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Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

(danluu.com)
371 points greggyb | 16 comments | 28 Oct 24 21:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.295s | source | bottom
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legitster ◴[28 Oct 24 22:41 UTC] No.41977299[source]▶
Having spent some time at the Microsoft campus, I can tell you this is basically the consensus view from employees today. Ballmer was not a cool, trendy, or fun CEO who people rallied behind - but he more or less "got the job done". He was the captain of a massive ship with a turning radius the size of a continent guiding it through icebergs.

Azure's success was specifically set in motion under Ballmer. Owed to the fact that it was developed to Microsoft's strengths (enterprise support) that it didn't piss off too many of their partners and sales channels. Same with Office 365 and all of their other successful services. None are glamourous - but all are impressive with how not awful they are given their design constraints.

Even things like Surface, while considered a failure, did its intended job of getting hardware partners to get their act together and make better consumer products.

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dyauspitr ◴[29 Oct 24 01:08 UTC] No.41978337[source]▶
Azure happened because of Nadella (who led the project) despite Ballmer.
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1. dexterdog ◴[29 Oct 24 01:48 UTC] No.41978558[source]▶
Azure may be successful financially, but as someone who has finally used it for the last two years after 15 years of AWS and a little bit of GCP, I can't help but think the world would be a better place if it didn't exist or if some lesser player had that market share.
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2. wongarsu ◴[29 Oct 24 02:14 UTC] No.41978700[source]▶
For most stuff Azure is pretty meh, but it seems to have the best features for running Windows servers and integrates well with Active Directory (or MS Entra or whatever they currently call it). Features that I don't need as a startup founder, but that would be very interesting for many places I worked at.

Basically the cloud for everyone but the tech companies

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3. greggyb ◴[29 Oct 24 02:35 UTC] No.41978806[source]▶
> Basically the cloud for everyone but the tech companies

And most companies are not tech companies. This is something that tends to be lost in HN discussions (not saying that applies to you, specifically).

I've spent a lot of time in the Microsoft world. I worked for AWS as well. In general, Microsoft executes on platform and ecosystem in a way that works very well for a lot of customers. In general, AWS executes on products better, which tends to appeal more to those who are focused on technology, specifically.

4. Uvix ◴[29 Oct 24 02:36 UTC] No.41978813[source]▶
Maybe it's just "what you're used to", but I'd swap Azure and AWS in that statement. Going from Azure to AWS, I found it not nearly as nice to use or easy to understand. Even basic features like "see all the resources in my account" were missing from AWS.
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5. stackskipton ◴[29 Oct 24 02:41 UTC] No.41978839[source]▶
As Azure SRE for a tech company, what feature is missing? We are using AKS with Linux, Blob storage and ServiceBus. Database is MySQL Flexible Server.

I'm even using some Azure Tables for backend services just because it was easier to deal with.

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6. dyauspitr ◴[29 Oct 24 03:09 UTC] No.41978983[source]▶
I disagree, I find Azure much easier to set up and use.
7. nl ◴[29 Oct 24 04:57 UTC] No.41979514[source]▶
I use all three regularly. AWS has a horrible, inconsistent UI, and the Azure portal is mostly ok (although I think GCP is the best of the three)

But OTOH AWS generally works and usually does what you think, whereas I'm never surprised when Azure breaks or some random Azure API works nothing like we expect.

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8. UltraSane ◴[29 Oct 24 07:02 UTC] No.41980165[source]▶
AWS feels fundamentally better engineered than Azure but Azure's GUI and API feels more consistent. AWS has never had the kind of global outage that Azure has had.
9. RandomThoughts3 ◴[29 Oct 24 07:31 UTC] No.41980374{3}[source]▶
> GCP is the best of the three

Until you have to call Google. Google business services are awful.

10. fragmede ◴[29 Oct 24 07:52 UTC] No.41980520{3}[source]▶
I feel your pain, also being on all three.

The biggest difference IMO is in how they're handled by large organizations and how prod permissions are provisioned by them. In Azure you have one user account and one org, with subscriptions for your user account to activate to get permissions. You can have multiple subscriptions but they're under the same login/user account and you can have multiple active at the same time. In AWS, you get access to an account or accounts that have different logins, so you get to juggle those with login/logout, even if there's SSO. In GCP, there are multiple projects, under a single login, but you may have to juggle projects.

The other aspect is how regions are dealt with. AWS global resource index/search thing is useful, but it totally feels like I spend more time juggling regions with AWS. Azure's regions themselves are, let's just say, interesting. GCP is better at it than AWS, and less interesting than Azure (which is a good thing).

11. fragmede ◴[29 Oct 24 07:54 UTC] No.41980534{3}[source]▶
I think

> Basically the cloud for everyone but the tech companies

is referring to the idea that tech companies are competent enough to run their own computers, not that Azure is missing something specific.

12. rbanffy ◴[29 Oct 24 11:46 UTC] No.41982885{3}[source]▶
> GCP is the best of the three

I must have very different needs. In my perception, AWS is the best of the three, Azure is second, and Google would be #3. Depending on your unique news, you might choose different CSP's, from Digital Ocean to Oracle or IBM (the only place you can get AIX, IBMi, and z/OS)

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13. nl ◴[30 Oct 24 00:35 UTC] No.41990902{4}[source]▶
Interesting.

Do you do cross-region work in AWS? For me that is just bad. I usually want to work at a service level and see across all regions, where as AWS wants me to work at a region level and see everything I have running there.

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14. rbanffy ◴[30 Oct 24 15:07 UTC] No.41995795{5}[source]▶
The web UI makes that easier with GCP, but the main "UI" for me is Terraform, with only occasional usage of the "human-rated" interfaces.

BTW, I hate Terraform with a passion, but I don't have the energy to write something that can describe infrastructure in Lisp.

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15. nl ◴[31 Oct 24 03:55 UTC] No.42003344{6}[source]▶
Why do you find GCP 3rd then? They have Terraform templates for all (?) their services includes in the docs.
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16. rbanffy ◴[31 Oct 24 09:58 UTC] No.42005140{7}[source]▶
I think it's a bit the services - I am very impressed with Aurora on AWS for instance, and there isn't really anything equivalent to it anywhere else. Also, some of the services elsewhere seem easier to deploy or more convenient to use.

In any case, all three big ones are pretty good for almost anything, and I don't think there is anything that's doable on one that's impossible to do in the others (IBM is the exception here - if you need AIX, IBMi or Z, they are the only ones who can offer that).