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Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

(danluu.com)
371 points greggyb | 2 comments | 28 Oct 24 21:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.496s | source
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cheaprentalyeti ◴[28 Oct 24 22:27 UTC] No.41977157[source]▶
"To sum it up, for the past twenty years, people having been dunking on Ballmer for being a buffoon who doesn't understand tech and who was, at best, some kind of bean counter who knew how to keep the lights on but didn't know how to foster innovation and caused Microsoft to fall behind in every important market."

It's important to keep the lights on while waiting for the next new development to take off. I think it's an undervalued skill.

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1. noen ◴[29 Oct 24 01:43 UTC] No.41978543[source]▶
He didn’t keep the lights on while waiting for new development to take off. He actively lost 40+ billion dollars on horrible acquisitions, and actively stifled internal innovation to ensure existing product lines weren’t threatened.

On the sales side he streamlined Microsoft into a single monolithic sales motion that killed dozens of products before they started because the target customer/market didn’t fit the EA model.

This included Azure that took nearly a decade after his departure to unwind so the sales force could actually sell consumption based products and services.

I honestly can’t think of anything substantially positive he achieved in his tenure other than promoting Satya and Scott G and a handful of others.

All of the contemporary media reports don’t know about the laundry list of near sighted, anti competitive, anti innovation shit he put on the company.

replies(1): >>41980483 #
2. RandomThoughts3 ◴[29 Oct 24 07:46 UTC] No.41980483[source]▶
> I honestly can’t think of anything substantially positive he achieved in his tenure other than promoting Satya and Scott G and a handful of others.

Ok, but apart from fostering a great generation of new executives, investing in currently extremely profitable products and business lines, streamlining our sales operations and getting us out of these life threatening antitrust cases, what did Steve Ballmer ever do for us?