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Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

(danluu.com)
371 points greggyb | 9 comments | 28 Oct 24 21:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.621s | source | bottom
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addicted ◴[29 Oct 24 02:19 UTC] No.41978723[source]▶
This article doesn’t understand what was fundamentally wrong with Ballmer’s leadership and what Nadella actually changed.

The specific technologies that were successful is irrelevant. Microsoft has and continues to invest in nearly every computer related technology that may come around the corner or they got late on.

The problem with Microsoft was everything went through Windows. The entire company was designed to promote Windows.

This was the fundamental flaw with Microsoft that Nadella changed. He quickly not just made Windows just another part of Microsoft’s business, to a great extent he actively devalued it.

The fact that Ballmer invested in Azure, etc before Nadella would all be irrelevant because under Ballmer Azure would have remained a red headed step child to Windows, so it’s unlikely to have seen much success under him anyways. Same goes for pretty much everything else Microsoft is doing right now.

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ThrowawayB7 ◴[29 Oct 24 05:11 UTC] No.41979581[source]▶
Except Steven Sinofsky, longtime head of the Windows division and one of the internal forces preventing Microsoft from going in alternate directions, was pushed out under Ballmer's tenure, not Nadella's.

Granted, Ballmer made the mistake of putting Terry Myerson, who headed up the failed Windows Phone effort, in charge of Windows but that's another story.

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lenkite ◴[29 Oct 24 09:36 UTC] No.41981463[source]▶
Windows phone was damn good and was growing in popularity when Nadella came in and killed it. When you are #3 in a market, you need persistence to win. One cannot expect immediate, massive profits in a saturated market. Yet, Windows phone by itself was a growth multiplier for Windows which Nadella annihilated in order to turn Microsoft into a cloud & ad services company.
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1. rbanffy ◴[29 Oct 24 11:38 UTC] No.41982824[source]▶
> you need persistence to win.

You also need a plan. How would Windows Phone displace either Apple or Android?

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2. raxxorraxor ◴[29 Oct 24 12:14 UTC] No.41983087[source]▶
It wouldn't and it wouldn't need to. The decision was still very likely wrong, especially transparent after Apple proved with silicon that ARM platforms can be that competitive. Windows wasn't ready here and platform interop wasn't at all it strength.

If Windows phones would have had an emulated x86 mode, many people would have bought it instantly due to the momentum that now steadily decreases.

There can be solid business revenue if you are "just" #3 and the experience with development is very valuable. Although it is true that Microsoft and hardware has always been turbulent, with partners or without. Sometimes they simply created the best products in their class with a lot of margin, sometimes they basically sold scrap.

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3. mysterydip ◴[29 Oct 24 12:17 UTC] No.41983099[source]▶
Just a spitball idea, but rather than focusing on the consumer market, they could've been the new blackberry for businesses (that give employees phones). Native active directory and group policy integration would be a good solution for the myriad of third party apps/services/devices that attempt to control the other phones.
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4. actionfromafar ◴[29 Oct 24 12:26 UTC] No.41983176[source]▶
The entire mobile market was immature back then, people didn't expect much interoperability and Windows Mobile 7 Nokias were slick and faster than iPhone or Android. They could have become the "contrarians luxury" if you didn't want to just get an iPhone. A bunch of hardcore Microsoft fan developers were gearing up to develop for Windows Mobilet dotnet when Microsoft changed the APIs with Mobile 8 (IIRC) and this dedicated bunch of developers just dropped the platform and just embraced Android or iOS instead.
5. actionfromafar ◴[29 Oct 24 12:28 UTC] No.41983187[source]▶
For sure. Enterprise mobile was not really a thing back then. (Laptops with VPN was state of the art.) Microsoft could have organically owned the enterprise mobile market but chose not to.
6. gtirloni ◴[29 Oct 24 13:13 UTC] No.41983524[source]▶
Open source has a lot of momentum in Microsoft now but it wasn't the case when Windows Phone was released.

Had they made it open source, it would have been a different story with Android and Windows Phone fighting to win the OEMs.

But that ship has sailed. Unless there's a paradigm shift in smartphones (doubtful), we're stuck with Android and iOS for the foreseeable future.

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7. trympet ◴[29 Oct 24 16:34 UTC] No.41986159[source]▶
> Had they made it open source

That would have necessitated open sourcing Windows

8. spacebanana7 ◴[30 Oct 24 11:02 UTC] No.41993599[source]▶
I could also imagine organisations like the military and police paying vast amounts for phones that could be governed like corporate PCs.

Even now, Microsoft has a great advantage over Google and Apple in getting meetings with the procurement people in those organisations.

9. rbanffy ◴[30 Oct 24 16:23 UTC] No.41996963[source]▶
That's what Blackberry did and it didn't work, despite great technology (QNX) and good Android compatibility.