[Ruxbin1986]

Steve Ballmer, technical bits aside. Just couldn't play as a successful CEO in PR Role. He was too aggressive, abrasive and even somewhat rude.

Aside from that, one of thing most amusing things and one Ballmer excellent business moves was suing nearly every Android Smartphone Company for patent infringement. Microsoft literally makes money off of Android Smartphones but what's confusing to me is how Apple takes all of the flak.

[skizm]

IIRC the android revenue is rolled into the x-box revenue under some nebulous category when they break out revenue in their earning (forget the exact title). This hides the massive losses they are taking on x-box and all things x-box related. The android revenue is almost pure profit and nearly $2B annually. (they make this money by licencing patents to phone makers that use android such as HTC and Samsung)

[twoheadedboy]

Do you have any sources or related info about this? That's super interesting.

[vijayagrawal18]

Looks like "new" Microsoft is not aggressively going after that pie. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-may-relinquishing-b...

[rasz]

Arent most of those patents pure junk? Afair the only valid patent in there was something to do with FAT long filenames , and that one was killed with Linus help back in 2013.

[Ruxbin1986]

I can't recall but I think many of them were User Interface related and rather specific.

Not like the Apple claim of "Rounded Rectangles" but I will admit that it did appear even at face value that both Apple and Microsoft had a strong case against HTC, Samsung, etc.

But I guess one of these makes better headlines for clickbait. YMMV.