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Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

(danluu.com)
371 points greggyb | 3 comments | 28 Oct 24 21:48 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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exabrial ◴[28 Oct 24 22:11 UTC] No.41976993[source]▶
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.

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analog31 ◴[28 Oct 24 22:18 UTC] No.41977054[source]▶
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.
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1. ipaddr ◴[28 Oct 24 22:22 UTC] No.41977102[source]▶
Give them LibreOffice - Calc and most won't care.
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2. analog31 ◴[28 Oct 24 22:30 UTC] No.41977198[source]▶
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.

3. p_l ◴[29 Oct 24 01:56 UTC] No.41978607[source]▶
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.