[abvdasker]

> "There was a meeting in a small conference room with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. And Steve never, I don't think, ever thought it was a good idea. There's a story I've told where I was standing in line in the cafeteria with Kevin, and Steve Ballmer snuck up behind us and yelled in my ear, making me throw my food: 'YOU'RE GOING TO LOSE ALL OUR MONEY!'”

Steve Ballmer might be the funniest dude ever to run a tech company. Every story with him is absolutely golden.

[ackbar03]

I don't think that's funny dude. The asshole with the bad ideas is in the ceo seat and he's your boss. I can't think of a less funnier employment situation. Kudos on him for having what it takes to actually bring it to life

[justapassenger]

Funny to watch (if you’re into this type of humor). Horrible to work for.

[sharkweek]

The CONJOINED triangles of success!

[SV_BubbleTime]

Michael Scott rules of management

[aparsons]

Steve hated it. Bill hated what it turned out to be by 1999 (I left around then). Dave Cutler hated it. Eric Engstrom saw it more as a defensive strategy. Microsoft poured an incredible amount of talent and resources that would have gone towards the Web into Xbox.

[matthewdgreen]

Losing the web is forgivable in retrospect: the web is a very big place and MS still has a very respectable Internet business thanks to Azure. What they can't be forgiven for is their focus on winning the living room rather than investing in mobile. If PocketPC had followed the same consumer/developer-centric trajectory as XBox, I think the mobile world would look very different today.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Considering what MS did to the web with the resources that were left over, it's possible the web had a lucky escape.

Meanwhile Xbox has been a product driver - a big mostly positive influence on Windows gaming and on other platforms.

[pjmlp]

From I am standing, with the Web turned into what is basically ChromeOS, I am not so sure how lucky it was.

[phaedryx]

I would hate to work for someone like that.

[op00to]

Depends on how much I got paid.

[flavmartins]

No, it doesn’t. You like the pay but hate the person. Many of us have been there before. You eventually get fed up and have to move on.

[KMag]

I used to think I would do pretty much anything I didn't find immoral for a million dollars per year. An abusive boss for 80+ hours per week changed my mind.

When I quit my third job, my boss told me "Karl, I know you hate me now, but in a couple years, you'll be making a million dollars a year and love me."

My response "Even if I believed you, I wouldn't do this job for a million dollars".

[ErikAugust]

Let me guess: You wouldn’t have ended up making a million dollars a year.

[KMag]

Maybe I would have. We were trading interest rate and foreign exchange derivatives in 2006. 2008 / 2009 would have been very volatile. We were generally long volatility, but sometimes we had some legs on some trades that would make significant losses in extreme volatility. It's hard to say. It's possible our 4-person desk could have made 100 million and my boss would have thrown a few my way. It's also possible the desk would have folded.

I still think I made the right choice by leaving. You have to live your life, and unless you really love your job, 80+ hours per week in the office is not living your life.

Also, I left that macro quant job by calling up Google and asking if they'd re-open the job offer I turned down 4 months earlier. It certainly helped that I had good backup jobs available.

[redler]

If the money is exceptional, the longer you stick it out, the more freedom you have to leave at a time of your choosing to pursue your next adventure.

[TheOtherHobbes]

And the more emotional and mental scars you'll have. And the more time you'll need to wait patiently for them to heal.

[nirui]

Not just the paycheck. If your boss is mean and stupid all the time, you'll learn so little from them, the net work experience you got from the job become a negative.

In my opinion, a good boss can be loud, but must also smart and willing to hear, learn and teach, which are essential if you want to increase productivity and get your team full of smart and idea generating people together.

If you work for a mean and stupid boss, not only you'll work in hell, if the business failed due to their mistake, they'll probably put failure on their employees. Which is really bad if their false words got into the ears of your next recruiter.

Life is short, if something is obviously bad, don't try it.

[RobRivera]

having been employed by an asshole in a previous life, a good enough paycheck makes it manageable.

Not saying its healthy tho; I think somepeople have simply mastered the 'embrace the suck' mentality when it comes to toxicity...they call that 'resilience'

[StavrosK]

I now realize how lucky I am to have worked with great people. The worst job I had was just boring.

[lokar]

Funny or cringe inducing?

[cptskippy]

The former because of the later.

[bitwize]

He was played to an absolute T by John DiMaggio, the voice of Bender the robot, in Pirates of Silicon Valley.

[CapitalistCartr]

Perhaps the funniest dude ever to ruin a tech company.

[rantwasp]

nah. I think Balmer did wonders for Ms. It’s really easy to blame the guy but I think it’s important to look at the context (of when he took over, what he actually did)

also, he is the only CEO I routinely saw at the “corporate gym” in Redmond before the pandemic struck. No bodyguards, no nothings. Like a regular dude going to the gym, hanging out in the sauna/jacuzzi. He had a super positive attitude towards the staff and other people that would strike up a conversation. While I did not the to have the image of a naked Ballmer burned into my retinas, I do appreciate that he did not let all that wealth go to his head.

[nailer]

When he started Microsoft had the most popular OS, web browser and mobile OS. A decade later they lost all three and their market cap barely moved.

[3pt14159]

I'm sorry, but their market cap is like 10x in the past decade. Their revenue streams are different now, yes, but they recognized they'd lost the platform with the SaaSification of most things and they wisely moved into other areas. Yes, they could have tried something else that kept them as the winners of the OS game, but vertical integration wasn't really in their bloodstream. Platforming and services were.

[nailer]

>> A decade later (when Ballmer finished) they lost all three and their market cap barely moved.

> their market cap is like 10x in the past decade

Steve Ballmer left 6 years ago. Pick your source regarding Microsoft's market cap while Ballmer was leading:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=steve+ballmer+market+cap

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=microsoft+lost+decade

[3pt14159]

Oh, I'm wrong then. I was under the mistaken impression that he was CEO much more recently than that. Thanks for the correction, it appears that you're completely correct about his leadership.

Thanks for updating my view!

[rantwasp]

one could argue that Windows is the most popular consumer OS even today (keep in mind the HN is not representative for what people normally run).

Also, a decade later, Microsoft is experiencing a software renaissance, in part, due to the the work Ballmer setup. One example: Azure. In the cloud space there are 2 gorillas: AWS and Azure (everything else is vaporware and at this point I don't think it would be wise to bet the farm on GCP or ... Oracle). How did Azure get here? Do you think they decided to do cloud and it happened magically?

Another example: the XBOX. I personally will never but a PS, and I believe XBOX is awesome in this space.

[nailer]

The most popular consumer OS is Android. Arguing anything else goes against all known stats.

Microsoft's renaissance is mainly due to Nadella focusing on software and services instead of selling Windows. You mentioned Xbox as a way to support Ballmer. The Xbox story mentioned in the article does not support Ballmer.

Agreed re Azure but I don't know if Ballmer was still focusing on Windows for Azure, which seems likely. Keep in mind Azure is mostly Linux instances today.

[pjmlp]

Try to do Office documents for school work on Android.

[donatj]

I'm pretty sure Windows at no point lost its thrive as most popular non-mobile OS

[edgyquant]

Sure but the market moved to mobile. If you cherry pick data of course you can pretend to be right.

[unnouinceput]

The market did not moved to mobile. Mobile is alongside desktop. People like diversity and mobile offered another one. And people who have only mobile in their homes are poor that can't afford desktop but I see mobile as a gateway drug to desktop. Once people will have enough money, will also buy desktop exactly because mobile hooked them in the first place.

[HenryKissinger]

Windows remains the most popular operating system for computers by far, and that will never change.

[_-___________-_]

Only if you play some jedi mind tricks of your own with the definition of a "computer".

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

You don't need to change the statement much to make it unequivocally true: just change "computers" to "desktop computers".

[TylerE]

I suppose that depends on how all gazillion AWS instances running Linux counts.

[rantwasp]

AWS instances run Windows too. And MS makes money off those instances. Also, Azure runs Linux too. Microsoft is in the post-Windows phase and it's working on things that will keep it relevant long term

[pjmlp]

On top of Hyper-V actually.

[bobobob420]

He botched Microsoft pretty bad.. windows 8 was his hallmark project no? And the beginning of surface was not that good. Once Satya took over Microsoft became a powerhouse again with their cloud/office integration + focus on azure.

[jjeaff]

And yet, azure and office 365 were both created under Ballmer.

[bobobob420]

So what they would have been created anyways. It’s satya’s business mind in propelling Microsoft’s business that made it a huge success, something ballmer was failing to do

[tapirl]

Windows 8 is the win OS I have happiest experiences with. It has far less bugs than windows 10, even today's windows 10.

It is windows 8 let me return from Linux to Windows, and it is windows 10 let me back to Linux again.

[phkahler]

Computers have been going back and forth between desktop and central servers for 40 years. When people tire of the cloud and shift back to local control, microsoft will no longer have an advantage over alternatives.

[rytill]

I can’t tell if this is a manufactured pattern, or if it’s true and I’m missing something because I haven’t been alive long enough.

From what I can tell, once upon a time we had mainframes and server rooms and big expensive computers, and there was no personal computing.

Then, we got personal computing and had very limited consumer connection to centralized servers on them. A lot of people barely had internet.

Then, we connected personal computing to centralized servers and many products were born.

Now, we have platforms built for creating centralized services because managing your own hardware was not necessary.

Where is the pattern there? It seems like you’re extrapolating a wave pattern from what could be a single datapoint. We got this, we got that, we connected them, now we’re here. Where is the back-and-forth you implied?

[phkahler]

After desktops came along like the Apple II and DOS based PCs, people had full control. Then we got networking to share printers, and IT started controlling things again. It's been a constant back and forth ever since. Not all the way to the extremes, and not every company at the same time. Not everyone ran Novell Netware for example.

[belltaco]

That makes no sense. You seem to be confusing Windows with ChromeOS.

[mi_lk]

Do you want to expand?

[rantwasp]

when Ballmer took over MS was right after the anti-trust fiasco. There was a time when people were not sure if the software giant was going to survive. They did under Ballmer.

From a sales pov, the company also grew and prospered. Microsoft had phenomenal growth while under Ballmer.

It's easy to remember all the things he botched (hello iphone?) but if you look at it objectively I think Ms did survive and prospered under Ballmer.

[Judgmentality]

> It's easy to remember all the things he botched (hello iphone?) but if you look at it objectively I think Ms did survive and prospered under Ballmer.

If you look at it objectively you include all the things he botched, which are "easy to remember" according to you. At best, he was meh. In my personal opinion he was horrible - I think a random employee likely would have done better.

[rantwasp]

I’m going to respectfully disagree. He did contribute to MS before he became CEO. And invested in a lot of things where the fruits are harvested to this day.

[HenryKissinger]

To run or to ruin?

[rasz]

Ballmer is real life Todd Packer from The Office https://theoffice.fandom.com/wiki/Todd_Packer

[thanhhaimai]

Eh, I don't post often, but I have to reply this. Please don't normalize that behavior. It's not funny. That's like a bully.

It's only acceptable for him to do that because of his position. Imagine a factory worker doing that to the CEO "just cause it's funny". That's the same with other funny-but-inappropriate behaviors we should discourage at work.

[warent]

Context makes every difference here. I could very easily imagine some lower level employee doing this to a CEO and getting a laugh out of it. Context and relationship.

EDIT: not that im saying Steve was in the right, who knows what their relationship was like

[npsomaratna]

Exactly. I cringed when I read that. I'd never treat one of my employees that way (or allow an employee of mine to treat a subordinate that way).