Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

We should resist that temptation and judge him on the results he delivered. MS was the essential tech company, king of the world, and under his leadership their innovation stalled, they lost in markets where they were leading, the stock stagnated, and huge piles of money were vaporized on acquisitions that were poorly planned or executed.

He tried to buy Yahoo for $44 billion! Only Yahoo’s greater idiocy saved him from that gargantuan mistake. And that was just one of many.

Buying Yahoo would have been a bet that didn't work out, probably, but I don't think it goes against the point in the article.

Developing OSes and software was clearly an unsustainable business. It's obvious in hindsight that cloud infrastructure was the way to go. But at the time placing a lot of different bets to find a few successful product-market fits was the best you could ask for.

I think that Ballmer's management can take a lot of blame for that. I think a different CEO could have executed and possibly have kept Microsoft in that market with success.

The Apple App Store by itself is a trillion dollar ecosystem. Microsoft being able to gain even a sliver of that size would be worth quite a lot.

We might give Apple similar criticism on the other side of this coin by saying that it's somewhat insane that Apple hasn't tried entering the public cloud market, especially given the fact that they now design their own ARM processors that are essentially the market leaders in that architecture.

Cloud infrastructure has become a commodity though and you can replace your cloud provider easily (theoretically, lol). What moat can MS or anyone else build around cloud infrastructure? Compare to OS' where MS may never have had a competitor catch up if they'd kept up speed on their OS teams.

Same with video games these days. Adding in digital casinos may seem nice but now you're just the same as every other digital casino offering.

Yahoo.com remains the 8th most visited website on earth[1] (I had no idea until I read that on HN some months back). It sits between Wikipedia and Reddit.

[1] https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/

A lot of this sounds like Google under Sundar's leadership, although I'm not sure if there is a parallel to the failed acquisitions, and some of the rot had set in well before.

I mean, Microsoft was too early and too late on smartphones. I never cared to look into the pre WP7 history.

But the more recent Windows Phone died with WM10, which I don't think is fair to blame on Balmer. WM10 came out in public beta in Feburary 2015, and Balmer was replaced in February 2014. Microsoft eliminated their legendary testing program in August 2014, and the WM10 betas and release in November 2015 had very poor quality. On my phones, I had to choose between annoying bugs in notifications in WP8 or WM10 with a subpar, laggy experience with mobile Edge that managed to be worse than mobile IE. They did manage to get a decent final release together in 2020, although mobile Edge was still crap. You can blame Balmer for not letting Firefox on their app store, I think; a browser that didn't suck would have helped me stay on WP longer anyway.

Still, I think Continuum with an x86 phone could have gotten market share, but Intel cancelled atom for phones in April 2016.

MS did not just have bad luck, they lost to competitors.

Yahoo management was looking to reduce the cost of running web search and advertising platforms, but ended up still having a large expense to crawl the web and basically do web search in order to enhance Bing results. And then the Microsoft ad market managed to be worse in all sorts of ways (for advertisers and publishers) compared to the existing yahoo one, plus Microsoft took a cut of the revenue. Some of that should have been better if it was one company; plus, I bet Microsoft would have sent Yahoo employees an Xbox360 or something. (I worked for Yahoo Travel from 2004-2011)

There are only 3 significant providers and the needed investments are a gigantic barrier to entry but sure it’s a commodity.

I was a Windows Phone user during 8 and 8.1. There was a short period where I felt like some traction was taking place. My bank even had a Windows Phone app, until they didn’t.

Windows 8.1 was the most competitive version against contemporaries, but then the delays and issues surrounding 10 really took the wind out of those sails.

My perspective as a consumer is that Microsoft buying Nokia seemed to have made Nokia worse and delayed their phone development process. I found myself without any upgrade path, while Apple and Samsung users could get a pretty significant upgrade in capability every year at that time.

Nokia was also better at making low-end phones and had very few flagship products that were iPhone and Galaxy competitors.

On the business side Microsoft didn’t focus on having their entire lineup available on all four US carriers. They had all these weird carrier exclusives where getting a new Windows Phone would mean switching carriers.

I have to think that the break in compatibility between Windows 7 and 8 really screwed over developer relations as well. On the Apple side they were delivering an experience very familiar to Mac developers, and on the Android side the experience was an open source free-for-all playground.

I very briefly tried WP10, and it actually seemed a step backwards; in their desperate attempt to somehow unify the desktop and phone thing, be it in code base or user experience or whatever, they tried too hard.