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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: 0s | source
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exabrial ◴[28 Oct 24 22:11 UTC] No.41976993[source]▶
No he wasn’t haha. The only thing he did was slide the company sideways via pre existing illegal monopoly. In fact, they lost most of their monopoly under his supervision . At no point did the quality of their products improve, and that’s evidenced with this year’s massive massive Windows outage, or Garmins mega ransomware, out a hundred other people who’ve been hacked via Windows.

If you’re running Windows for anything, it’s only a matter of when, not if.

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abirch ◴[28 Oct 24 22:17 UTC] No.41977048[source]▶
I remember when he retired and the MSFT jumped. Satya is underrated.
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parl_match ◴[28 Oct 24 22:19 UTC] No.41977070[source]▶
Satya's tenure has seen the fall of Xbox, the lost relevance of Windows. While moving to a services model is going to be very lucrative for them, they risk competitors offering swap-out models.
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ytoawwhra92 ◴[28 Oct 24 22:53 UTC] No.41977411[source]▶
The fall of Xbox started with the Xbox One, which was developed and released while Ballmer was CEO. They put an enormous amount of investment into that console, but made some bad calls in both its development and marketing that put them in a deep hole that they've been unable to get out of since. The increasing backwards compatibility of modern consoles means that the current 4th generation Xbox is paying for the sins of the 3rd generation in addition to dealing with its own struggles. Really the only thing that can fix the situation is money, but the business is probably under pressure to show profits after two decades of heavy investment with minimal return.

I don't necessarily think you can blame Ballmer for the missteps the Xbox team made, but I definitely think you can't blame Nadella.

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1. jfim ◴[29 Oct 24 03:24 UTC] No.41979074[source]▶
Out of curiosity, what do you see as the fall of Xbox? It seems to work fine to play games, even if they had missteps with certain things (eg. Kinect being deprecated after being mandatory, some hardware issues).
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2. ytoawwhra92 ◴[29 Oct 24 04:00 UTC] No.41979245[source]▶
> Out of curiosity, what do you see as the fall of Xbox?

The ever-declining hardware revenue and market share. If the decline that started in 2013 continues long enough it will stop making sense for Microsoft to sell consoles at all. They seem to be planning for this, as they're clearly pivoting the Xbox business towards "content and services".

This is a stark contrast to how Xbox was positioned prior to the 3rd gen. Xbox One. They had taken significant market share away from PlayStation and they were expecting to continue to do so, particularly outside the USA. They were also trying to get a foothold in the household computing market (this market was in its infancy then, now: Alexa/Fire TV, Nest/Chromecast, Apple TV/HomePod). Those ambitions are gone.