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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: 0.211s | 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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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. ThrowawayB7 ◴[30 Oct 24 02:55 UTC] No.41991559[source]▶
Windows Phone was indeed damn good. I held on to my WP 10 phone a lot longer than anyone sane would have. However, the only growth for WP was in the negative direction. There were no apps for WP because of past compatibility breaks, Google was sabotaging access to their services, carriers and OEMs were unhappy because of low sales volumes of WP phones. Windows Phone was already very clearly dead before Nadella took over.