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Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

(danluu.com)
371 points greggyb | 1 comments | 28 Oct 24 21:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.284s | 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. hardwaresofton ◴[29 Oct 24 04:55 UTC] No.41979502[source]▶
Almost instinctive disagree -- this guy doesn't miss much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Azure#Key_people

Also elsewhere in this post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41978577

That said, have never been a Microsoft watcher and basically will never run it in the server context so... Happy to be corrected.

I do agree that the current phase of Microsoft is remarkable -- the turn around in strategy/sentiment is huge.