fits your idea why denying any other
| itake wrote:
| Can you share a couple examples of non-skilled labor?
| thowawatp302 wrote:
| > Serving up food you didn't even cook isn't an intensely
| difficult or skilled job.
|
| So how long did you spend doing it, to be able to asser
| that?
| kortilla wrote:
| You can tell based on the hiring criteria. There aren't
| any
| locusofself wrote:
| do you know how expensive it is to live in Redmond? Very
| expensive
| ethbr1 wrote:
| As recently as 10 years ago in 2014, at the tail end of
| Ballmer's CEO tenure, Washington state minimum wage was
| still ~$8.60.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_Unite
| d_S...
| infecto wrote:
| Should not matter how rich the person is. Tipping at the
| register is a shame.
| csomar wrote:
| No you are not. The tipping culture in the US is insane
| (along with the idea that employers want their stuff to be
| paid via tips). Good for Ballmer for sticking to his values.
| EasyMark wrote:
| Baristas in Norway get paid far more than here in the USA
| except in the fanciest of coffee shops. Tip culture is simply
| a part of the restaurant scene here, while I don't agree with
| it, I don't see hurting the baristas/waitstaff as an option
| either. I may not give exorbitant tips, but I give a
| reasonable 10-15%
| oefnak wrote:
| You're keeping the system in place by contributing to it. I
| don't see how people don't understand that. You should act
| how you want everyone to act.
| ywvcbk wrote:
| > Baristas in Norway get paid far more than here
|
| Are they? Google claims the average is about NOK 200 per
| hours? That's barely above the tipped minimum wage in
| Washington or California. So it would be considerably less
| with tips?
| pennybanks wrote:
| this isnt expected. not for most ppl at least. you can if you
| want but its nothing like sitting down getting served or
| delivery driver, etc.
| nicholasbraker wrote:
| Hi Norway, The Netherlands here. I feel you ;-)
| fastasucan wrote:
| I am also Norwegian and I also dislike tipping culture, but
| when they have your daily ice tea ready for you before you
| come in I would say it would be strange to not say "ah, just
| keep the change" now and then to show that you appreciate
| (and essentially pay for) the extra service.
| lmpdev wrote:
| Tipping is a fundamentally flawed and exploitative system
| seizethecheese wrote:
| > exploitative
|
| I worked in restaurants, and let me tell you, I never felt
| exploited in tipped positions. If anything, I felt like lucky
| at least compared everyone else in the restaurant industry.
| The real exploitation happens in the back of the house...
| usui wrote:
| The parent comment did not specify the exploitative system
| as limited to tipees.
| sooheon wrote:
| It exploits customers
| e3bc54b2 wrote:
| I believe GP meant exploitative towards consumers.
|
| The customer was presented a deal. That the deal includes
| non-written, ever increasing additional charges
| unilaterally imposed by other side is exploitative.
| ywvcbk wrote:
| I guess if you are talking about the customers then you
| technically might have a point...
|
| tipped workers would probably be making considerably less on
| average than now if tipping just disappeared. Especially in
| states like WA, CA, NY etc. which don't even have a tipped
| minimum wage
| adventured wrote:
| > the richest man in the world (at the time) and he never once
| offered a tip.
|
| Ballmer was never the richest man in the world, not even for a
| moment.
|
| Right now is about the closest he has ever come to that marker
| (#8, $148 billion).
| not_a_bot_4sho wrote:
| You're absolutely right. Bill Gates was the richest back
| then. My memory failed me on that part. (It's been over 20
| years...)
|
| Fixed my comment to reflect this correction. Thanks!
| mvdtnz wrote:
| If you want more money per drink put it on the menu price.
| Don't passive-aggressively await each customer's random
| generosity.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| "Price discrimination"
| avazhi wrote:
| You think you should have received a tip for working behind the
| counter?
|
| Or were you actually waiting tables and he'd be at a table?
|
| If it's the latter I apologise for the brusqueness.
| not_a_bot_4sho wrote:
| This was a coffeehouse in Redmond. Tipping baristas has been
| a common thing for the past 50-60 years or so on the west
| coast of the US.
|
| And no, I don't think we "should" have received a tip. Most
| regular customers did tip occasionally. He was an outlier but
| only notable because of his wealth.
|
| Other customers who do never tipped were treated the exact
| same.
| avazhi wrote:
| So you seem to think that simply because of his wealth he
| should have been tipping you? The corollary would be the
| notion that regardless of where you were working at the
| time, you would have expected a tip from him simply on
| account of his wealth? There's a huge difference between
| tips being a thing certain patrons do every once in awhile,
| and something being an established norm - are you trying to
| say that in Seattle at the time tipping baristas was
| literally a well-established norm (ie., not just that it
| was common but that it was actually the predominant
| behaviour if not outright expected)?
|
| I'm American but have lived in Australia for nearly 20
| years, and in Melbourne for the past 15. There's a huge
| coffee culture here and almost all cafes have a tipping
| jar. But I can't imagine any baristas finding it odd to the
| point of mentioning if a patron, even a repeat patron,
| never put money in the jars.
|
| I've never been a Ballmer fan myself although he's gotten
| more likeable post-Microsoft IMO, but to me it says a lot
| about his character that he both got his own coffee/tea (as
| opposed to having a PA do it for him), and if you're saying
| he was always polite then I have no clue why you'd feel the
| need to cast aspersions on him by suggesting he should have
| tipped but didn't.
| not_a_bot_4sho wrote:
| > So you seem to think that simply because of his wealth
| he should have been tipping you?
|
| No. But it's funny that he, of all people, didn't. It's
| the juxtaposition of wealth and frugality that are
| amusing.
|
| > are you trying to say that in Seattle at the time
| tipping baristas was literally a well-established norm?
|
| Yes. Without a doubt. But the norm was to tip
| infrequently, and not everyone did it. Those that did
| tipped once a week or 1x/2x a month. And it was usually
| just their change, significantly less than 10%.
|
| > I can't imagine any baristas finding it odd to the
| point of mentioning if a patron, even a repeat patron,
| never put money in the jars
|
| No one blinked an eye at the regulars who didn't tip. It
| wasn't a concern. The only exception is when it was a
| famous billionaire. It's notable.
|
| > why you'd feel the need to cast aspersions on him
|
| How so? I shared an objective observation. And I made
| clear that there was no ill will. Not even the slightest
| bit upset.
|
| I feel like a lot of commenters are working through their
| own issues with tipping that surfaced with this light
| hearted story. Tipflation sucks, I get it. But this story
| isn't that.
| avazhi wrote:
| Well, I guess what I'd say is this: if you told the story
| but left out the part about the tips, but then people
| asked if ever tipped and you said no, that would be a
| very different story from one where the fact he didn't
| tip looms large because of how you tell it. I think the
| story is notable just because a billionaire both ordered
| his own drinks personally and was a nice guy. Aside from
| Buffett going to McDonald's in Omaha I don't think the
| super rich ordering their own fast food is especially
| common these days.
|
| I do agree though in general about tipping culture and
| how most people feel about it. I'm not necessarily trying
| to white knight for a billionaire here, either.
|
| Hope that makes sense and I do appreciate your responses.
| godelski wrote:
| Everyone, chill
|
| Regardless of how you feel about tipping culture we're not
| talking about the average person nor are we talking about the
| average * _experience*_. The dude is worth north of $100bn, and
| is making nearly $10k per minute![0]. Someone who cannot spend
| his wealth. Someone who 'd have to spend tens of millions of
| dollars every single day just to stop his wealth from growing.
| Someone who makes money faster than he can throw hundred dollar
| bills handfuls at a time.
|
| We're not talking about anything normal here because no one
| here * _literally*_ makes thousands of dollars in the time it
| takes to wipe their ass. You can become poor, he would need an
| act of god to do so.
|
| We can have a conversation about tipping and how much everyone
| hates it, but to ignore the fact that we're talking about
| someone with this kind of money is... ludicrous[1]. Throwing
| down a hundred bucks means literally nothing to the man. It is
| not even what a penny is worth to most of you. He's not you and
| framing the discussion this way is obtuse. Rage on tipping, I
| don't give a fuck and I'll probably join you. He's not
| "sticking it to the man" or "standing up for his values" he *
| _is* " the man. He's playing an important role in creating this
| machine you're raging against. I just don't understand any of
| you [0] 1e11*0.05/365/24/60 | |
| | | |_ minute | | | |____ hour
| | | |________ day | |_____________
| Conservative 5% yearly return |_________________ At
| least 25bn less than he is worth... [1] FWIW, I hate
| tipping too. Fuck the till based tips with the ever increasing
| percentages. I frequently click 0. But fuck it man, I'm a grad
| student. Still, if I'm a regular somewhere and they are giving
| me special service, I'm gonna throw a few dollars into the tip
| jar. Tipping culture or not they're going out of their way for
| me and I should show gratitude in some way (you can also do by
| other means)
|
| _
| keyle wrote:
| "Everyone, chill"
|
| then proceeds to drop _emphasis_ , F words and other strong
| words.
|
| Maybe take a page of your own book.
| HaZeust wrote:
| The substance of his comment is still well-intentioned
| though. I agree with him.
| RandomThoughts3 wrote:
| Random person writes completely unsourced negative
| comment about someone HN dislikes for no reason. HN
| cheers before launching in a pointless and already
| rehashed a thousands times discussion about tipping
| culture.
|
| I don't know if it's well intentioned but it's peak HN.
| godelski wrote:
| Chill because you all are giving me anxiety that I don't
| need.
|
| Idk how to tell you this, but this is a pretty common
| pattern for human speech. You see it in plenty of
| countries, plenty of cultures. Welcome to Earth. Words mean
| more than the literal dictionary interpretation of them.
|
| Edit:
|
| I only have sass in me tonight.
| cinntaile wrote:
| The workweek just started, you gotta save some sass for
| the rest of the week too.
| godelski wrote:
| I'm a grad student and ABD (all but dissertation). My
| work week has no beginning nor end. But don't worry, I
| still got plenty in me.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| I read "everyone chill" to mean "there's a lot of bad takes
| here", not literally "remain calm". In that context, I
| think the comment makes sense -- they're illustrating just
| how wrong the common take is
| paulddraper wrote:
| I've literally never heard that expression before
| mrmlz wrote:
| Someone learns something new everyday!
| bravetraveler wrote:
| I have, now what do we do? Which of us controls the
| language?
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| Rock paper scissors for it
| bravetraveler wrote:
| I _really_ don 't like this medium for it, when/where? :)
| ryandv wrote:
| This is eye-opening. I make a fraction of what Steve does and
| am still dumb enough to be hitting 20% at the machine every
| time I go out.
|
| If 0% is good enough for Mr. Ballmer, it's good enough for
| me.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| There's a difference between being frugal and being an
| asshole.
|
| If you have enough money that tips are a rounding error for
| you -- not tipping just makes you an asshole.
| 71bw wrote:
| It's none of your business to ever tip anywhere UNLESS
| you explicitly want to thank somebody for their service.
| How hard is that to understand?
|
| It is the workplace's responsibility to pay their staff
| adequately. NOT YOURS.
|
| 0% tip all the way everywhere. No matter if I have $10 or
| $10k on the bill.
| YawningAngel wrote:
| There are lots of instances in which it is in fact your
| responsibility to pay the staff and if you choose to
| ignore that fact and stiff them that's on you
| highwaylights wrote:
| I do tip, but is this perspective really helping the
| people that live off their tips?
|
| You don't feel the need to tip the people stacking
| shelves at Walmart or the Amazon driver.
|
| In almost any other job we reasonably expect that
| someone's compensation is between them and their employer
| and that the state should be making sure they're
| protected from exploitatively low income.
|
| Why are waiting staff a special case? People have worse
| jobs that come without tips and it doesn't seem to bother
| anybody.
|
| Those tips are expected now and irrelevant to service so
| it's also just helping employers get away with paying
| those staff members less, so it's really just subsidizing
| restaurants and cafes at this point.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| > There are lots of instances in which it is in fact your
| responsibility to pay the staff
|
| I'm not aware of this, but then the U.S. has a different
| tipping culture to elsewhere. Have you got any examples?
|
| Also, if it's your responsibility to pay the staff, do
| you also get the right to dictate how they do their job
| (within reason)?
| vasco wrote:
| If you didn't employ them you don't have to pay their
| salary, or even know how to start to evaluate what that
| would be.
| 71bw wrote:
| > There are lots of instances in which it is in fact your
| responsibility to pay the staff
|
| For example?
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _There are lots of instances in which it is in fact
| your responsibility to pay the staff_
|
| Name one (let alone "lots").
| meiraleal wrote:
| > It's none of your business to ever tip anywhere UNLESS
| you explicitly want to thank somebody for their service.
| How hard is that to understand?
|
| That's exactly the point? Buying iced tea everyday for
| some time means that he liked it. Not showing
| appreciation to something he clearly appreciates
| master-lincoln wrote:
| I also use that one park garage all the time and my
| streets are snow plowed and I appreciate that. Still I
| don't know anyone who tips those workers. Do they provide
| less service than the person making me a drink?
|
| I personally only tip if service was extraordinary and I
| appreciated it. Which is once a full moon at best
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _Not showing appreciation to something he clearly
| appreciates_
|
| He shows appreciation by showing up and buying tea every
| day.
|
| How much do you tip Apple or Microsoft as appreciation
| for their software every time you show up to use it?
| fragmede wrote:
| Judging by the number of ads in Windows, maybe $1/day.
| meiraleal wrote:
| > How much do you tip Apple or Microsoft as appreciation
| for their software every time you show up to use it?
|
| I don't use their products which for me are all garbage
| and I tip often free and open source software.
|
| Now the important thing, comparing "tipping" Apple and
| Microsoft to giving a tip to a minimum wage worker is
| quite evil.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| This is a pretty heartless reply. I will be downvoted for
| expressing my view here. > It is the
| workplace's responsibility to pay their staff adequately.
| NOT YOURS.
|
| Yeah, except that most of these (low income/low skill)
| service workers don't have the negotiation power to
| change this power dynamic. Thus, you, someone with enough
| means to eat out, can offset that gap, just a little bit,
| by tipping.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I don't think you're _wrong_ , but I can't help thinking
| that the tip money would be better off funnelled towards
| political change.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| And keep this twisted system in place. The only way for
| it to finally collapse is if people stop always tipping.
| To me that's truly heartless.
| grecy wrote:
| > _Yeah, except that most of these (low income /low
| skill) service workers don't have the negotiation power
| to change this power dynamic._
|
| And by tipping you are keeping it so they can _just_
| afford to keep making ends meet, thus enabling the status
| quo.
|
| It could be argued you are continuing the problem.
| vasco wrote:
| And you work to keep the system the same way. You work to
| earn, and then spend your money sponsoring the system
| when it's optional for you to sponsor it.
| pkphilip wrote:
| Interestingly, I have never seen tips being demanded by
| restaurant staff almost as an entitlement in any other
| country other than the US - even in far poorer nations.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _Yeah, except that most of these (low income /low
| skill) service workers don't have the negotiation power
| to change this power dynamic_
|
| This has no bearing in reality. Most of these places
| can't staff their stores because no one will work for
| prevailing wages.
|
| > _Thus, you, someone with enough means to eat out_
|
| Oh yeah, the people grabbing coffee at Starbucks are all
| rich.
|
| Raise your prices and pay your staff.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _Oh yeah, the people grabbing coffee at Starbucks are
| all rich._
|
| Relatively speaking? Yes.
|
| Someone spending $4+ on one coffee mean they can easily
| tip.
|
| And if your argument is that they can't afford that?
|
| Then those same customers won't be able to afford the
| price increase if Starbucks simply raised labor costs and
| passed it on.
| geodel wrote:
| Thats exactly the point. Raise the price then customer
| can decide if they can afford it or not. With fake low
| prices customers may not know what they are getting into.
| geodel wrote:
| The funny thing is when people reasonably say raise the
| price to actual costs, the answers is "Customer may stop
| coming..". As if the whole point to scam customer with
| fake low prices.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _It is the workplace 's responsibility to pay their
| staff adequately. NOT YOURS._
|
| I don't get this argument, because at the end of the day
| you're paying both ways.
|
| Either you're paying higher menu prices (because labor
| costs have increased) or you're paying tips (because
| labor costs are artificially low and you're supplementing
| them).
|
| There is no magical "the business pays its employees
| more, but everything you buy stays the same price."
|
| Especially not with food service margins.
| roenxi wrote:
| > Still, if I'm a regular somewhere and they are giving me
| special service, I'm gonna throw a few dollars into the tip
| jar.
|
| There are some philosophical problems there. The
| business/servers can't renegotiate the menu like that - if
| they aren't getting paid for a service and the customer
| didn't ask for it then there is no reason they should get
| more money for it.
|
| Also, an observation about how the economics of regulars work
| - if you are a regular the business is probably already
| making a lot of money off you. Someone who goes back even a
| single time earns them 2x as much as a one-time walk in.
| Being a regular is already a favour to a business even if all
| you do is order something cheap off the menu. In my
| experience, when a business identifies that I am a regular
| they try to make me pay less to keep me coming back.
| antaviana wrote:
| Actually, there is a restaurant where I go sometimes that
| when I pay cash instead of with a credit card, the owner
| gets so elated that rounds down the amount to pay in some
| 3-7%. The countertip I guess.
| ryandv wrote:
| Restaurants and bars especially in my city love tax
| evasion - that's why they are so enthusiastic about cash
| payments.
| jajko wrote:
| Yes thats normally the main drive, cash is usually just
| annoyance and additional risk to business.
|
| I wouldnt be too harsh judging that business though,
| quite a few restaurants are barely cutting it so this may
| help them stay afloat. Its this or generally higher
| prices in restaurants.
| kalaksi wrote:
| That just means that it wasn't about money for him.
| godelski wrote:
| Maybe. Or maybe he still lives like he is poor. If he does,
| or if he lives in any way where he is considering money as
| meaningful, then he is delusional. The man has so much
| money he can buy a mega yacht with less than a week's
| passive income. If money means anything to him, he is does
| not understand. If he also doesn't see how he can
| fundamentally change people's lives in a single act that
| means nothing to him, what does that say? After all, this
| is a man who could dump a pile of hundred dollar bills on
| the table every day, at every restaurant and coffee shop he
| visits and the act is less of a burden to him than it is
| for us to hold a door open for someone who's an awkward
| distance away.
|
| Money is a proxy. Did we forget what it was for?
| kubb wrote:
| One problem with unbounded capitalism is that people can't
| understand how big big numbers are. They think of themselves
| but slightly richer. So of course people should be able to
| accumulate the wealth of a city or a country, and there's no
| negative aspect to that at all. They just worked like we do.
| And they should get gains on their wealth just like we do for
| our retirement. There's no difference except a couple of
| zeros.
| godelski wrote:
| I'm not against "unbounded" capitalism, but certainly there
| should be things in place that ensure adequate competition
| is taking place. So I prefer "unfettered". I think this is
| of special concern given that the Silicon Valley Model is
| to literally become a monopoly. That's not good for anyone,
| including the company.
|
| That said, obviously I have some concerns on the
| billionaire class, especially the hundred billionaires.
| > can't understand how big big numbers are.
|
| It isn't _just_ this (though it is true[0]), but that money
| works extremely differently at this scale. Interest is not
| a rounding error, or something you think about being
| influential down the line. Passive income is so great that
| it gets difficult to imagine. There 's those sites[1] that
| have you try to spend a large fortune and they don't even
| get to the different part. That being that for people like
| Elon, anything on that list can be bought by a week's worth
| of... doing nothing. That the passive income is so high
| that the problem isn't even that you couldn't spend the
| money if it was not growing, but that it grows so fast that
| you can't even spend it if you tried really hard. Spending
| a static billion dollars is incredibly difficult and you
| have to get creative. But in the real world with interest,
| it is exponentially more difficult.
|
| I think the best example of this is MacKenzie Scott, Jeff
| Bezos's ex-wife. She's been spending her money as fast as
| she can and she "hasn't lost a dime". Forbes had her
| starting at $36bn and currently has her at $35.6B[2]. In
| the time since she has divorced Bezos she's given away
| nearly $17bn. We're talking less than 5 years.... In <5
| years she's "spent" half of her static wealth and still has
| what she started with. Money at this level simply does not
| work the same way and a lot of people do not fundamentally
| understand this.
|
| But there's also a psychological issue I don't get. What is
| the point of having so much "fuck you money" if you are not
| going to tell people to fuck off. Certainly they do at
| times, but often they don't. To have the wealth to do
| whatever you want, to be unconstrained, unburdened, and to
| still have anxiety and concern? To be stressed? I can
| understand that old habits die hard, but they do die.
|
| [0] I started my academic life in physics. We do giant
| numbers and tiny numbers. I can with great certainty assert
| that our brains are not made to actualize these numbers. It
| is amazing that we have the math to work with them but when
| you stop to compare and it blows your mind. This is not
| done enough.
|
| [1] https://www.spend-elon-fortune.com/ or articles like
| this https://youngfinances.com/spend-1-billion-dollars-you-
| cant-h...
|
| [2] https://www.forbes.com/profile/mackenzie-scott/
| pheatherlite wrote:
| That's not the point, though. It's not how generous he is
| with his money. It's how he sees money, its purpose in his
| life. People who see wealth as a force multiplier don't gorm
| habits of being careless with it. Just like you see people
| who have no money live pay check to pay check, take on debt
| just to assume a class they don't exist in. Yet you used to
| see Bezos in a camry and Buffet in some equally run of the
| mill car. It's because these people place value on
| everything, a car to themis just depreciating numbers. They
| formed a habit of critically assessing the "why".
|
| Back to the topic at hand: Tipping is a ridiculous notion
| that the wealthy can see through, while the rest of us are
| too brainwashed to objectively analyze
| freilanzer wrote:
| > Back to the topic at hand: Tipping is a ridiculous notion
| that the wealthy can see through, while the rest of us are
| too brainwashed to objectively analyze
|
| Oh yes, the wealthy are superior to us unwashed masses in
| every way. How I wish I could see through and objectively
| analyse, but my bank account won't allow that.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| The phrase, _penny wise and pound foolish_ comes to mind,
| though probably doesn 't strictly apply. I don't spend my
| life reading. I read then live.
|
| I don't see this hyper-optimization as a good thing.
| Externalities and so on. Of course dragons hoard coins.
| They look nice, bring good things, and who is going to stop
| them? _" Game theory"_ is broadly applicable
|
| All this to say: if tipping is a life altering decision for
| you, I have news. You're closer to the townsperson than the
| dragon, outlook is grim. Now the cycle may continue!
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| > Tipping is a ridiculous notion that the wealthy can see
| through, while the rest of us are too brainwashed to
| objectively analyze
|
| Tipping culture is quite different in the Americas than it
| is in e.g. the UK. I don't think it takes much effort to
| analyse that the winners of tipping culture are the
| restaurant/bar owners as they don't have to pay their staff
| properly and can avoid tax.
|
| Whilst I don't like tipping culture, I think there's a
| different reason as to why billionaires might not tip -
| greed. Normal people would never get to be a billionaire as
| it takes a particular kind of greed to have millions of
| dollars and to be determined to hoard even more money when
| you know full well that it's often made by exploiting the
| employees that made you all those millions. It's a very
| nasty, selfish form of hoarding that hurts society, so
| don't be surprised when billionaires demonstrate that they
| don't care about anyone else.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I take it you meant form habits?
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| Why should he give money to someone over literally any other
| person in the same establishment or outside of it? What does
| that have to do with "the man"?
| gitaarik wrote:
| So what's your point, should he have tipped?
| justanotherjoe wrote:
| That's crazy, i didn't know that. That is a guy who is 2
| orders of magnitude above a 'mere' billionaire. And for what?
| Because he was friends with bill gates at Harvard, and
| employee#30 at microsoft. Talk about capitalism's greatest
| mistakes.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| Developers, developers, developers. I'm no fan of the guy
| but he definitely had a bigger role than proximity.
|
| My distaste is exactly _because_ of how he spent his time
| working. I believe we 'd be further along without them,
| considering efforts against free/libre software.
| DSingularity wrote:
| What's the saying? Everyone is acting like they are a multi-
| millionaire that is in a temporary financial bind?
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Like you say, at his level of wealth, the actual dollars and
| cents become almost meaningless. Setting aside whether
| somebody in that position _should_ be leaving a tip, how
| could you not _want_ to? I would love to have the experience
| of just dropping a $1k tip to see what it 's like. Maybe he
| did that once so never felt the need to again.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _I would love to have the experience of just dropping a
| $1k tip to see what it 's like._
|
| What exactly are your expectations here?
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I'm not sure, that's exactly why I'd like to experience
| it and find out! I guess the server would be very
| grateful, but who knows. They might tell me it will
| change their life in some way, the restaurant might name
| a dish after me, countless things could happen.
| username332211 wrote:
| Or maybe he does tip generously, and maybe he does throw of
| dollars, but only does it to actual waiting staff? After
| all, that's the issue most people seem to have here.
|
| It makes no sense to psychoanalyze a Ballmer's mind from
| this short episode.
| AlexDragusin wrote:
| I like how in this case 1e11 almost reads as "hell" :)
| potato3732842 wrote:
| It really rubs me the wrong way that you tell everyone to
| chill and then go on to levy your own value judgement of the
| situation. If you want to larp as the ref or moderator you
| don't get to pick a side.
| gs17 wrote:
| Reminds me of his visit to my undergrad. He had a niece or
| nephew or something (I never met them) who went there, and he
| was going to visit them. The university planned what amounted
| to a large science fair to showcase all the projects around and
| everyone was required to put something together. The day came,
| he walked in, made a beeline for his relative's project, talked
| to them for a minute, then hurried right out. My mentor ran
| after him trying to get him to take some merchandise.
|
| In retrospect it's pretty obvious there was a big
| miscommunication, and he didn't really seem rude about it
| (supposedly he did talk to a project they put outside the hall
| because it used a Kinect IIRC). It really wouldn't surprise me
| to find out the university told him we _just so happened_ to
| have this research fair going on the day he 'd be visiting.
| nirui wrote:
| > one of the richest men in the world and he never once offered
| a tip.... he was always very polite and warm so I can't be mad
|
| I bet Mr. Ballmer saved a lot of money from his "polite and
| warm".
|
| I once watched one of TED business talk videos. In the video
| the businessman proudly claimed that from a very young age, he
| learned to take advantage of people's empathy towards him as a
| kid to get a better business term (or something like that, it
| was long ago I can't fully remember).
|
| From that video, I've learned to reduce my empathy/emotional
| reaction when making decisions. Because you just don't know if
| the other side is manipulating you into making mistakes. Money
| is money, you pay what you should've, we'll discuss extra
| things after that.
|
| If Mr. Ballmer never pay the tips that he should've, then he
| needs to pay more for the product (in the form of added on
| convenience fee, for example). Of course, if you failed in
| charging such fee, then that's your fault, for falling into the
| "polite and warm" trap.
|
| BTW: "sensitive" not. But comments on Hacker News are often
| trended to demand stuff for free, including kindness which is
| independent of the original stuff. That's very foolish.
|
| Today at least you have 15% 20% 25% choice to punish or reward
| people who directly serve you. If everything is 20% included in
| the price (oh, it will be like this, it always goes like this),
| then you just have to sit there and take in whoever got the
| altitude that day. That's not even how capitalism let alone
| democracy works.
| switch007 wrote:
| Rich people are the most oddly tight people I've ever met.
| They'll buy a PS5m house one day then the next spend 30 minutes
| arguing with the gardener that the broken 10 year old mower
| should just work and most definitely doesn't need replacing
| throw4950sh06 wrote:
| They probably bought an expensive one that should be working
| longer than that. You don't get rich by buying cheap shit
| that breaks often.
| switch007 wrote:
| You don't get poor from that level of rich replacing a
| lawnmower
|
| The mower was PS500 (my Dad was the gardener)
| throw4950sh06 wrote:
| It's the mindset, not the specific action.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Boris Johnson (ex-Prime Minister) is the classic example here
| in the UK. Fantastically wealthy, yet infamous for stiffing
| other people with the bill and never paying them back.
| lynx23 wrote:
| My grandma already said: "With the rich, one learns to save."
| The greedy rich man is so common, its not even a prejudice
| anymore :-)
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| First, I love this story. I'm on your side. For me personally,
| the most charming detail is that he paid in cash. I guess it
| was a while ago! Your story makes me think of the scene from
| the film "Casino" when the mafia guys spit into the "free"
| sandwiches that they give to the police. (Ref:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPufB6oaJFE)
|
| It is weird to me that a guy like that even bothers to pick up
| his own daily black iced tea. Once you are making a few million
| dollars per year (and you have a net worth > 1B USD), I would
| assume that everything would be brought to you. Literally, have
| an assistant who does all of this stuff and brings it to your
| office. The most highly paid people that I have ever observed
| up close were in non-stop meetings all day long -- talkin'
| money! They had no time to buy their own daily coffee or lunch.
| There was an assistant who would bring everything to their
| office. That said, maybe he did it to "feel normal". For any
| human being, having a net worth > 1B USD must really screw with
| your world view.
| Maxatar wrote:
| My understanding is that Azure became an incredibly profitable
| cloud platform once it became open to Linux, which was something
| done after Ballmer had stepped down and Nadella became CEO.
| kettlecorn wrote:
| Two small anecdotes about Ballmer from my internship there:
|
| At an intern event an intern asked some question along the lines
| of "What's one quality of a competitor you wish Microsoft had?"
| They were clearly asking about cultural qualities but Ballmer's
| response was "I'd take Google's search engine because that thing
| prints money". Then he did this super exaggerated gesture and
| noise imitating a money machine printing money.
|
| At the time that was a super disappointing answer to me because
| as an intern within the Bing division I really felt like there
| was this culture of "Bing is better and it's not our fault Google
| is beating us". To see Ballmer not use the question as an
| opportunity to talk about ways Microsoft could improve felt like
| seeing the source of that cultural problem.
|
| The other was from an intern event with Phil Spencer. Phil
| Spencer at the time was the head of Xbox's Games Division, but
| not yet the head of Xbox. Spencer said he was in Ballmer's office
| one day and Ballmer asked him "Why don't you just make the games
| that sell?"
| adabyron wrote:
| What Dan doesn't mention is that Steve was given the reins to a
| sinking ship if I recall.
|
| The US Govt was just finishing it's trial on Microsoft & was
| watching them closely.
|
| Tech bubble just burst.
|
| On day 1 of the transition after Steve, the stock jumped like
| crazy & continued that momentum. The stock was, as Dan mentions,
| at an unfairly low p/e ratio too.
|
| Idk if Steve was great but seems he was given the role of
| transition CEO. Plus did Bill ever really leave?
|
| It'll be interesting to see how Satya finishes his career & the
| first few years after. Microsoft was making really good software
| the first few years after Satya took over & a lot of people were
| wanting to work there. Since Covid though, their software quality
| & updates have crashed imo.
| hilux wrote:
| > On day 1 of the transition after Steve, the stock jumped like
| crazy & continued that momentum.
|
| Many people would interpret that as "investors had no faith in
| Steve Ballmer and were delighted to see his back." Do you have
| a different interpretation?
|
| Also, you seem to be implying that the trial was some external
| event, and not directly the fault of Bill and Steve. That is
| not how most people felt at the time.
| toyg wrote:
| _> implying that the trial was some external event_
|
| In many ways, it was. The political stars aligned "just so",
| in a way we've not really seen before or since. Many, many
| other companies got away with much more egregious behaviour
| (hello, Apple).
| hilux wrote:
| Apple does not have the percentage ownership of the market
| that Microsoft had with both Windows and Office. And to my
| knowledge Apple operates out in the open, i.e. they do not
| lie to everyone, and do not bundle shitty products with
| monopoly products in the way that Microsoft habitually did
| - and may still do.
| adabyron wrote:
| > Many people would interpret that as "investors had no faith
| in Steve Ballmer and were delighted to see his back." Do you
| have a different interpretation?
|
| You're 100% right. Starbucks just did something similar. I
| personally don't believe these jumps are warranted until the
| new CEO proves their ability to change the ship. It would be
| really interesting to hear from Microsoft insiders what
| changes were being made before the CEO changeover & what ones
| were heavily done by Satya.
|
| > Also, you seem to be implying that the trial was some
| external event, and not directly the fault of Bill and Steve.
| That is not how most people felt at the time.
|
| While many people may have felt they were being very anti-
| competitive at the time, the same standard has not been held
| to other companies or Microsoft much over the past 20 years
| in the United States.
| addicted wrote:
| This article doesn't understand what was fundamentally wrong with
| Ballmer's leadership and what Nadella actually changed.
|
| The specific technologies that were successful is irrelevant.
| Microsoft has and continues to invest in nearly every computer
| related technology that may come around the corner or they got
| late on.
|
| The problem with Microsoft was everything went through Windows.
| The entire company was designed to promote Windows.
|
| This was the fundamental flaw with Microsoft that Nadella
| changed. He quickly not just made Windows just another part of
| Microsoft's business, to a great extent he actively devalued it.
|
| The fact that Ballmer invested in Azure, etc before Nadella would
| all be irrelevant because under Ballmer Azure would have remained
| a red headed step child to Windows, so it's unlikely to have seen
| much success under him anyways. Same goes for pretty much
| everything else Microsoft is doing right now.
| dataflow wrote:
| I don't know anything more than the next guy here, but just
| reading this, it seems like a really underrated and insightful
| comment. Thanks for explaining it so clearly.
| ThrowawayB7 wrote:
| Except Steven Sinofsky, longtime head of the Windows division
| and one of the internal forces preventing Microsoft from going
| in alternate directions, was pushed out under Ballmer's tenure,
| not Nadella's.
|
| Granted, Ballmer made the mistake of putting Terry Myerson, who
| headed up the failed Windows Phone effort, in charge of Windows
| but that's another story.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Not just that everything was going through windows as GP
| said, whatever market they entered, they acted like their
| product will be like windows in that sector too from day one.
| Zune was like that, but the best example is windows phone,
| version 8 more precisely which is the first proper modern
| smartphone version.
|
| Google realized that if they want to stand a chance in
| catching up to the iPhone, they need to shove android in
| people's faces, and lure in devs.
|
| Microsoft entered the game (WP8) when android already had a
| foothold, making it even harder. They started with a mostly
| empty app store, and while they were clever enough to make
| sure the most widely used apps would be available by
| effectively bribing those big companies to develop windows
| phone apps, they pretty much gave the middle finger to all
| the small indie devs. I remember when android 2 was around I
| just downloaded android studio and played around a bit,
| making a simple scrobbler app for my Samsung device.
| Sideloadong was king back then, but even up to this point I
| had to pay zero bucks and jump through no hoops to try this
| out. I don't remember what putting this on the Google play
| store would've cost me back then, but not much.
|
| The windows phone experience was: sign up for a dev account
| to download visual studio with WP support. Start up VS, asked
| for your account again. I think in the beginning this was
| actually a paid account, probably because apple did it that
| way and again, you're Microsoft so act like you already own
| the place. But later in they reversed course here at least
| and you could log in with a free account.
|
| So you start building a small test app and then you want to
| run it in the shipped emulator but surprise! Your laptop only
| shipped with windows 8 home which doesn't include
| virtualization features, so tough. So the only way to test
| the app was to push it to your phone, which was another
| overly complicated mess where your phone had to be in
| developer mode and you could only "sideload" one app at a
| time, iirc. The result was an app store with mostly
| tumbleweed. Whatever small utility or gimmick you wanted,
| when on android a search would give you dozens of results, on
| WP, there was maybe 4, and 3 of them almost unusable and
| abandoned.
|
| I'm not blaming ballmer for having decided this specifically,
| but holy hell how did this pass any meetings with the higher-
| ups? You're uo against two tech giants who have a head-start
| of a few years, you try to get people to switch to your
| platform by being pricey, having no apps, and being hostile
| to smaller devs?
|
| The same played out with all the phone makers, who had to pay
| license fees for WP when android was free to use. Guess which
| phones were cheaper in the end. And when Microsoft bought
| Nokia, Nokia had the unfair advantage of getting WP for free,
| making it even less attractive for others to compete in that
| sector.
|
| And let's not get into the botched Nokia acquisition because
| I also don't think this can be blamed on ballmer that easily,
| or primarily.
| creesch wrote:
| > The windows phone experience was: sign up for a dev
| account to download visual studio with WP support. Start up
| VS, asked for your account again.
|
| This is something that Microsoft still struggles with. Some
| things have improved, but a lot of the dev experiences on
| the Microsoft side are still cumbersome and not aimed at
| small time devs.
|
| My experience here is with browser extensions and
| publishing these for both old Edge (pre chromium) and the
| newer Edge. The entire publishing dashboard is/was overly
| complex and assumes you are either a single person or a big
| organization with (azure) AD set up. With Mozilla AMO you
| can just add individual developers to your extension by
| mail, and with Google it is as easy as setting up a group.
|
| With browser extensions specifically (and Edge as well) you
| can also clearly see where it is still a dedicated
| motivated internal team setting things up and where things
| were handed over to more general teams and support was also
| outsourced to somewhere else.
|
| Anyway, my main point is that even now, many years later,
| Microsoft still struggles in this area making me think this
| is more fundamental to the company culture and way of
| operating.
| kaon_ wrote:
| I really wanted windows phone to be a success and am still
| sad it wasn't. I loved the interface. The native integration
| between my desktop/laptop and phone would have been great.
| Nowadays with so many apps being PWAs and built with
| nativescript or ionic, maybe windowsphone has a chance again?
| I have no idea tbh.
| baxtr wrote:
| I didn't like the UI at all. A lot of unnecessary
| animations. It felt like a forced departure from the iPhone
| standard, just so that it's different.
| wombat-man wrote:
| Feels a bit late at this point. Surface Pros run snapdragon
| but it still feels like too much of a lift to spin up an
| entire new mobile OS.
|
| I'd be pretty intrigued but they're still struggling to
| nail the tablet market imo.
| lenkite wrote:
| Windows phone was damn good and was growing in popularity
| when Nadella came in and killed it. When you are #3 in a
| market, you need _persistence_ to win. One cannot expect
| immediate, massive profits in a saturated market. Yet,
| Windows phone by itself was a growth multiplier for Windows
| which Nadella annihilated in order to turn Microsoft into a
| cloud & ad services company.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > you need persistence to win.
|
| You also need a plan. How would Windows Phone displace
| either Apple or Android?
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| It wouldn't and it wouldn't need to. The decision was
| still very likely wrong, especially transparent after
| Apple proved with silicon that ARM platforms can be that
| competitive. Windows wasn't ready here and platform
| interop wasn't at all it strength.
|
| If Windows phones would have had an emulated x86 mode,
| many people would have bought it instantly due to the
| momentum that now steadily decreases.
|
| There can be solid business revenue if you are "just" #3
| and the experience with development is very valuable.
| Although it is true that Microsoft and hardware has
| always been turbulent, with partners or without.
| Sometimes they simply created the best products in their
| class with a lot of margin, sometimes they basically sold
| scrap.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| The entire mobile market was immature back then, people
| didn't expect much interoperability and Windows Mobile 7
| Nokias were _slick_ and faster than iPhone or Android.
| They could have become the "contrarians luxury" if you
| didn't want to just get an iPhone. A bunch of hardcore
| Microsoft fan developers were gearing up to develop for
| Windows Mobilet dotnet when Microsoft changed the APIs
| with Mobile 8 (IIRC) and this dedicated bunch of
| developers just dropped the platform and just embraced
| Android or iOS instead.
| mysterydip wrote:
| 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.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| For sure. Enterprise _mobile_ was not really a thing back
| then. (Laptops with VPN was state of the art.) Microsoft
| could have organically owned the enterprise mobile market
| but chose not to.
| gtirloni wrote:
| Open source has a lot of momentum in Microsoft now but it
| wasn't the case when Windows Phone was released.
|
| Had they made it open source, it would have been a
| different story with Android and Windows Phone fighting
| to win the OEMs.
|
| But that ship has sailed. Unless there's a paradigm shift
| in smartphones (doubtful), we're stuck with Android and
| iOS for the foreseeable future.
| trympet wrote:
| > Had they made it open source
|
| That would have necessitated open sourcing Windows
| nashashmi wrote:
| Except from a project management standpoint, if you don't
| have a vision for a project, the people on that team would
| get up and leave. And there was no short term vision for
| the phone in the face of android and iPhone. The long term
| vision did not have team buy-in.
|
| And then further the phone was a distraction for all of the
| other teams who were expected in someway to provide some
| software that would work on there as well as android and
| iPhone.
|
| I agree that the phone would have been great ... at some
| point. But in an MBA world, it was a liability
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Windows Phone is surely symptomatic of Balmer's milking the
| cow rather than innovating approach. A smart phone is not a
| small desktop computer - it needed a complete rethink of
| user interface as Apple had done.
|
| It's also a bit strange that the success of Windows was
| based on the ubiquity of clone PCs rather than single
| vendor, yet Microsoft instead tried to follow Apple here
| and let Google become the "clone PC" (Android phone) OS
| supplier.
|
| I can't fault Balmer for at least trying to get a slice of
| the pie by belatedly putting out me-too products like Bing
| and Azure, but it's precisely because of Microsoft/Balmer
| missing the importance of the internet that it was put in
| position of being follower rather than leader.
|
| Microsoft is really a bit like Intel in having totally
| dominated a product category, but then having missed on
| most of the major industry trends they might have been
| expected to lead on (for Microsoft, internet, mobile and
| AI; for Intel mobile, gaming and AI). They are lucky to
| have had a second chance with Nadella who seems much more
| in tune with industry trends, willing to rapidly pivot, and
| who seems to have made a masterful move with their OpenAI
| partnership in buying time to recover from an early lack of
| focus on AI/ML.
| lenkite wrote:
| The user interface _did_ have a complete re-think.
| Windows phone popularized tiles and live tiles which was
| not just innovative, but an order of magnitude easier and
| more ergonomical compared to icons, esp for older people.
| The comforting common-cross-app back button, the metro
| UI, the smooth performance, ability to store all apps on
| SD card, best phone keyboard of that era, integration
| with windows PC - they had the bare-bones down fine. But
| simply gave up after a few years, instead of
| incrementally improving.
|
| I thought it was a bad mistake to bow, kneel and
| surrender the smart-phone market space. Today, I am fully
| convinced it was a critical, life-threatening mistake as
| more folks move to the Apple ecosystem - buying both
| iPhones, Macbooks and Apple Watches because of a fully-
| integrated ecosystem. The funny thing it was Microsoft
| who popularized Continuity, but after they gave up due to
| lack of willpower, it was Apple who took over, executed
| better and won. Really frustrating to see the state of
| Windows OS and device market today.
| chucke1992 wrote:
| > for Microsoft, internet, mobile and AI
|
| I don't think they missed AI boat. Their culture would
| not have allowed them to create OpenAI, but they were
| fast to leverage their moat and push AI into their office
| and windows suites and azure. Hell, they are even trying
| to catch up with search using AI and are trying to push
| Azure for various AI startups and stuff.
|
| MSFT rarely leads on anything - arguably even Windows is
| something they created being inspired by something else,
| while not going deep into hardware. Which what became the
| undoing of IBM. They are much better at being second.
| Azure - they were behind AWS, but not as late as Google.
|
| I bet with Satya, even with mobile they would have
| grabbed Nokia much earlier and pushed Windows Mobile
| before Android took off.
|
| AWS missed AI boat though.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Amazon have a very close relationship with Anthropic,
| which seems like a good match (Anthropic focus on
| business use), and win-win. Anthropic gets access to the
| compute they need, and Amazon get AI to integrate into
| their AWS offerings.
|
| I don't know the contractual basis of the relationship,
| but it seems this has to be pretty long term and
| strategic. A significant part of the competitive
| advantage of one AI vendor over another comes down to
| inference cost, which in turm comes down to customizing
| the model architecture for the hardware it is running on,
| which in this case either is, or will be, Amazon's home
| grown Graviton processors.
| chucke1992 wrote:
| The problem with Amazon is not their closeness to
| Anthropic, but more of the fact their moat is not big
| enough to integrate AI in a way MSFT can. Even their
| Azure services somehow feels natural with AI support.
|
| I don't know if Satya predicted it or not, but their push
| into open source and Github acquisition were very helpful
| for AI.
| stackskipton wrote:
| I had a Windows Phone for a while. I still miss the
| tiles.
| archerx wrote:
| Well since Nadella I have been using less Microsoft products
| and probably won't be using Windows anymore once my Windows 10
| LTSC stops working.
|
| I keep hearing praise for Nadella but all he is doing is
| alienating a lot of customers with his terrible decisions.
| juped wrote:
| Ballmer would never have put honest-to-God _advertisements_
| in _Windows Solitaire_.
| rightbyte wrote:
| I always had the feeling MS was squeezing competitors and
| software vendors, not users directly.
|
| The user hostility have made me move me to Linux systems.
| spacechild1 wrote:
| Let alone ads in the start menu!
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| To be fair, Windows 98 came with almost-ads in the stock
| Active Desktop wallpaper - and promos for
| AOL/CompuServ/Prodigy.
| znpy wrote:
| AOL was stuff that people actually used however. It
| wasn't "random stuff".
|
| For many people in the 90ies it was like the brand "AOL"
| was a synonym of "internet".
| 1980phipsi wrote:
| Or screw up search on the start menu
| squarefoot wrote:
| As a 100% Linux user with good memories of that era (flying
| chair, Linux==cancer, etc.) I may be the best person here
| to actually _defend_ Ballmer, having for sure no hidden
| interests in doing that. _Everything_ changed in those
| years: Google was cool, Linux desktop almost non existent,
| cryptocurrency not even in the head of its creator, AI was
| a myth and the best voice recognition could offer was the
| hilarious "double the killer" demonstration [1]. How can
| we compare CEOs actions separated by two decades? Ballmer
| did what was perceived as useful for its company back then
| just as Nadella is doing that now. Perspectives have
| changed, hence companies and their CEOS had to adapt. I'm
| 100% sure that if Ballmer were MS CEO today, he would
| include advertisements as well, as today putting
| advertisements in every free corner of the known Universe
| is perceived as acceptable, if not necessary, which was not
| the case 20 years back.
|
| [1] context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX8oYoYy2Gc
| 486sx33 wrote:
| Exactly
| rowanG077 wrote:
| This is true for me as well. I do have a VR gaming machine
| which I don't think will linuxify soon but I would if I
| could. Nadella has grown Microsoft no doubt. But in the
| process has trashed Windows. One of the most valuable pieces
| of software. I wouldn't be surprised this will bite them in
| the long run a lot.
| globalise83 wrote:
| Our company is absolutely full of Microsoft products (all
| the Office 365 stuff, PowerBI, Azure, Microsoft SSO etc.
| etc.), yet most of our teams use Macbooks. Windows is no
| longer a necessity to work in a mostly-Microsoft
| environment, and that strategy is making Microsoft fabulous
| amounts of money.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| Tools like PowerBI are quite good, the data pipelines are
| amazing, but at the end of the chain Microsoft always
| makes mistakes so that something good like PowerBI will
| only remain an advanced Power Point version. If you go a
| bit deeper the platform is fairly locked down behind
| artificial restraints.
|
| Azure has good parts, auth with Microsoft is perfect for
| software in the office world and goes beyond the usual
| LDAP Active Directory. But on the other hand it is quite
| slow to a degree that it really affects productivity. The
| damage is probably in the billions/trillions for their
| many customers. That is the real price of office cloud
| versions.
| gtirloni wrote:
| _> yet most of our teams use Macbooks._
|
| Exactly this. Today I can switch from Linux to macOS to
| Windows and 99% of what the average users does can be
| done in the browser. Worse, in a smartphone.
|
| So it was very smart of Microsoft to realize Windows was
| going to stop being a hard requirement for most use
| cases.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| honestly that was the case about a decade ago. small /
| boutique MSP I was at cut costs by buying everyone white-
| label laptops, since one of the manufacturers was a
| client in LA and SF.
|
| anyone who really wanted a windows license could get one,
| but most of the staff used Unbutu, with some AD and other
| stuff on the backend
| cameronh90 wrote:
| Indeed. Conversely, Apple are the ones now forcing you to
| buy into their walled garden if you want to support users
| on their devices.
|
| We are a mostly Windows+Linux shop, but we need Macs to
| build and test iPhone apps, investigate issues with
| Safari on iOS, do certain iPhone support tasks, etc.
| fluoridation wrote:
| Sorry, but how is that a response to what the GP said? It
| was not necessary to keep making Windows worse and worse
| to decouple it from other MS products.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| So you agree or disagree with me? I'm not sure how this
| is a response to my comment?
| madisp wrote:
| With GitHub, TypeScript and VS code I'm probably using more
| Microsoft products than before.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Of those three, the only one that drives revenue to MS is
| GitHub.
| cjblomqvist wrote:
| Not true, at least not according to MS themselves. MS
| have done several studies and adoption of these tools
| drive adoption of Azure. That's why MS invests in it.
|
| They've been quite clear about this. The one platform/OS
| was Windows. The new platform/OS is Azure/Cloud. It's
| almost like saying Google doesn't make any revenues from
| search, only from selling ads.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| VS Code is also low-key keeping Windows relevant as a
| developer OS. If something else came along which was
| truly very excellent but was only working well with
| Linux, and VS Code was not there to be the de-facto go-to
| solution for most new devs, it could eat away more of
| Windows marketshare.
|
| So I see VS Code as a _slight_ moat, also in its
| promulgation of dotnet-isms. So I think VS Code drives
| some revenue Microsofts way in a pretty diffuse but real
| way.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| I'm not sure how it's improving Windows relevancy, second
| most popular IDE group - Jetbrains ones - are on Windows
| too.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| That's why I wrote _slight_. VS Code is more of a
| _backstop_ to make sure developing on Windows doesn 't
| suck. Don't let Windows fall behind kind of thing. Every
| cross platform thing is biggest on Windows by default
| because Windows is the biggest platform.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| VSCode Server and other remote dev servers are a big
| deal. Before we had to sync or mount a remote partition
| to manage the gap between Windows and the *nix server. I
| remember just plain using vim over ssh to avoid the
| hassle.
|
| That pain existed under macos and linux as well, but to
| such a lower extent as you could do so much more locally.
|
| While Jetbrains does it too, VSCode being strong
| guarantees it stays a viable path in the future.
| fakedang wrote:
| How is VS Code a moat when it's platform agnostic? Plus
| the developer market is just a fraction of the overall
| market.
|
| MS Office is the real moat, as is Windows XP/7. Everyone
| use MS Office because Google Slides/Docs/Sheets is a
| silly contender to the MS Office suite. Windows XP/7
| because that's what a huge percent of the human
| population using computers grew up on today, so they're
| most familiar with it. And let's be honest, that's not
| going away, even as MS enshittifies Windows 11, simply
| because no Linux build can apparently mirror the Windows
| XP/7 UI (for some reason, not even Mint) while Apple is
| hell-bent on doing its own thing on the sidelines.
|
| The day MS breaks Office suite is the day Microsoft goes
| down, but that's unlikely because the current crop of
| devs at MS don't even know how to get started. Microsoft
| could literally not do anything and still make tons in
| revenue.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > And let's be honest, that's not going away, even as MS
| enshittifies Windows 11, simply because no Linux build
| can apparently mirror the Windows XP/7 UI
|
| Windows 10/11 does a really bad job at emulating XP/7 UI.
| It is about as foreign to XP users as Debian or whatever.
|
| I made a XP VM the other month to run some insane
| software I had to run at work.
|
| I felt so much at home. It was so nice. Everything was
| awesome. The control panel was awesome. The distinct
| buttons were awesome. The start menu was awesome. The 'My
| computer' at desktop root was awesome.
|
| All in muscle memory, still.
|
| Then I am back out to 10 and can't figure out where my
| app shortcuts are without knowing their name or what of
| the 3 or 4 different control panels I am supposed to use.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| They bought it. If Microsoft had developed it, we would get
| something like sourcesafe (was that the name?).
|
| Sure, the investment was quite sensible, although I don't
| think they can change it for their ambitions too much.
|
| Microsofts conquest against open source was of course a
| wrong strategy of Balmer.
| tylerchilds wrote:
| this is the funny thing about microsoft
|
| they are way better at buying and selling software than
| ideating and creating it.
|
| successful microsoft products are acquisitions.
| meekins wrote:
| Same story with Azure. All the good services are
| acquisitions, rest is low quality feature catch-up with
| AWS augmented by a terrible IAM system.
| benrutter wrote:
| I agree but I'm not sure it's just microsoft- meta's
| instagram, whatsapp and quest are all acquisitions of
| already sucessful products. Oracle are similar.
|
| I think, up to a point, and especially in the US where
| antitrust is pretty lax, it's a very safe investment to
| just buy other already sucessful companies.
| tylerchilds wrote:
| The most glaring example in recent memory would be the
| amazon monopoly and the evidence i submit is diapers.com
|
| with enough money, you can fund your investments to
| strategically take down every mom and pop.
|
| amazon can't take on every consumer vertical
| simultaneously, but they used their funds to drive
| diapers.com into the red, because as a parent you're
| scrwed either way and comparing food to diapers, will buy
| the cheaper diapers instead of the cheaper food.
|
| amazon wanted diapers.com
|
| diapers.com said, we're good this isn't a billion dollar
| enterprise, but it pays the bills.
|
| amazon bought it after making sure they couldn't actually
| use it to pay the bills.
| Tostino wrote:
| Hell, even Sql Server wasn't originally developed by
| Microsoft. They have taken it a long way since though.
| sausagefeet wrote:
| > SourceSafe was originally created by a North Carolina
| company called One Tree Software.
| znpy wrote:
| > With GitHub, TypeScript and VS code I'm probably using
| more Microsoft products than before.
|
| cool, how much money have you paid to Microsoft to use
| those?
|
| Except for Github (which they bought, by the way) probably
| not much. And github has some serious competitors (Gitlab
| which is just great and to a lesser extent, bitbucket).
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| > he is doing is alienating a lot of customers with his
| terrible decisions
|
| Windows doesn't even make up 1/5 of their income, and in
| contrast a bit over half of their income is Office and Cloud*
|
| The real money is in enterprise IT and cloud services. The
| average consumer doesn't keep their prebuilt computer long
| enough to buy another version of the OS. They don't need to
| keep a niche within a minority (privacy-oriented customers
| who would buy an OS) happy with Windows to continue drowning
| in revenue.
|
| It seems like he has done a fantastic job, if the goal was to
| decouple their fortune from Windows.
|
| *Based on googling and a lazy reluctance to dig through their
| earnings calls
| _thisdot wrote:
| It's a mystery to me why they haven't made Windows free
| yet. Surely they make much more money from users using
| Windows than buying Windows
| saghm wrote:
| It basically already is, at least for consumers. You can
| download an .iso of whatever the latest Windows version
| is and install it, and although it will prompt you to put
| in a product key, nothing stops you from continuing to
| use it if you don't. You can't customize certain cosmetic
| settings, and there's a small watermark in the bottom
| left corner, but it's hard to imagine that it being fully
| functional otherwise is an oversight rather than
| something they're fine with. The only people who will go
| through the effort to install it like that and keep using
| it are the ones who are least likely to pay for it.
| nilamo wrote:
| This is true: my gaming PC had that watermark for nearly
| 10 years. You can't change the wallpaper, remote desktop
| doesn't work, but that's the only downside to not paying
| for windows (and using Microsoft's free iso, instead of
| pirating a key).
|
| It's quite clear to anyone who's tried it (at least since
| Win10), that Microsoft does not care at all if you pay
| for Windows.
| hiatus wrote:
| It comes preinstalled on most computers. The consumers
| don't pay, OEMs do. And they'll continue to pay because
| most people don't want an OS-less machine.
| gtirloni wrote:
| Only PC enthusiasts buy Windows. 99% of the population
| gets it bundled with their computers and who knows how
| much MS is charging those OEMs. Probably pennies.
|
| Windows already has a de facto monopoly in desktop OS.
| They don't need to be nicer and give it for free to get
| more market share. They have all market share they every
| will.
| codegeek wrote:
| Since Nadella took over, Microsoft stock has gone up from $30
| to $400 with a market value of over $3T. Satya understood
| that for MS to compete, they have to get out of the "Windows
| Only" mentality. For example, .NET Core was a huge thing when
| it finally came out. I don't think that he has made any
| terrible decisions for the company. May be for some users
| like you, sure. But not for the company overall.
| jayceedenton wrote:
| > a red headed step child
|
| Very good point, but please stop using this phrase.
| anilakar wrote:
| > The problem with Microsoft was everything went through
| Windows. The entire company was designed to promote Windows.
|
| ...and nowadays Windows is designed to promote their cloud
| subscription services while local features get axed.
|
| If Google is not allowed to link directly to Maps, there is no
| way Microsoft can be allowed to advertise their paid services
| everywhere in their OS.
| Hypergraphe wrote:
| I'm not sure that devaluating Windows is a good strategy at
| all...
| belter wrote:
| Bad strategy for Microsoft but clearly a wining strategy for
| the World.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Selling licenses is not where the money is. Selling
| subscriptions to corporations so that every corporate-
| supplied computer (including Macs) pay Microsoft for
| something, be it Office or a full Windows+Office+Sharepoint
| license. All things considered, they can give Windows for
| free and they'll still profit from it as an enabler for
| further Microsoft lock-in.
| ozim wrote:
| It is in "everything is cloud" and "most of software runs in
| browsers anyway" world where operating systems don't matter .
|
| I would not say it was by any means one or the other CEO
| "insightful" choice but it was more of market choosing on its
| own. Microsoft had to make own cloud or die that was the
| choice and better to put loads of investment in that. Ballmer
| started Azure because Amazon of course was first and Google
| did the same so Nadella was just playing cards he was handed
| by the world.
| Hypergraphe wrote:
| Running a cloud and developping an operating system are two
| separare activites that don't need to be tied together.
| There is a lot of proprietary software in companies around
| the globe that rely on windows low level APIs and it will
| last for decades. There is a lot of things that are running
| outside the browser. The whole gaming industry is still
| tied to Windows directx.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| It's not a strategy, it's a recognition that the Windows org
| has decayed and they apparently don't know how to turn it
| around. Apparently simple projects take forever, new code
| they launch is often filled with bugs, different parts of the
| org don't talk to each other and they can't explain why
| anyone should write an app that targets the Windows API. I
| support customers shipping apps to every platform and Windows
| is nowadays 90% of the pain, it's worse even than Linux.
| Microsoft just don't care either, you can tell the devs who
| work on it are overwhelmed by the sheer size and tech debt
| levels of the codebase. Decades of compounding bad decisions
| have well and truly caught up with them :( This is a pity in
| a way, the desktop OS market could use more competition.
|
| Nadella de-prioritizing Windows was the right thing to do for
| the business because it had a monopoly, so after PC sales
| saturated the market the best they could achieve was treading
| water, but also because the strategy of tying everything to
| Windows assumed the Windows team would continue to execute
| well and these things would all be mutually reinforcing. In
| the 90s Windows did execute well but by 2010 that had
| stopped, and so the tying strategy also had to stop. A better
| CEO than Ballmer could possibly have turned the Windows
| situation around and avoided the need for the disconnection,
| but instead it was left to drift.
| chucke1992 wrote:
| The thing is that OS is not important these days as you can
| apps on thin clients now and a lot of folks are spending most
| of the time within apps and doing nothing else.
| Hypergraphe wrote:
| I think that it is not exact. OS is as important as
| yesterday since you need them to run your containers that
| provide your services used by your thin clients. This is
| still the backbone of everything. But you have a point
| windows kinda lost the servers battle.
| chucke1992 wrote:
| yeah. I think they have did some refactoring in OS
| though, to make it more modular. Not sure what are their
| long term plans for Windows. They probably would have
| benefitted from some handheld UI for sure.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Lately it has definitely felt as though Microsoft is
| resurrecting Ballmer's old meme as "AI! AI! AI!"
|
| I was at Microsoft for the last couple years of Ballmer and the
| first few years of Nadella. He definitely did change the
| company and I remember at the time feeling that he handled the
| change really well, but from where I sat he spent the first
| part of his tenure evolving Ballmer's final push to move focus
| from Windows to developers. Everything Microsoft did prior to
| LLMs was to bring developers over, from VS Code to GitHub to
| WSL.
|
| Now the company seems fully baked I to LLMs with everything
| they do chasing that. It would even make sense if the developer
| push was driven in part by the need to build up training sets
| for the eventual LLM work, though I really have a hard time
| believing that Microsoft was so well ahead of the game that
| they started grooming developers to provide data more than a
| decade ago.
| toyg wrote:
| _> Now the company seems fully baked I to LLMs with
| everything they do chasing that_
|
| Them _along absolutely everyone else_. ChatGPT was an iPhone
| moment.
| kranke155 wrote:
| I would press X to doubt just because of profitability.
|
| It's cute that we now have image and video gen AI. Also we
| have now Turing test passing chat bots (Id say). But
| although they are very impressive, and I know lots of
| people who use them for various tasks, I haven't seen a
| "killer app" yet.
|
| For iPhone the killer app was making calls. It was the best
| phone you could get. Then it had apps. It was undeniably
| better.
|
| LLMs are good at a lot of things, but they don't seem to
| excel any particular task - yet. I'm not sure they are a
| revolution yet.
|
| I'd say they're more of Macintosh moment. A hugely useful
| technology no doubt - but useful for what exactly? For Mac
| it was desktop publishing.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I agree generally with what you're saying but feel you
| were all over the place in your comment.
|
| The _killer app_ on the iPhone was not "making calls" --
| I suspect instead it was Safari, the other 1st party
| apps, the touch screen and the slick integration of all
| of that to make it a no-brainer device that even my mom
| and dad could use (they were approaching their 70's when
| the iPhone debuted).
|
| Your analogy that ChatGPT (or LLMs generally) are more
| akin to the Mac feels close to the mark to me. Your
| comment about the Mac's killer app, desktop publishing,
| suggests that LLM's killer app will follow, just hasn't
| arrived yet.
|
| The analogy is a little shaky though since, some would
| argue, it was the laser printer (plus the Mac) that
| kicked off desktop publishing.
| kranke155 wrote:
| You're right it is a bit all over the place.
|
| "The killer app is making calls" is me quoting Steve Jobs
| on the Iphone 1 presentation. I get that it doesn't sound
| true now, knowing all we can do. It's true Iphone was a
| lot more, but that was his conviction at the time, and I
| think it makes sense. Their aim was to make the best
| phone in the world.
|
| I also think yeah, it is a bit like Macintosh in the
| sense that this is a new general purpose technology, and
| I'm not sure we've really figured out what's going to the
| most transformative about it yet.
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| Want the whole premise of the original iPhone keynote
| that it was a fusion of three things -
| telecommunications, an iPod and internet? (Is that
| right?) That seems to place "phone" as not the killer
| app, but rather a pillar of three things that made up a
| "killer app" when combined.
|
| I do remember the initial visual voicemail implementation
| being very appealing of course. Especially since it
| seemed they had enough leverage to get the carrier/s
| (just one at the beginning) to do whatever they needed.
| paulluuk wrote:
| I'd say the killer "app" for the iPhone was the touch-
| screen. There were plenty of other phones that could be
| used to make calls, at the same quality for a lower
| price. Frankly, I still find the iPhone to be way too
| expensive for what you get in return.
|
| For LLMs, the "killer app", for me, is already here. And
| there's two of them right now.
|
| The first is the chatbot (like chatGPT or Pi or Claude).
| Having someone who you can just ask for any kind of
| information, from book recommendations to hypothetical
| space travel situations to advice about birthday gifts,
| and to get answers that are better than what I'd get from
| 90% of real humans, is huge to me.
|
| The second one is the coding assistant, in my code
| copilot. It has made me at least twice, if not thrice as
| productive as I was before.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| A killer app in the like-an-iphone context is something
| that provides obvious value - if not outright delight -
| to a huge demographic.
|
| Coding doesn't do that, because the demographic
| interested in coding is not huge compared to the rest of
| the population.
|
| Chatbots don't do it either because they're too
| unreliable. I never know if I'm going to get a
| recommendation for something the LLM hallucinated and
| doesn't exist.
|
| There's also huge cultural resistance to AI. The iPhone
| was perceived as an enabling device. AI is perceived as a
| noisy, low-reliability, intrusive, immoral, disabling
| technology that is stealing work from talented people and
| replacing it with work of much lower quality.
|
| It's debatable how many of those perceptions are
| accurate, but it's not debatable the perceptions exist.
|
| In fact the way OpenAI, Anthropic, and the others have
| handled this is a masterclass in self-harming PR. It's
| been an unqualified cultural disaster.
|
| So any killer app has to overcome that reputational
| damage. Currently I don't think anything does that in a
| way that works for the great mass of non-technical non-
| niche users.
|
| Also - the iPhone was essentially a repackaging exercise.
| It took the Mac+Phone+Camera+iPod - all familiar concepts
| - and built them into a single pocket-sized device. The
| novelty was in the integration and miniaturisation.
|
| AI is not an established technology. It's the poster
| child for a tech project with amorphous affordances and
| no clear roadmap in permanent beta. A lot of the
| resistance comes from its incomprehensibility. Plenty of
| people are making a lot of money from promises that will
| likely never materialise.
|
| To most people there is no clear positive perception of
| what it is, what it does, or what specifically it can do
| for them - just a worry that it will probably make them
| redundant, or at least less valuable.
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| The Killer App was the user-interface. There was not
| tutorial video, there was no long explanations. It was
| touch and go. And it worked.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| >For iPhone the killer app was making calls.
|
| What?
|
| Making calls was the killer app for Nokia brick phones in
| the late 1990s.
|
| The killer app for the first generation of smartphones
| (Windows Mobile, Blackberry, etc.) was email and
| calendar.
|
| The killer app for iPhone and Android was the
| capacitative touchscreen combined with the ability to run
| 3rd party apps (yes, I'm aware there was an extremely
| brief moment in the history of the original iPhone where
| Apple opposed this), and 3G mobile internet (yes, again,
| I realize this came a year after the initial iPhone
| release). Mobile web browsers and Maps/GPS got the party
| started.
| pjmorris wrote:
| > Them along absolutely everyone else. ChatGPT was an
| iPhone moment
|
| Nice analogy. My sense of things is that the iPhone was a
| win for all of its users. While ChatGPT may make some/many
| of its users more productive (see Ethan Mollick's work),
| the driving force behind 'AI! AI! AI!' in the corporate
| world is an executive hope that complacent AI can replace
| expensive people. That's not a win for all of its users.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| except the iphone delivered. we're still holding our breath
| for AI
| toyg wrote:
| Manufacturers started pivoting almost immediately when
| the iPhone debuted. Yes, eventually it delivered, but
| nobody waited for that before they started aping it.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> ChatGPT was an iPhone moment._
|
| A Blackberry moment, perhaps. There appears to be something
| there, some groups are latching onto it and deriving value
| from it, but we haven't yet seen the iPhone come along to
| transform that initial interest into something that sweeps
| the world.
| dblohm7 wrote:
| > Them along absolutely everyone else. ChatGPT was an
| iPhone moment.
|
| Old guy here, but it feels more like a Netscape moment than
| an iPhone moment. We'll end up with our pets.com of the LLM
| age, the whole thing will implode, and the few companies
| that were actually doing useful stuff with LLMs will
| survive.
| jsight wrote:
| Are those moments really that different? Motorola was
| practically the Netscape of the iPhone era, as those
| early Droids were everywhere. There were tons of others
| too, then it all imploded with only a few companies
| really surviving in the smartphone space.
| freejazz wrote:
| Yeah, they are. I'm using an iPhone now.
| dblohm7 wrote:
| It's not about who is the "Netscape" this time around,
| it's about the irrational exuberance surrounding the
| entire thing.
|
| These days it seems like anybody can throw "AI" into
| their company name (even if it's complete BS) and it has
| the same effect as adding ".com" to a company name did in
| the late nineties.
|
| IMHO AI is a .com-like hype cycle that's orders of
| magnitude larger and more irrational than anything that
| happened post-iPhone.
|
| That's not to say that there aren't good businesses in
| there (the same was true of .com, of course), but there's
| a lot of junk that's getting a lot of money thrown at it.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Except that LLMs have way worse unitary economics than
| the web or a phone's app store.
|
| What comes back to the old data-inefficiency of machine
| learning. There hasn't been visible improvement on this,
| and it is looking more and more as a fundamental
| limitation of AI.
| sangnoir wrote:
| ...or it could turn out to be a 3D-TV moment - the jury is
| still out.
|
| For a while, all OEMs had 3D TV models, and it seemed their
| ubiquity was inevitable by sheer force of manufacturers
| ramming the products down consumers throats (like AI). The
| only debate was over which solution was superior: active or
| passive. 3D movies are still with us, so the tech didn't
| completely disappear - only from the consumer space.
| sedawk wrote:
| _> Lately it has definitely felt as though Microsoft is
| resurrecting Ballmer 's old meme as "AI! AI! AI!"_
|
| You nailed it! Having spent significant time (as low-level
| minion) under both Ballmer and Satya, it certainly feels like
| the old Ballmer-time meme is coming back with the AI!
|
| Also with it, the forced-curve ranking that Satya disbanded
| is being re-instituted under a different name.
| ozim wrote:
| I would argue that specific technologies changing is super
| relevant fact.
|
| In 90's and 00's "everything Windows" made loads of sense for a
| company so being hard on any competition was the right thing.
| Also I don't see people saying it about MacOs you cannot do
| software to this day for MacOs or iOS without having actual
| device and operating system from Apple.
|
| What changed for MSFT was that operating system in 2010's and
| forward became irrelevant. Cloud is where the money is and now
| MSFT is "all in Azure or nothing company", entire company is
| designed to promote Azure and O365.
|
| To properly promote Azure they need to run Linux on that cloud
| and they need mind share of developers that will develop
| products using Azure - earlier they could force developers to
| use Windows because that was where software was running.
| chucke1992 wrote:
| Yeah. It is basically a trap that every CFO who became CEO step
| into - tie everything to a single thing.
|
| With Satya he had much broader vision.
| layer8 wrote:
| As an end user, I lament the devaluation of Windows and the
| general drive to cloud-based solutions. It has made everything
| worse.
| DowagerDave wrote:
| Yep, aside from the legacy desktop environment & gaming I don't
| really have any ties to MS anymore, and I was a pure MS
| developer for 20+ years. Now with .NET superior on non-windows
| platforms and the nonsense their hostile consumer & enterprise
| side keeps pulling why would I stay in the ecosystem? I agree
| that Ballmer was unfairly used as a punching bag, but MS today
| (both the good and bad) is all Nadella.
| Nevermark wrote:
| > Microsoft under Ballmer made deep, long-term bets that set up
| Microsoft for success in the decades after his reign
|
| This is no doubt true.
|
| Under Ballmer, Nadella "led a transformation of the company's
| business and technology culture from client services to cloud
| infrastructure and services." [0]
|
| But the number of failed mobile (phone, small PC) initiatives and
| products, from long before the iPhone to multiple waves of multi-
| billion dollar write downs afterward, (phones, music players,
| ...) despite Ballmer clearly wanting Windows "everywhere", and no
| limit on his spending, was just as large of an opportunity,
| cyclically bungled for a couple decades.
|
| I had one of the earlier generations/extinct-species of Windows
| phone. At the time I had given up on Palm following through on
| their great start, but found the Windows phone was just
| frustrating in other ways.
|
| (I did have friends with Microsoft's last phone, and they really
| liked it. Just too late.)
|
| Apples market cap today, approximately its iOS market cap, is a
| good proxy for the ball Ballmer couldn't stop dropping. Even when
| only his team was on the court.
|
| So I give Ballmer a 5/10. :)
|
| But any massive hypergrowth business, is still a massive
| hypergrowth business. Microsoft gets 10/10.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Nadella
| senderista wrote:
| Are you remembering Windows Mobile? That sucked, but Windows
| Phone did not (and was famously built by a totally different
| team). But it was too little, too late.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| >Are you remembering Windows Mobile? That sucked, but Windows
| Phone did not (and was famously built by a totally different
| team)
|
| This seems to show another of MS's big problems in those
| days: too many different products doing the same thing, and a
| lack of focus. IIRC, they went from Windows Mobile to Windows
| Phone (version x) and then to Windows Phone (version y,
| totally incompatible with version x). Each time, this
| alienated 3rd-party developers because all the apps they
| wrote wouldn't work on the all-new platform.
| Nevermark wrote:
| > (I did have friends with Microsoft's last phone, and they
| really liked it. Just too late.)
| ThrowawayB7 wrote:
| There were a lot of mistakes by the Windows Phone division but
| ultimately WP had zero chance of succeeding with Google
| sabotaging access to YouTube and their other services.
| fumeux_fume wrote:
| Weird how few people who worked under him feel that way.
| jimbobbam wrote:
| This is a bunch of revisionist history bs.
|
| Windows me, windows vista, explorer, windows media player, zune,
| ms retail store.
|
| He brought the worst products to the market and we hated him for
| it.
| datavirtue wrote:
| I enjoy those fact videos he has been making. I was impressed
| that he cared enough to do them and actually take the time to run
| point.
| nailer wrote:
| So azure was a hit and Office moving to a saas model was a hit.
|
| Balmer lost: the most popular consumer operating system, the most
| popular web browser, the most popular media player, the most
| popular instant messaging platform.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| I worked at Microsoft from 2003-2007, and left a couple months
| after the iPhone launched (for totally unrelated reasons, but I
| wanted to situate the timeline).
|
| Steve was a terrible leader. He helped the company grow moribund,
| lazy, and self-absorbed. Stack ranking was a cancer[1]. Employees
| were far more interested in stabbing each other in the back than
| building world-class products.
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/12/5094864/microsoft-
| kills-...
| nextworddev wrote:
| Kind of unrelated, but stack ranking is very much back now
| across the board now in big tech.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| That's appalling.
| ripvanwinkle wrote:
| Its cyclical, a lot of companies over hired and are trying
| hard to cut down
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Cyclical processes and appallingness aren't mutually
| exclusive. In fact they may well be related.
| bjoveski wrote:
| If you want to learn more about MSFT during Ballmer era, i highly
| recommend the acquired podcast:
|
| https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/microsoft-volume-ii
|
| They come to the same conclusion as Dan - that Ballmer did a ton
| of things right and he was actually a much better CEO than the
| credit he's given today.
|
| Part 1 of the podcast focuses on Bill Gates' era - both episodes
| are super engaging, the research and preparation they do is
| remarkably good.
| funksta wrote:
| Great podcast and I really enjoyed their MSFT episodes.
|
| I thought their pro-Ballmer angle was interesting at the time
| too (it was the first long-form defense of his tenure that I
| had heard), but I wasn't sure how much of that was due to him
| being a primary source for the podcast's material.
| abhiyerra wrote:
| Second this podcast. Ballmer basically setup Microsoft as the
| enterprise software company. From the first episode it seemed
| that Bill was actually more interested in the consumer side of
| things and wasn't that interested in the enterprise, but it was
| Ballmer that basically setup that entire business line in the
| first place especially with him managing the OS/2 with IBM and
| later NT.
|
| I think a lot of fails for MS during the Ballmer era was them
| toeing the line post their anti-trust.
| jatins wrote:
| tangential: anyone has the link to Gary Bernhardt talk on
| reproducibility mentioned in the post?
| roncesvalles wrote:
| Ballmer was a successful CEO for the simple reason that he
| discovered Satya.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| sure, we know that now after having a wider range of examples
| across the industry!
| tapirl wrote:
| Agree, he just had bad public relations.
| zombiwoof wrote:
| Came here to trash Microsoft, learned more about tipping than I
| ever thought possible
| skc wrote:
| He made Microsoft an insane amount of money when they were at
| their "least" coolest.
|
| That takes some doing.
| wslh wrote:
| I'm really looking forward to his autobiography, not just another
| Isaacson-style biography, but something from the man himself,
| even if he has some help writing it. Reading Paul Allen's
| autobiography gave me a deep understanding of his and Bill Gates'
| journey long before Microsoft. Their story started much earlier
| than the usual DOS narrative!
| sunaookami wrote:
| This is what I always said. Nadella ruined Microsoft for
| consumers. Ballmer literally saved the Xbox business during the
| RROD fiasco and he made sure Windows Phone could thrive - it was
| an established 3rd operating system in Europe with over 10%
| market share and it could've been more but Nadella killed it
| because it wasn't popular in the US. Also, Windows was definitely
| better under Ballmer.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| "$500? Fully Subsidized? That is the most expensive phone in the
| world and it doesn't appeal to business customers because it
| doesn't have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email
| machine."
| tyleo wrote:
| The Acquired podcast also supports this claim in a 2-part episode
| on Microsoft I'll link below.
|
| Their evidence is from interviews with current and former
| Microsoft employees who worked with Ballmer IIRC including
| Ballmer himself. They basically describe him as being the rock
| that cheerlead, navigated, and held the company together through
| a decade of legal troubles. He also started many important
| businesses like enterprise, gaming, and cloud.
|
| https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/microsoft
| yalogin wrote:
| Underrated? He is properly rated in the sense that he owns 10s of
| billions even though he singlehandedly killed the windows
| smartphone and tablet business and also killed Nokia. Granted
| that apple killed them but with Microsoft's resources there was
| no reason to just give up like they did. Buying Nokia was a
| historic bad decision that screams he didn't understand the
| business at all. There was a huge opportunity to just emulate
| apple and just suck in all of the corporate market in one swoop
| and add them to their recurring revenue office service but
| Ballmer didn't see it. He just saw them as phones and hardware.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| On the other hand it took a complete moron to fuck up windows
| phone. And somehow it happened under his tenure.
| high_na_euv wrote:
| I thought I saw article with similar title
|
| And yea
|
| https://blog.jovono.com/p/ballmer-microsoft-underrated
| palla89 wrote:
| The amazing thing about the internet is that it's always just a
| matter of time before something negative gets completely reversed
| by someone. For every "best, coolest thing ever," there will
| inevitably be an article arguing that it was all hype and
| actually the opposite.
|
| And the same thing happens with a bad product / action
| eventually, there's always an article attempting to redeem it.
|
| Why is that? Is it just human nature driving our need to be heard
| and seen as visionaries?
| floatrock wrote:
| For politics: its bots setting a narrative. For temu
| dropshipping: its bots to make money.
| high_na_euv wrote:
| Or maybe because there is many things that are vastly
| misunderstood because people prefer simple explainations and
| theories
|
| In general people are scared of complexity
| flerchin wrote:
| $100B does not seem underrated to me. Microsoft made lots of
| money with Ballmer, and continued to make even more money after
| he left.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Everyone forgetting about Lisa Brummel and "stack ranking"?
|
| That nearly ruined Microsoft...
|
| https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft-ditches-syst...
| bradlys wrote:
| What does Microsoft do now? Most every major tech company I've
| seen uses stack ranking - even if they don't use that name.
| Hell, a lot of startups I've been at even use that. The
| founders and executives love it as far as I can tell - why else
| would they do it?
| andrewla wrote:
| At Microsoft in particular, stack ranking has always been
| used in the sense of trying to put together a rough ordering
| of employees at similar levels.
|
| But "stack ranking" in scare quotes at Microsoft referred to
| the specific practice of the 20/70/10 rule -- the top 20%
| were the standouts, 70% was fine, and 10% was "this person
| needs to be eased out". This was applied for any org with
| more than a certain minimum number of people, and led to a
| very very toxic review process.
| bradlys wrote:
| This is pretty much what I see at almost every company I've
| been at in the last decade though... The review process is
| always toxic and has always lead to my peers in the
| industry being more likely to sabotage than help me since
| that's the best way to look good in reviews. That with 80%
| of my peers being permanent H1B means they will do whatever
| it takes to stay employed.
|
| I would be happy to know big tech companies that aren't
| doing this but I don't know any?
| andrewla wrote:
| I would argue that Microsoft's original practice (without
| the 20/70/10) is actually pretty good. Have managers make
| subjective evaluations, merge them together at higher
| level meetings, and then work out compensation from
| there.
|
| There's a big cottage industry of trying to back
| everything up with data, to provide actionable feedback,
| etc., and these end up being giant time-wasting cover-
| your-ass exercises, which always end in an uncomfortable
| non-working system for everyone -- "I did the thing you
| asked but my review is the same as last year, why aren't
| I getting promoted". Mentorship and growth has to be more
| than just "here are your goals". Peer reviews can be
| okay, but only if you force people to make judgments --
| "rank these three people against each other" rather than
| "give these people a rating 1-10 in each of these five
| areas".
|
| The subjective evaluation process doesn't work unless you
| trust your managers, though. And that invariable means
| that it doesn't scale.
| fsckboy wrote:
| "grading on a curve" is a good idea, and if athletics wasn't
| run that way, nobody would watch.
|
| that doesn't mean it's easy to implement, manage, or impossible
| to game, or that it plays nice wrt human factors, but to attack
| the core idea as essentially wrong is anti math, science, and
| rationality.
|
| Microsoft always suffered from rewarding egotists and political
| animals over people who did actual work.
| GVIrish wrote:
| > but to attack the core idea as essentially wrong is anti
| math, science, and rationality
|
| The way Microsoft implemented stack ranking was anti math.
| You're supposed to measure the data then calculate the level
| of fit to a distribution, not artificially shoehorn the data
| into buckets to create the curve. If you analyze the data
| honestly you may find you have a bimodal distribution, or a
| heavily skewed distribution, who knows.
|
| Stack ranking just clumsily says, I'm gonna give x% a bad
| score, y% a middle score, and z% the top score.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _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 factors that are not
| necessarily normally distributed.
|
| the people who downvote me simply want participation
| trophys, and "no" is the answer.
|
| You absolutely can argue that Microsoft pursued a system
| that hurt both Microsoft and its employees, but not by
| attacking rank ordering.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| 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.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Athletics is an actual competition where the expectation is
| that "you win".
|
| When you hire 12 baristas are they competing to make the most
| coffees or is their job to handle customer's orders? If their
| job isn't to compete with each other then don't stack rank
| them. Use other metrics like #of incorrect orders or w/e and
| decide what you think they should've done and if they did
| more than that give them a bonus. If they do less then maybe
| you need a new employee.
|
| > Microsoft always suffered from rewarding egotists and
| political animals over people who did actual work.
|
| That has nothing to do with grading on a curve. You can
| assign people to the top of a curve based on "egotist"
| criteria or based on "work". Nothing about a curve or stack
| ranking requires it to be based on "real work".
| randomdata wrote:
| _> When you hire 12 baristas are they competing to make the
| most coffees or is their job to handle customer 's orders?_
|
| Both? Handling customer orders is how the sport is played,
| but at the same time they are competing for the most points
| (money) in that gameplay.
| lesuorac wrote:
| So, all your baristas working a graveyard shift are going
| to be at the bottom of the stack ranking in terms of
| revenue/time. What do you now do?
| randomdata wrote:
| What do you do in athletics? Do you tell the kids
| (graveyard shift) they aren't allowed to participate in
| sports anymore because they can't compete with the big
| leagues (peak hours)?
|
| Probably not. More likely you would look at the different
| leagues individually. I'm surprised this idea is novel to
| you.
| krisoft wrote:
| > What do you do in athletics?
|
| Why do you talk about athletics? Baristas are not
| athletes. Coffee shops are not the olympics. You are
| stretching this analogy beyond its usefullness.
|
| > I'm surprised this idea is novel to you.
|
| Could you possibly express your thoughts without putting
| down others? Thank you.
|
| To address the meat of your comment. It sounds like you
| are proposing to grade the baristas working the bad
| shifts and the good shifts separately in different
| "leagues". The problem with that is that assumes that you
| are aware of all the factors which form the different
| leagues. If there are clear "night time" vs "daytime"
| barista groups that works. but if you just assign
| baristas as scheduling works out then you will realise
| that some people (randomly, and through no fault of their
| own) will be assigned to the slower shifts. Will you fire
| a perfectly good barista who is meeting the expectations
| of your establishment just because scheduling worked
| against them in that evaluation period? That is what
| stack ranking did in the case of microsoft.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> Why do you talk about athletics?_
|
| Because that's what the discussion is about...? Did you
| forget to read the thread?
|
| _> Could you possibly express your thoughts without
| putting down others?_
|
| If words shown on a computer screen are putting you down,
| it's time to go outside. You've lost your sense of
| reality.
| krisoft wrote:
| > Because that's what the discussion is about...?
|
| The thread seems to be about how one would manage
| baristas. It spawned off where lesuorac pointed out that
| baristas working for a coffe shop are different from
| athletes in that they are not competing with each other.
|
| > Did you forget to read the thread?
|
| > You've lost your sense of reality.
|
| I guess that's a no then. I hope you have a good day.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> The thread seems to be about how one would manage
| baristas._
|
| What gives you that impression? It isn't not about
| baristas, but namely about a parallel between baristas
| and athletics. That was the context that was setup at the
| head of this particular thread branch, and we haven't
| change the subject (aside from that irrational attempt
| related to being "put down", whatever that was).
|
| _> I guess that's a no then._
|
| Correct. There is no logical place for pointless emotions
| here. Save it for human interactions.
| lesuorac wrote:
| I mean you do tell the kids they can't participate (in
| that league). There are woman playing ice hockey but none
| of them have survived an interview (professional try out
| with an NHL team and so they've all been told no.
|
| ---
|
| It's novel because it's not how its done.
|
| It's a big part of the stack rank hate is that people
| just blindly rank everybody and then adjust compensation
| that way. Taking more granular detail into account just
| isn't done.
|
| But also because you're hired to do a job. If you do the
| criteria of the job then you should get a satisfactory
| rating. Similar to test taking, if you demonstrate
| knowledge of the material then you should pass. If you
| got 99/100 questions right and everybody else got 100/100
| then you shouldn't get an F despite you being the worse
| of the group.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> Taking more granular detail into account just isn 't
| done._
|
| Where'd you dream up that idea? I operate a restaurant,
| so I at least have first-hand experience in overseeing
| barista-like workers, and I don't know how you could
| possibly ignore such details?
|
| I'm sure I'm not perfect at it. I'm certainly not
| accurately capturing the butterfly flapping its wings in
| Africa. But you'd never flat-out ignore the blatantly
| obvious like shift times.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Perhaps we've gone so deep into the thread that you've
| forgotten how we got here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41983561
|
| Perhaps with a statement like "But you'd never flat-out
| ignore the blatantly obvious like shift times." then you
| understand why people don't like stack ranking because
| yes people do ignore blatantly obvious things.
| randomdata wrote:
| Not forgotten, but not particularly relevant. The context
| we followed only inherited the athletics analogy and how
| it parallels with baristas.
|
| Sometimes it is necessary to ignore the blatantly
| obvious. You can't meaningfully alter the ranking of a
| sports team because their star player was out with a
| broken leg. You have to accept the circumstances for what
| they are.
|
| But I'm not sure that translates to something like shift
| times which are fundamental to the game.
| krisoft wrote:
| That's great. If you regularly fire the barista who
| brings in the least amount of money then you will find
| that nobody sane will take the slower shifts.
|
| Because how much money a barista brings in is mostly a
| factor of how busy the coffeeshop is. Which is largely a
| factor of what time the clock shows, and that's not
| something a barista will be able to influence. (baring
| circumstances where a barista is so incompetent that
| costumers walk out of the shop.)
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Why the hell are your baristas competing? Why are you not
| just measuring whether or not they are acceptably good at
| their jobs? If they are superior, promote them. If they
| are acceptably OK, keep them. If they suck, fire them.
| You shouldn't have to arbitrarily put someone at the
| bottom of the curve; that's ridiculous.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> Why the hell are your baristas competing?_
|
| Because that's what is necessary in a market economy? If
| they don't put in effort to compete, the customer will
| find another team of baristas that will. It is not like
| it is hard to find another coffeeshop.
|
| _> you shouldn 't have to arbitrarily put someone at the
| bottom of the curve_
|
| What is arbitrary about it? The reality is that more
| coffeeshops open than can actually be supported by coffee
| drinkers, so it is an economic necessity that some end up
| shuttering due to being at the "bottom of the curve".
| psunavy03 wrote:
| You compete with your competitors, not with your fellow
| employees. That's some dog-eat-dog toxic crap.
| sealeck wrote:
| > "grading on a curve" is a good idea, and if athletics
| wasn't run that way, nobody would watch.
|
| Good thing that enterprise software and athletics are
| different things!
| psunavy03 wrote:
| This is ridiculous. You grade people to a standard, not
| against each other. Stack ranking Jack Welch-style is
| basically operating under the assumption that if you had Bill
| Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk,
| Satya Nadella, and Jeff Bezos on a team, that one of them
| would have to get a shitty grade and be fired.
|
| All it does is make true talent not want to work with other
| true talent for fear they get screwed over.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _Stack ranking Jack Welch-style is basically operating
| under the assumption that if you had Bill Gates, Mark
| Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Satya
| Nadella, and Jeff Bezos on a team, that one of them would
| have to get a shitty grade and be fired._
|
| no, it's not, you are wrong. It is based on the
| _probability_ that you will not have all those outliers on
| one team, a probability that is very very high.
|
| also, it's not used for teams of a dozen people where you
| can easily know everybody personally, it's used for teams
| of 1000 people, and Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve
| Jobs, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Satya Nadella, and Jeff
| Bezos 'S jobs would all be safe (if they could get along
| with each other, which they couldn't, there'd be so much
| backstabbing productivity would grind to a halt :)
| schnitzelstoat wrote:
| I was going to mention this. It was such an awful system and
| management method.
| mproud wrote:
| WSJ had a great write-up that was very interesting about the
| plans Ballmer was trying to get rolling. I really gained
| additional respect for him after reading this.
|
| He wanted to overhaul the company, but realized people would
| struggle doing so while he was in charge. He realized sometimes
| you have to let someone else do it.
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303460004579194...
| [archive here](https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pdfiles/cfov
| hds/weekly...)
| destitude wrote:
| The guy that laughed at the iPhone when it was first announced.
| exmicrosoldier wrote:
| I disagree with Dan due to my experience as an low level employee
| under Ballmer. He encouraged political infighting and
| backstabbing and dog eat dog internal competition, while praising
| and desiring tight integration between teams.
|
| He wanted "cloud first, moblie first" - two firsts! The culture
| at the time was built around RAID - the internal bug datadbase
| and that there should be clear prioritization for everything.
|
| The inability to decide between enterprise cloud and consumer
| client devices held Microsoft back.
|
| Ballmer had customers asking for enterprise cloud in 2000 but he
| kept listening to people talking about lifting windows sales by
| 10 percent with search integrated to the desktop.
|
| And then they chose the bloated SQL server for that and wondered
| why that couldn't run on normal consumer hardware in Longhorn.
|
| The fundamental tradeoffs between something that sacrifices
| generalization for specialization and efficiency meant that what
| is good for running server rack NASDAQ didn't work for low
| powered laptops.
|
| From a low level employee perspective Ballmer was the ruthless
| guy that wanted people to hate each other at work as they fought
| for survival lord of the flies style but was pikachu surprised
| that we could never deliver integrated experiences that worked
| together.
|
| Satya's two key abilites to me were the ability to actually
| prioritize in a coherent way and the decision to bring the rank
| and file infighting down because integrated experiences are hard
| to build when you want your brother and sister departments to
| fail so yours gets more budget because thats how Ballmer worked.
| atomicnature wrote:
| off-topic: Love the username :)
| alexawarrior4 wrote:
| So Ballmer-era Microsoft was the inspiration for Amazon's
| current culture, I see.
| xkqd wrote:
| This one's on Jack Welch - a pioneer in short term gain over
| long term building. You absolutely can juice a company's
| performance by going dog-eat-dog, but inevitably when the
| smoke clears you're left with jackals and hyenas stretched
| too thin.
|
| Always worth mentioning that this culturally altered America
| in a way that we'll probably never unwind.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| > Always worth mentioning that this culturally altered
| America in a way that we'll probably never unwind.
|
| I think this about a lot of things, such as certain events
| in politics or generative AI. I'm curious how you apply
| this to ruthless cutthroat policies at a handful of
| (admittedly quite large) tech companies?
| RobRivera wrote:
| Culturally unwinds corporate america.
|
| Go to any family business that scales a niche and you find
| golf course dealmaking and nepotism humming along with good
| ole fashion quiet cartel work.
| DowagerDave wrote:
| Combined with the massive popularity of private equity in
| so many business areas now we're unlikely to see 100-year
| companies again.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| I worked a long time ago in the same company that Steve Ballmer
| worked, both as juniors. Same culture. I think I know where he
| got it from.
| nojvek wrote:
| I was at Microsoft under both Ballmer and Nadella leadership.
|
| Ballmer was stuck on the old ways. I was connected to a team that
| had made iOS office apps but Ballmer blocked because MSFT jewel
| apps on Apple meant Apple would gain marketshare over Windows
| Mobile. That team was fairly pissed and some folks quit.
|
| Nadella was leading cloud division at that time, but they were
| not getting the firepower to go against AWS. Azure succeeded
| despite Ballmer. Nadella clearly saw Cloud was going to be the
| next big revenue firehose.
|
| Ballmer closely held onto Windows walled garden. His bet on
| acquiring Nokia and Skype had spectacularly failed. Android and
| iOS had won, they entirely lost on Windows Mobile.
|
| VSCode had just started but it was seen as an experiment and the
| sentiment was it could absolutely not jeopardize actual Visual
| Studio. Linux was seen a competitor to Windows.
|
| Under Nadella, he saw an entirely different Microsoft. He was
| playing bets on the future, while Ballmer held onto the past. The
| game had changed.
|
| Nadella didn't care about Windows walled garden. He wanted
| Microsoft on every platform where developers and Enterprises
| were. VSCode wanted to cannibalize VS go for it. MSFT apps on iOS
| go for it. Linux on Windows, go for it. All of MSFT switches to
| git, to for it. Acquire github and cannibalize Azure pipelines,
| go for it. Use chromium base for Edge instead of mshtml, go for
| it. Nadella made good bets over and over again. Ballmer doesn't
| have the same record.
|
| Nadella + Scott Guthrie went all out on Azure to be #2. The infra
| spend alone was in billions. Remains to be seen how OpenAI bet
| pans out.
| 486sx33 wrote:
| Nadella has been horrible and a huge mistake for Microsoft. They
| will continue to suffer under his leadership. At least ballmer
| had goals and pretended to care what customers want. Windows is
| an unmitigated disaster under nadella and it doesn't need to be.
| No new innovation is happening and hardware is more performant
| than ever. Windows had issues under ballmer because the hardware
| wasn't there yet and they were trying new things. Nadella only
| wants spyware and bloatware and everything as a subscription /
| service. The leadership can't change soon enough, hopefully his
| back room deals with OpenAI come to light and blow up sooner than
| later.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| There's no evidence Ballmer would have avoided spyware.
| Especially for money. Who was the first boot-licking corp in
| the NSA Prism slides? That's right--MS 2007.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM#/media/File:Prism_slide_...
| cryptonector wrote:
| The biggest problem with Ballmer's tenure was stack ranking,
| which led to the famous org chart where every org in MSFT points
| a gun at every org in MSFT.
|
| Things like LINQ and VScode are very nice but they weren't
| created by Ballmer. Ballmer's org allowed them to flourish to the
| point where they needed serious capital, then the org gave them
| that capital. Sun was like that too, but ultimately the
| management at Sun failed in so many ways. It's not just the
| technologies you choose to invest in -- there's something more
| needed, and the nicest thing to say about Ballmer is that he
| didn't ruin MSFT. The nicest thing to say about Satya is that he
| made it a nice place to work at while also greatly growing MSFT's
| cloud business.
| thijson wrote:
| Intel also had the stack ranking. I think this management
| technique originated with Jack Welsh at GE. It does pit groups
| against each other. Even for individuals on the same team, it
| pays to sabotage each other's work. I heard of managers hiring
| people so that they could be offered up when layoffs came
| around. It was kind of like how the Celt's had human sacrifice.
| Families would adopt people so that they could be offered up if
| they were chosen to give a family member for sacrifice at a
| later date.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Amazon is famous for hiring to fire.
|
| I wonder when the business schools will teach that stack
| ranking was a failed experiment?
| aidenn0 wrote:
| He should have said developers 37 times.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMcuxW6QzBM
| anshulbhide wrote:
| I guess Steve Ballmer deserves to be richer than Bill Gates today
| because he held onto his MSFT stock while Gates sold the majority
| of his :)
|
| Also, the Acquired podcast also makes the strong argument that
| Ballmer lay a lot of the foundation of what powered MSFT's growth
| under Nadella e.g. Azure.
| kevwil wrote:
| Yikes. The hottest of takes there. Wow. I know he's super-rich
| now and I'm not, so whatever.
| bjornnn wrote:
| If anyone is an authority on who is and isn't an underrated CEO,
| it's world famous titan of industry Dan Luu. Who hasn't heard of
| Dan Luu?
| marcusverus wrote:
| MSFT is up more today than it was during Steve Ballmer's 14 year
| tenure. It's up 1%.
| bjornnn wrote:
| I think the fact that Steve Ballmer could be considered a good
| CEO by anyone today is just another reminder of the fact that our
| society has lost all understanding of what a sustainable business
| model is and our modern conception of capitalism is really just
| feudalism, i.e. private owners with significant political
| influence eliminating all competition with the help of the state
| and wielding monopolistic control over essential resources and
| earning their profits by charging rent rather than actually
| producing anything of real value.
|
| We've been locked in this cycle for centuries now - technological
| progress opens up some new uncharted territory that is up for
| grabs and there is the brief period of booming growth and diverse
| competition in this new thriving industry, then the boom is over
| and the system no longer encourages competition or innovation or
| intelligent decisionmaking, instead it encourages overreach and
| incompetence and cancerous uninhibited growth and parasitic
| behavior - stealing ideas and flooding the market with cheap
| inferior imitations, aggressive anti-competitive practices,
| increased lobbying and increased dependence on state funding. The
| industry becomes dominated by these bloated behemoths that add
| nothing of value to the world and are an enormous burden on
| society and eventually they become so unsustainably huge that
| even the combined wealth of every sovereign nation cannot keep
| them afloat and then they collapse.
|
| I mean, seriously, everyone knows Windows has always been shit
| and people have never had anything but negative things to say
| about it, everyone knows that every product Microsoft has ever
| produced has been absolute trash and that they have never had any
| interest in doing anything innovative or original or contributing
| anything useful to the world. Microsoft isn't a company and
| people like Steve Ballmer are not CEOs or businessmen of any
| kind, they're just landlords.
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