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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: 0.411s | source
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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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snowwrestler ◴[29 Oct 24 01:44 UTC] No.41978547[source]▶
This is hindsight bias. Because other people took some of his later initiatives and made them successful, it’s tempting to look back and grant him these as wins.

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.

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1. tdeck ◴[29 Oct 24 05:01 UTC] No.41979536[source]▶
> 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.

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.

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2. ThrowawayB7 ◴[30 Oct 24 02:33 UTC] No.41991424[source]▶
Microsoft was under consent decrees and anti-trust / anti-monopoly scrutiny for much of Ballmer's tenure and had to tread very carefully in the marketplace. Pichal doesn't have that excuse. In fact, Google is staring down the barrel of a barrage of anti-trust / anti-monopoly lawsuits itself and the real test of Pichal is how well he is able to get Google to perform over the next decade when it's laboring under similar restraints. I would not bet money on him doing a better job than Ballmer did.