The problem with Ballmer is that he missed a lot of opportunities.
Satya is much better in that regard.
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Satya is much better in that regard.
Satya has been good with acquisitions but what else?
Like with Ballmer we certainly would not have got O365 to iOS for example. It would be 100% bundled one way or another to Windows services or something or browser or whatever.
Even with Azure we would not have got such aggressive expansion and attempts to push services across Windows and Linux or playing with Open Source platforms like K8S. I think Ballmer was closer to the modern Google who is hell-bent on not using anything Windows.
Ballmer's attempt to buy Yahoo and disregard for touch screen phones is what defined his legacy. He was a good CFO who knew how to run business, but not a great CEO.
> Satya has been good with acquisitions but what else?
Ability to buy right things is important too. Like Ballmer wanted to buy Yahoo, while Satya bought Github. One cost 80b, while another created a whole foundation for Copilot push. Linkedin purchase was great and with OpenAI I am 100% sure that Ballmer would have missed AI train (like AWS did).
You are weirdly obsessed with that but Ballmer actually started Bing and bought Nokia to make touchscreen phones. I think you are extremely biased to the point of being entirely disconnected from the facts at hand.
> Ability to buy right things is important too.
Ballmer bought Skype and launched the foundation of what would become Teams - you know - arguably the most important corporate piece of software after Covid.
Microsoft during that era was one bad call after another. When Apple saw multitouch they made a phone; Microsoft made a giant table[0] (very little imagination beyond the Jeff Han demo[1]). When Microsoft saw the iPhone reception, they sunk 2 years an $1B into the Kin line of phones[2], which lasted all of 2 months before being pulled from shelves. It was several years later when they bought Nokia, when then iPhone was already 6-7 generations in. By this time the world was already moving to "mobile first", and Microsoft was being left behind without a platform.
For a couple decades Microsoft worked to convince the world that Windows, Office, and Microsoft as a whole was needed to get real work done. It was during Ballmer's time at the helm that this belief eroded. People saw they didn't need Microsoft to make a good smart phone. They found they could get work done with Google Docs and didn't always need MS Office. They found macOS could be used to get work done just as well as Windows... and in fact, a desktop OS might not be needed at all. Ballmer's biggest failure was giving his competitors time to show the world that Microsoft wasn't as necessary as the world was led to believe.
As far as Teams goes... it is used a lot by companies that are all-in on O365, but Slack and Zoom were the two household names in the space during the pandemic. Once again, the world was shown that work could be done without Microsoft.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PixelSense
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_the_radical_promise_of_th...
This is a wild take. Both the original Surface 1.0 table and the second SUR40 had some really amazing, highly-imaginative multi-user compute paradigms (a multi-user interface with no concept of “up”? Come on now.).
Commercially successful? No. But calling them "very little imagination" is a real head-scratcher.
What’s also interesting about this comment is that, in this very same Ballmer era, Microsoft later acquired Jeff Han’s Perceptive Pixel to create the Surface Hub product.