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Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

(danluu.com)
371 points greggyb | 8 comments | 28 Oct 24 21:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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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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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legitster ◴[29 Oct 24 02:17 UTC] No.41978712[source]▶
Hindsight works both ways.

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.

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dangus ◴[29 Oct 24 02:40 UTC] No.41978833[source]▶
While it may be true that the OS itself isn't really a cash cow anymore (if it ever was), I still think Microsoft's greatest failure of the previous decade was exiting the smartphone OS space and ceding it to Google and Apple.

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.

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1. toast0 ◴[29 Oct 24 05:04 UTC] No.41979552[source]▶
> While it may be true that the OS itself isn't really a cash cow anymore (if it ever was), I still think Microsoft's greatest failure of the previous decade was exiting the smartphone OS space and ceding it to Google and Apple.

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.

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2. actionfromafar ◴[29 Oct 24 12:34 UTC] No.41983226[source]▶
My thesis is WP8 was already the first huge misstep where they lost developers.
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3. dangus ◴[29 Oct 24 12:57 UTC] No.41983384[source]▶
Yeah, the idea that Nadella killed Windows Phone only makes sense in the context of Windows Phone already having failed under Ballmer.

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.

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4. actionfromafar ◴[29 Oct 24 13:05 UTC] No.41983449{3}[source]▶
That's exactly it. There were a bunch of hardcore Windows dev shops getting ready to support Windows Phone who jumped on WP7, ready to dig down, but who felt betrayed when WP8 was a clean break. You lose that hardcore bunch, then you are just evaluated on the generics and Windows Phone had no edge.
5. MarkusWandel ◴[29 Oct 24 15:41 UTC] No.41985202[source]▶
I tried various "weird phones" on my way to standard Android, among them a high-end WinCE phone (Xperia X1a) and a WP8 one (Lumia 520). Make no mistake about it, WP8 was a good mobile OS, even if they did stick the dreaded "Windows" name in there. Smooth, reliable, battery efficient, well-thought-out UI. But alas, too late. By then Android had captured the "not iOS" market and it would have taken a miracle to bring a third OS to the mainstream.

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.

6. garaetjjte ◴[30 Oct 24 03:00 UTC] No.41991584[source]▶
WP7 was the first misstep with extremely limited API and no native code for apps.
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7. actionfromafar ◴[30 Oct 24 09:05 UTC] No.41993086{3}[source]▶
Sure, then making WP8 phones incompabitle with WP7 apps was the second misstep. Developers, developers, indeed! Not wanted here.
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8. garaetjjte ◴[30 Oct 24 14:14 UTC] No.41995094{4}[source]▶
WP8 was compatible with Silverlight (ie. WP7) apps. The problem was splitting app model into half-abandoned Silverlight and new WinRT, and not providing WP8 upgrade to any WP7 phones.