[Bamafan]

> For whatever reason, the industry press never liked Ballmer, and I guess they like Satya

Ballmer made several missteps:

1. Fruitless foray into mobile with acquisition of Nokia and Windows Mobile and Windows Phone strategies.

2. Billion+ dollar acquisition of Skype that basically went no where.

3. Remember a company called aQuantive? Don't worry, neither does anyone else. Ballmer's MS purchased them for $6 billion.

That's off the top of my head, but I'm sure there are more examples.

[sonnyblarney]

"Ballmer made several missteps:"

Growing an already massive company company by 3x in revenue is the important thing, which is the 'bottom line' in which missteps have to be contextualized.

Any company in tech is going to make mistakes, this should be happening, so listing them off doesn't so much help - what matters is how all of this works out in the mix.

I worked in mobile during that time, it was vicious. Surely MS could have done better, but I view it more as lost opportunity than failure.

Remember that 80% of acquisitions fail. Google spent $3B on Nest. Apple spent $3 Billion on Beats, it remains to be seen if they'll make that up in profit.

[twblalock]

Trying to compete in mobile and failing is a misstep. Microsoft missed out on smartphones, one of the fastest growing and most lucrative market segments in tech industry history.

Trying to compete in search and failing is also a misstep. Bing is just not as good as Google.

It's arguable that Azure would not have been successful under Ballmer either, because it's unlikely he would have embraced Linux to the extent that Nadella has.

The bottom line is that Ballmer was good at growing existing business but Microsoft was late to the game on a lot of industry trends under his watch, and when they did try to catch up they did not do a very good job -- Windows Phone is a perfect example.

It's impressive to grow existing business, but companies that do not successfully innovate eventually stagnate and that's not what investors want to see.

[adventured]

I agree that mobile and search were missteps, specifically putting themselves into a position of competing so poorly in those areas overall. It's also unrealistic to think that one company could own desktop, mobile, search, office, etc.

Microsoft was going to own desktop, mobile, search? $300-$400 billion in revenue? $130+ billion in profit?

No. That's absurd. Holding Ballmer to account for not conquering planet Earth is not a fair premise. Of course there were lots of 'missteps,' what's described is impossible. Their biggest mistake was attempting all of it in the first place.

[twblalock]

> Microsoft was going to own desktop, mobile, search? $300-$400 billion in revenue? $130+ billion in profit?

> No. That's absurd. Holding Ballmer to account for not conquering planet Earth is not a fair premise.

I didn't say Microsoft needed to "own" mobile and search. They just needed to be competitive, instead of trying and failing which is what they did.

[btowngar]

Online search is a natural monopoly - being simply "competitive" probably isn't possible, you either win (Google) or you don't (everybody else).

[drewrv]

Mobile was obviously a big failure on their part, though I think their only misstep was being late to market.

On the other hand bing has been good for them (and it's great for consumers). Hard to call a multi-million dollar business unit a failure.

[baybal2]

Microsoft had mobile in its pocket - original win mobile that competed with Palm had the dominant market share, and it would've had more if they didn't nuke it with revamped win mobile.

[Bamafan]

> Growing an already massive company company by 3x in revenue is the important thing, which is the 'bottom line' in which missteps have to be contextualized.

Yes, he managed to creatively squeeze revenue out of existing markets. This is what he was known for.

But as far as finding new markets or growing existing markets, he failed and that's all Wall Street cares about.

> Surely MS could have done better, but I view it more as lost opportunity than failure.

Non other than Bill Gates himself refers to MS Mobile strategy as a failure: http://fortune.com/2013/02/19/today-in-tech-why-bill-gates-c...

> Remember that 80% of acquisitions fail. Google spent $3B on Nest. Apple spent $3 Billion on Beats, it remains to be seen if they'll make that up in profit

Ballmer's failure rate on major acquisitions may have been 100%. (I'm not even kidding)

[scarface74]

Beats was already profitable when they bought it.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/2018/03/08...

Beats Music was also the foundation of Apple Music which is also gaining subscribers like crazy.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/careypurcell/2018/05/15/with-50...

[Ruxbin1986]

Where's that 80% figure?

As far as I am aware, the Beats acquisition was successful. They bought their streaming music model and put that into Apple Music.

[jpatokal]

I'd count Minecraft as a success story. (Not sure if the deal closed under Nadella, but it was certainly started during Ballmer's reign.)

[microtherion]

> Apple spent $3 Billion on Beats, it remains to be seen if they'll make that up in profit.

Apple made $17.5B in revenue in FY18 in "Other Products". A sizable chunk of that is bound to be headphone revenue (and homepod may also have profited from the Beats acquisition).

Given the healthy margins that Apple tends to have across all its products, it seems plausible that even under quite conservative assumptions Apple easily made a billion or so in profit from that segment. And that's not even counting Apple Music.

https://s22.q4cdn.com/396847794/files/doc_financials/quarter...

Disclaimer: Working for Apple in a non-fiscal, non-Beats related role.

[kipchak]

Regarding Skype, it's acquisition has been argued to have been more in order to allow for NSA interception of VoIP traffic than it making business sense, though the truth behind that statement is highly debatable.

[ShamelessC]

Could you elaborate on this? Why would Microsoft want to lose money for the NSA to benefit?