Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

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.

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.

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

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.

What?

Making calls was the killer app for Nokia brick phones in the late 1990s.

The killer app for the first generation of smartphones (Windows Mobile, Blackberry, etc.) was email and calendar.

The killer app for iPhone and Android was the capacitative touchscreen combined with the ability to run 3rd party apps (yes, I'm aware there was an extremely brief moment in the history of the original iPhone where Apple opposed this), and 3G mobile internet (yes, again, I realize this came a year after the initial iPhone release). Mobile web browsers and Maps/GPS got the party started.