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Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

(danluu.com)
371 points greggyb | 4 comments | 28 Oct 24 21:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.691s | source
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fnord123 ◴[28 Oct 24 22:30 UTC] No.41977194[source]▶
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.

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1. paulpauper ◴[29 Oct 24 01:26 UTC] No.41978448[source]▶
Agree .Balmer was a disaster. Microsoft stock basically languished from 2003-2013 as everything else went up.
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2. datavirtue ◴[29 Oct 24 03:01 UTC] No.41978948[source]▶
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.
3. dingaling ◴[29 Oct 24 06:31 UTC] No.41980020[source]▶
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.

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4. kortilla ◴[29 Oct 24 07:57 UTC] No.41980561[source]▶
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.