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Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

(danluu.com)
371 points greggyb | 1 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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harry8 ◴[28 Oct 24 22:26 UTC] No.41977145[source]▶
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.

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1. analog31 ◴[28 Oct 24 22:31 UTC] No.41977206[source]▶
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.