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Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

(danluu.com)
371 points greggyb | 4 comments | 28 Oct 24 21:48 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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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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_heimdall ◴[29 Oct 24 12:23 UTC] No.41983142[source]▶
Lately it has definitely felt as though Microsoft is resurrecting Ballmer's old meme as "AI! AI! AI!"

I was at Microsoft for the last couple years of Ballmer and the first few years of Nadella. He definitely did change the company and I remember at the time feeling that he handled the change really well, but from where I sat he spent the first part of his tenure evolving Ballmer's final push to move focus from Windows to developers. Everything Microsoft did prior to LLMs was to bring developers over, from VS Code to GitHub to WSL.

Now the company seems fully baked I to LLMs with everything they do chasing that. It would even make sense if the developer push was driven in part by the need to build up training sets for the eventual LLM work, though I really have a hard time believing that Microsoft was so well ahead of the game that they started grooming developers to provide data more than a decade ago.

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toyg ◴[29 Oct 24 12:32 UTC] No.41983213[source]▶
> Now the company seems fully baked I to LLMs with everything they do chasing that

Them along absolutely everyone else. ChatGPT was an iPhone moment.

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kranke155 ◴[29 Oct 24 13:12 UTC] No.41983511[source]▶
I would press X to doubt just because of profitability.

It’s cute that we now have image and video gen AI. Also we have now Turing test passing chat bots (Id say). But although they are very impressive, and I know lots of people who use them for various tasks, I haven’t seen a “killer app” yet.

For iPhone the killer app was making calls. It was the best phone you could get. Then it had apps. It was undeniably better.

LLMs are good at a lot of things, but they don’t seem to excel any particular task - yet. I’m not sure they are a revolution yet.

I’d say they’re more of Macintosh moment. A hugely useful technology no doubt - but useful for what exactly? For Mac it was desktop publishing.

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1. JKCalhoun ◴[29 Oct 24 13:23 UTC] No.41983614[source]▶
I agree generally with what you're saying but feel you were all over the place in your comment.

The killer app on the iPhone was not "making calls" — I suspect instead it was Safari, the other 1st party apps, the touch screen and the slick integration of all of that to make it a no-brainer device that even my mom and dad could use (they were approaching their 70's when the iPhone debuted).

Your analogy that ChatGPT (or LLMs generally) are more akin to the Mac feels close to the mark to me. Your comment about the Mac's killer app, desktop publishing, suggests that LLM's killer app will follow, just hasn't arrived yet.

The analogy is a little shaky though since, some would argue, it was the laser printer (plus the Mac) that kicked off desktop publishing.

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2. kranke155 ◴[29 Oct 24 18:25 UTC] No.41987781[source]▶
You're right it is a bit all over the place.

"The killer app is making calls" is me quoting Steve Jobs on the Iphone 1 presentation. I get that it doesn't sound true now, knowing all we can do. It's true Iphone was a lot more, but that was his conviction at the time, and I think it makes sense. Their aim was to make the best phone in the world.

I also think yeah, it is a bit like Macintosh in the sense that this is a new general purpose technology, and I'm not sure we've really figured out what's going to the most transformative about it yet.

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3. throwaway314155 ◴[29 Oct 24 20:59 UTC] No.41989351[source]▶
Want the whole premise of the original iPhone keynote that it was a fusion of three things - telecommunications, an iPod and internet? (Is that right?) That seems to place "phone" as not the killer app, but rather a pillar of three things that made up a "killer app" when combined.

I do remember the initial visual voicemail implementation being very appealing of course. Especially since it seemed they had enough leverage to get the carrier/s (just one at the beginning) to do whatever they needed.

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4. kranke155 ◴[30 Oct 24 10:08 UTC] No.41993384{3}[source]▶
That's true. I think his idea was to beat the competitors in every category - it was the better phone, it was the better internet device, and it was the better iPod (apparently that was one of Apple's main reasons for making the iPhone at the time, they felt like phones would start having mp3s).

I think we agree. All I meant is, yes LLMs seem to do a lot of things, but nothing quite perfectly. Yet.