[Rzor]

I just read that part of the book[0]. Actually, Satya says that Ballmer offered him the position because MS had to answer to AWS.

>[...] Steve had invested in it because [search][1] would require the company to compete in a sector beyond Windows and Office and build great technology—which he saw as the future of our industry. There was tremendous pressure for Microsoft to answer Amazon’s growing cloud business. This was the business he was inviting me to join.

>“You should think about it, though,” Steve added. “This might be your last job at Microsoft, because if you fail there is no parachute. You may just crash with it.” I wondered at the time whether he meant it as a grim bit of humor or as a perfectly straightforward warning. I’m still not quite sure which it was.

But yeah, funny, though.

[0] The book is Hit Refresh, if anyone is curious.

[1] It was Bing: >There was no mention of the cloud in that year’s shareholder letter, but, to his credit, Steve had a game plan and a wider view of the playing field. Always a bold, courageous, and famously enthusiastic leader, Steve called me one day to say he had an idea. He wanted me to become head of engineering for the online search and advertising business that would later be relaunched as Bing, one of Microsoft’s first businesses born in the cloud.

[texasbigdata]

Thank you for the quote! I would be a bit skeptical of any highly ambitious executive’s self-described potentially revised historical narrative of their ascent, however his words are his words.

I don’t know about you but if my boss made a parachute joke while currently in a private plane flying south, it would be a scary thing.