Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

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.

Agree .Balmer was a disaster. Microsoft stock basically languished from 2003-2013 as everything else went up.

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’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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.