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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This sounds right until you realise how much market share Windows captured, held and now even solidifies from the Ballmer era.
I don't agree with you, and I believe the Ballmer era did wonders for Windows and was a turbulent period. The new era of MS now is quite stable because of this.
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.
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 .
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
"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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] addicted|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] _heimdall|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] archerx|1 year ago|reply
I keep hearing praise for Nadella but all he is doing is alienating a lot of customers with his terrible decisions.
[+] [-] ThrowawayB7|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ozim|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dataflow|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Hypergraphe|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] layer8|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] DowagerDave|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] anilakar|1 year ago|reply
...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.
[+] [-] seoulmetro|1 year ago|reply
I don't agree with you, and I believe the Ballmer era did wonders for Windows and was a turbulent period. The new era of MS now is quite stable because of this.
[+] [-] chucke1992|1 year ago|reply
With Satya he had much broader vision.
[+] [-] jayceedenton|1 year ago|reply
Very good point, but please stop using this phrase.
[+] [-] legitster|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] vjust|1 year ago|reply
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 .
[+] [-] snowwrestler|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] belter|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cyberax|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] signa11|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] datavirtue|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dyauspitr|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] fnord123|1 year ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] miffy900|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] blackeyeblitzar|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hardwaresofton|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] paulpauper|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dvt|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] aaronbrethorst|1 year ago|reply
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-...
[+] [-] codeflo|1 year ago|reply
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|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] causality0|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] exmicrosoldier|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] FuriouslyAdrift|1 year ago|reply
That nearly ruined Microsoft...
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft-ditches-syst...
[+] [-] edm0nd|1 year ago|reply
Steve Ballmer: developers developers developers developers developers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs
Two of my favorite videos haha
[+] [-] hermanradtke|1 year ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] nvader|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperhopper|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] RandomThoughts3|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] adabyron|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] KaoruAoiShiho|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nojvek|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] colonCapitalDee|1 year ago|reply
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
[+] [-] cheaprentalyeti|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] OtomotO|1 year ago|reply
He was a CEO, that much can be said. The rest is up for debate.
[+] [-] underdeserver|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] yalogin|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] voidfunc|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Nevermark|1 year ago|reply
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
[+] [-] ThrowawayB7|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] senderista|1 year ago|reply