Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

For me it was more his personality that made me dislike him. He acted like a baboon on stage. Nadella is much more composed and seems more intelligent as a result. I don't like that kind of extreme expression and this is important because I wouldn't respect such a leader at work. See also other stuff like the chair-throwing incident of course.

Also something I didn't see covered, this was also the dark age where Microsoft hated linux. Now they say they love Linux and there is certainly some affection going around (though I remain sceptical).

One thing I don't really like about Satya Nadella by the way, his AI strategy is a mess. They're slamming stuff on the market way too quickly (see the recall fiasco), they call everything 'copilot' so even their own people get confused which product does what because there are literally over 30 separate copilot products now. Stuff is changing by the day (until 2 weeks ago the copilot button controlled both consumer and corporate copilots, now it only works with consumer). It's the kind of overeager rush that makes it feel like nobody has a clue what they're doing anymore.

> One thing I don't really like about Satya Nadella by the way, his AI strategy is a mess. They're slamming stuff on the market way too quickly (see the recall fiasco)

Google did an even worse job in that regard, Gemini's reputation is still greatly tainted in the tech world despite now being competitive with the other frontier models.

I don't really agree. Google is great at AI development, they're just not so good at marketing.

And I think they're right not to push it too hard like MS is doing. Because the tech still needs work.

Personally I use neither, but I use llama locally which is amazingly good considering the limited resources it has to work with here.

Gemini is currently atrocious compared to Chatgpt, they cant even do a good integration with the data they have on other google products like search, maps, youtube, gmail, calendar.

The frontend of the B2C product, on desktop, sure. I was talking about the LLM itself, i.e. API-based usage. And there's a good number of tasks it's better at than any other model. Same goes for GPT and Claude FWIW, each have tasks they beat the competition on.

Even on the consumer side though, the overwhelming majority of usage will be through mobile apps, and I find the Gemini app significantly better than e.g. the Claude app - one of their two main competitors.

What I'm getting is that Google did push too hard, they gave Bard/early Gemini demos when the product was still miles from ready and compared awfully to GPT, and they're still suffering from it.