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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: 0.499s | 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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abirch ◴[28 Oct 24 22:17 UTC] No.41977048[source]▶
I remember when he retired and the MSFT jumped. Satya is underrated.
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parl_match ◴[28 Oct 24 22:19 UTC] No.41977070[source]▶
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.
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1. dh2022 ◴[28 Oct 24 23:23 UTC] No.41977644[source]▶
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..)

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2. kristianp ◴[28 Oct 24 23:29 UTC] No.41977688[source]▶
Valve figured it out when making the Steam Deck. But they're a brilliant exception that makes your point.
3. cyberax ◴[29 Oct 24 01:30 UTC] No.41978468[source]▶
> Why hardware makers do not figure this out for themselves is a different topic

Have you _seen_ the typical software produced by hardware makers?