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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: 0s | 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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dyauspitr ◴[29 Oct 24 01:08 UTC] No.41978337[source]▶
Azure happened because of Nadella (who led the project) despite Ballmer.
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dexterdog ◴[29 Oct 24 01:48 UTC] No.41978558[source]▶
Azure may be successful financially, but as someone who has finally used it for the last two years after 15 years of AWS and a little bit of GCP, I can't help but think the world would be a better place if it didn't exist or if some lesser player had that market share.
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Uvix ◴[29 Oct 24 02:36 UTC] No.41978813[source]▶
Maybe it's just "what you're used to", but I'd swap Azure and AWS in that statement. Going from Azure to AWS, I found it not nearly as nice to use or easy to understand. Even basic features like "see all the resources in my account" were missing from AWS.
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nl ◴[29 Oct 24 04:57 UTC] No.41979514{3}[source]▶
I use all three regularly. AWS has a horrible, inconsistent UI, and the Azure portal is mostly ok (although I think GCP is the best of the three)

But OTOH AWS generally works and usually does what you think, whereas I'm never surprised when Azure breaks or some random Azure API works nothing like we expect.

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1. fragmede ◴[29 Oct 24 07:52 UTC] No.41980520{4}[source]▶
I feel your pain, also being on all three.

The biggest difference IMO is in how they're handled by large organizations and how prod permissions are provisioned by them. In Azure you have one user account and one org, with subscriptions for your user account to activate to get permissions. You can have multiple subscriptions but they're under the same login/user account and you can have multiple active at the same time. In AWS, you get access to an account or accounts that have different logins, so you get to juggle those with login/logout, even if there's SSO. In GCP, there are multiple projects, under a single login, but you may have to juggle projects.

The other aspect is how regions are dealt with. AWS global resource index/search thing is useful, but it totally feels like I spend more time juggling regions with AWS. Azure's regions themselves are, let's just say, interesting. GCP is better at it than AWS, and less interesting than Azure (which is a good thing).