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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: 0.208s | source
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underdeserver ◴[28 Oct 24 22:18 UTC] No.41977063[source]▶
I read the entire article, and I love how virtually every comment here is what Dan wrote about.
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underdeserver ◴[28 Oct 24 22:20 UTC] No.41977083[source]▶
Also, I agree with the gist of the article, in that a lot of Nadella's success is stuff that takes more than 3-4 years to execute.

Ballmer, or Microsoft under Ballmer, had to have been laying the groundwork for Azure, TypeScript and VS code before they took off under Nadella.

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ytoawwhra92 ◴[28 Oct 24 23:19 UTC] No.41977616[source]▶
> Ballmer, or Microsoft under Ballmer, had to have been laying the groundwork for Azure, TypeScript and VS code before they took off under Nadella.

More specifically: Nadella under Ballmer laid the groundwork for those things.

Dan lists three big wins for Ballmer: Bing, Azure, Office365.

Nadella led Bing and Azure. Not sure where Office365 sat in the org chart, but even if he wasn't managing it a _lot_ of services at Microsoft at that time relied on technology that was developed in Bing and Azure.

He was promoted for good reason.

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1. underdeserver ◴[29 Oct 24 06:38 UTC] No.41980060[source]▶
Good point. I wasn't aware of that, and I think it should have been mentioned in the blog post.