During Ballmer's tenure, the Office division spent a lot of resources building apps for iOS. Ballmer saw a demo, realized that they were better than the Office apps available on Microsoft's own phones and tablets, and so blocked the release. The company sat on the apps for multiple years. When Nadella came on, one of his first decisions as CEO was to release them to the public.
This single incident perfectly demonstrates Ballmer's failures and Nadella's new vision. Had he remained at the helm Microsoft would have continued to stagnate and sink with the likes of IBM, Cisco and HP rather than stay on top of technological shifts and become the biggest company in the world.
Meh, I don't see how Nadella's "vision" is praiseworthy either:
* their flagship OS is more and more a spyware platform
* Windows Server is pretty much a rarity these days outside of large corporate deployments. Anybody has seen MS SQL recently?
* Azure seems to have reached its peak mind share, mostly pushed by free credits
* Their gaming division mainly lives on Game Pass, while XBox is further and further away from Playstation and now there's Valve eating their lunch
* Windows on ARM, even Windows branded laptops or 2-in-1s are a niche within a niche
* What is a cell phone again?
* Edge's philosophy is "as evil and spyware as Google, but worse". In fact, Microsoft as a whole is trying to badly emulate the peak evil Google of 2015+
Ballmer made some enormous blunders and a lot of his indecision proved costly. Nadella pushed proudly forward in destroying the Microsoft name all to make a quick buck. I'll give you VSCode and Github to be good ideas, though the latter is just an acquisition, not a bonafide good product built in house.
Not that I personally use it, but Azure seems pretty relevant and Microsoft's financials seem pretty decent. I'll give you that Microsoft on the client-side does seem like a legacy installed base--albeit a big one. But client-side growth is pretty much a niche these days outside of mobile and, yes, Microsoft lost that.
However, generally, I could name a number of companies that descended into legacy irrelevance (not a few of which were acquired by Broadcom) but I wouldn't put Microsoft into that category at this point.
And the fractured developer ecosystem with multiple UI frameworks (WPF, WinUI, MAUI, Blazor) all being understaffed, while actual Microsoft products are being developed in React Native.
>During Ballmer's tenure, the Office division spent a lot of resources building apps for iOS. Ballmer saw a demo, realized that they were better than the Office apps available on Microsoft's own phones and tablets, and so blocked the release.
ok it was obviously a bad move in hindsight, but at that point in time, was it not a gutsy high risk move to try give windows phone a small advantage? its obvious once you cancel winphone, but canceling winphone was a big concession
I think the biggest knock against Ballmer was not being able to figure out a (smart)phone strategy that ended up working. Having more than just Android and iOS would probably have been a better situation for everyone to be in.
Mobile 8 was not compatible with Mobile 7. You can't go around and change interfaces when companies are betting the barn on you.
For Windows proper you can release and deprecate a GUI every 20 minutes because there is always Win32 to fall back to.
But when you are bootstrapping an entire eco-system you can't muck around like that. Also strategic blunder to buy Nokia and then do exactly nothing with it.
Linux was still toxic to Microsoft. Nokia had a Linux computer which was also a phone which sold incredibly well despite Microsoft almost denying its existance, definitely not marketing it. They had to stop making it because to stop selling it. (No not "Linux" like Android is "Linux". A real Linux PC in your pocket. Imagine a Raspberry with data connection and phone.
Maybe, I still think Microsoft missed a golden opportunity. People installed Debian packages on the darned things. They could have "WSL" on the phones in the future.
Microsoft absolutely whiffed on mobile generally and that has to be on Ballmer to a significant degree. As with Intel with x86, they relied far too heavily on Windows being their essential beachhead. That said, he put the financial and some of the business/technical foundation in place for Nadella to be able to re-establish Microsoft as an important/relevant player with Azure (and Linux) which was by no means a given.
People on HN still remark on how much they liked their Windows Phone. Other than making a product so great that, decades later, people are still saying how much they miss it, what did you want him to do?
Balmer presided over Microsoft's transition into irrelevance. He wanted developers to write software for Windows. He did not want them to write software for the world that was changing, opening (the internet, Open Source, etc.) which is why developers gave him a middle finger. Just like any large corporation Microsoft stopped leading and started chasing and could not keep up until they struck gold with the XBox.
I've had the same thought for a long time. I think this is spot-on. Ballmer is underrated in that he put Microsoft into a profoundly well-resourced position that a better product leader was then able to make productive use of.
Consumer Windows doesn't generate enough revenue per customer and the consumer OS space is commodified, so I'd say it's getting the treatment it deserves.
Vista was good, just slow on the older contemporary computers. I bought a new properly specced machine when it was released and it was a significant improvement over XP.
Vista was utter garbage. It is historical revisionism to only blame it's failing on minimum requirements. Not only was it slow, it was a horrible clickfest eg with almost 20 clicks and almost as many windows to change wifi settings. At that time (and probably still today) do you know how many did you need to get to wifi settings on OSX? 3 or 4. That was insulting to a windows user and I've never used windows again as my primary choice of OS. Windows 11 is on a good path to become Vista as it's enshittified to hell and back.
Having worked on mobile there 2008-2011: no, I would say he’s properly rated. Had years head start on the Android model (hackable OS+vendors+wide HW support), and threw it away. Chased iPhone model briefly without the commitment to actually win. Took smartphone market share from 20-30% to 0% when it mattered most. Invested more in XBox and Business intelligence platforms.
> Invested more in XBox and Business intelligence platforms.
Both of which turned out to be the right move long term.
Mobile is a commoditized winner takes all market, and there's no guarantee MS would have won even if they concentrated entirely on it.
Concentrating on BI platforms helped spawn M365, and the Enterprise focus helped spawn MS Azure which had very early Product-Market Fit at the Fed because they became FedRAMP authorized well before AWS.
There's way more money in Enterprise B2B than there is in B2C.
>There's way more money in Enterprise B2B than there is in B2C.
Apple would like a word--although arguably their B2C success translated into B2B in a world where corporations increasingly didn't just dictate employee gear decisions.
But to your other point, Microsoft (though I credit this more to Nadella than Ballmer) were absolutely able to parlay Microsoft's enterprise strength to Azure in government/enterprise which AWS didn't really get at first and Google was even slower to do.
Multiple previously massive B2C vendors like Nokia, Ericsson, Sony, HP, Dell, RiM, etc either died trying to compete in the B2C space or pivoted out as a result.
Google, Huawei, and Samsung are only able to compete against Apple because they are subsidizing their B2C ventures with their B2B product lines.
MS in the 2000s could have joined that dustbin of history as well because the old school "Windows" division was very B2C and Consumer oriented at the expense of Enterprise.
Certainly, Apple could have basically died at various times.
I could also name a ton of massive B2B software (to say nothing of hardware) vendors that died over time.
Yes, Microsoft basically transformed themselves from a B2C vendor (where they're now increasingly irrelevant) to a mostly exclusively B2B vendor. They're basically Azure at this point plus Office365 for their base. I wouldn't bet on the future of Xbox at this point.
Can't credit wins to the CEO and blame subordinates for the losses. If Terry Myerson was failing then it was Ballmer's job to replace him (something that Nadella finally did).
He didn't "miss" anything. Microsoft had wrested dominance in smartphones from Palm just before the iPhone was released. Ballmer may have made a mistake in keeping him on but Myerson was the person in charge of keeping Windows Phone competitive with iPhone.
During his tenure, Windows 8 was released... Just as W8, the server version also lacked the START button, which was particularly noticeable when working through RDP. Also, the whole "Metro" design was a disaster. I also remember the acquisition of Skype for an astronomical amount. Where is Skype now? Indeed, an underrated CEO...
Skype is now the backbone of O365 and what evolved into Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Phone System, and Microsoft Team Room Systems. It's literally gobbling up the market as we speak, forcing long time AV vendors to have to build distinctly Microsoft products. Poly, Logitech, Crestron, all massive players in the space, have to bow to Microsoft's requirements and build hardware carefully sized for Microsoft Teams Room interfaces. They are basically removing almost all the software from these companies and making them only hardware, they will eventually produce the hardware themselves as well.
No, the backbone is Microsoft Office Communicator, which was rebranded to Lync, then Skype for Business, and finally embedded in Teams. The Skype consumer product, which they acquired, has very little to do with any of this.
A good chunk of Teams’ backend is built on top of Skype. Not sure about the present day, but just a few years ago, you could see tons of references to Skype in the Teams’ codebase.
I worked with the source code directly a few years ago. The grandparent comment confirms that what I saw back then is still the case today (assuming they have access to the source code in the present day).
With that in mind, where does such confidence on your end come from?
Mobile is fun and cool and probably started a lot of HNers careers, but everyone on here seems to ignore how much more money there is to be made in the Enterprise and B2B space, and how it absolutely dwarfs B2C revenue from an effort and retention perspective.
B2C Growth Sales is a slog with a lot of variability outside of a company's control.
MS back then was in a weird transitional phase where it as a company needed to decide whether it wanted to prioritize B2C or B2B/Enterprise. Ballmer made the call to go for Enterprise and helped pivot MS away from being a B2C or B2B2C company to a company heavily devoted to Enterprise and B2B sales motions.
It was Ballmer who laid the seeds for Azure, M365, and Enterprise in general by making the "Enterprise Business" and "Servers and Tools" (precursor for Azure and MS Security) divisions much more prominent internally than their "Windows" division.
There was also no guarantee that then-resurgent Apple or new-kid-on-the-block Google wouldn't be able to eat into MS's Enterprise market share with release of the iPad+iWork and Google Apps (now Google Workspaces) respectively, and and could have tangibly done the same pivot that Amazon did in the late 2000s
There's a case to be made that Ballmer is smarter than the ignorati give him credit for but let's not forget things like the attempted Yahoo acquisition. That would have been an absolute disaster for Microsoft.
I don't think him not doing something that makes sense is a negative. "Balmer did not invest billions in a company that would go no where" is not a negative.
I think the current CEO is definitely a good one. I just wish one CEO would finally focus on making Windows less awful for power users. Let us turn off all the useless garbage and have offline accounts. I'll personally pay more to do so. Give power users the OS they want.
Curious why Ballmer is coming up lately, did something happen with him?
What you’re asking is not specific to power users. I have never seen a single user, “power” or not, saying they like ads and privacy invasions embedded in their OS.
Sure, but if they market it to power users, I'll take that as a win. Right now they're not targeting such a thing to any users. Until then, I'll stay on Linux, and buy Mac or Linux exclusive devices.
The point is they won’t. This crap they’re pulling is not an oversight, they know exactly what they’re doing. It makes zero difference who they “market it” for, most people would want to do it if they opened the door.
> Right now they're not targeting such a thing to any users.
Exactly. By design. And it’ll stay that way until enough users leave Windows. Which is unlikely any time soon.
All that comes to mind is that he is now surpassing the net worth of Bill Gates, to a large extent because when he left Microsoft he said he would keep his Microsoft stock positions.
I think Gates has given away ~$50B - which would seem to be enough to tip the scales? I'd rather compare the billionaires by what they redistribute vs. the size of their hoard.
Bill Gates controls the Gates Foundation; if you're trying to count his wealth, you should include its endowment, which it currently reports as $75 billion. (And it also reports that it has made $77 billion of grants since inception, so if you want to include spent money too, he's outclassing Ballmer without even considering his personal holdings. It's more consistent to just count held money.)
I haven't listened to this episode specifically, but I have listened to probably 20 of their other ones. It's a solid podcast, although I wish they were a little more critical and not always so laudatory.
I got into Acquired through the Jim Simons episode which was great but the rest of their content is hit and miss.
Sometimes they get hard to listen to because they treat every company as something incredible and many of them aren't - the luxury brands episodes are completely bizarre, no idea who the target audience is for a four podcast on a handbag manufacturer.
And their SBF episode didn't age well at all - so much ass kissing. Credit to them at least for not removing it entirely.
I've never wanted to be on a podcast in my life but for some reason I want to go on it and tell the story of how we built DigitalOcean, I feel like they would ask actually good questions. Really enjoying them.
This was such an an enjoyable read. My view of Ballmer has completely changed, in retrospect. Am also impressed that he was a mathematician by training and outscored Gates, and went quite against norms by his own business judgment (which is commendable - it means he made his own path, and didn't just chase after trends).
There was a recent interview with Ballmer on The Dispatch Podcast[0]. I've been longtime casual Ballmer-hater because of Microsoft's treatment of Linux, but at least for 30 minutes, found him to be a genial, thoughtful, and interesting bazillionaire.
This article is borderline comical. The thin list of his accomplishments focus on increasing revenue ($15B to $70B) and launching or acquiring successful initiatives (Xbox, Skype, Azure). Then the rest is a recollection of his biggest embarassments, like terrible mobile products, misguided Windows strategy and trailing AWS by 7 years.
Reporting on business issues is always muddled by a lack of proper comparisons, along with cherry picking. For example, this article makes the argument that increasing Microsoft's revenue by 4x was very impressive, even though the stock value stagnated. However, when evaluting his tenure as owner of a basketball club, he is declared successful because its value doubled. The problem is that Microsoft was eclipsed compared to its peers at the time - Google, Amazon, etc. -, and likewise the average basketball club doubled in value as well.
He was entrepreneurial, in summary his strength. He convinced shareholders to part with potential dividends and invested in new things. There's little excuse for company like Microsoft generating so much cash not to be doing so.
Mixed bag:
Xbox 360 - success
Vista - fail
Windows 7 - success
Zune - fail
Windows phone - fail
Azure - success
Similar story for Zuckerberg.
Lucky with Facebook.
Thereafter ensured he had a finger in every pie.
One minute he's a bad bet with his quixotic expenditure on AR/VR, and
the next minute he's a genius with his investment in AI (Llama).
At the end of the day, it pays to have your finger in many pies. Money makes money.
"Maybe the memes making fun of this person are, in fact, an exaggeration."
Sure. I don't need much convincing that Ballmer was only "bad" rather than "uniquely terrible". It seems a pretty normal thing that the negative reaction was outsized.
But I also think it would be more interesting to look at cases where the reaction by the haters was _spot on_. Or even where it _undersold_ how bad things were.
Cutthroat capitalism existed long before Jack, that top reddit comment is quite the thing. Carnegie was a wanker, Ford was a wanker, Sloan, the list could go on and on.
I teach business all day every day and I only reach for Jack to teach "Fix, Sell, or Close" - In terms of clinical business he was right, in order to focus fully on the customer, the business units need to be empowered and pushed to be 1 or 2 in their given segment. They should have all the resource and time they need to focus fully on the customer problems. Out of the 70s GE had become quite unwieldy, he did a great job of re-focusing the resources where they could be best used.
I also think talking to how they engineered their finances without looking at the whole picture is a bit unfair. GE was in a bad place when he took over, it was way over extended doing a meh job generally. He surly needed cash to 1. refocus the business 2. expand research and innovation into the areas left (jets and healthcare primarily) 3. implement a large scale global expansion.
Should you do channel stuffing or bill and hold? No. Even worse: when you blur it into your reporting, that is just asking for SEC enforcement. Is there a better way to do it? Yes. Were they being sloppy? Yes. If it really was part of saving GE, should they have done it? Well, I'll leave that to you dear reader. :)
Not wrong, but then he (post-retirement) says things like:
> Regarding shareholder value, Welch said in a Financial Times interview on the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, "On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy...your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products."[67]
Given his actions as CEO, what he says (above) and what he actually did, there's some kind of disconnect (unless he had some kind of 'conversion' in retirement).
Honestly we as consumers might have been better off with Microsoft’s vision of a Windows computer in each home acting as the hub of digital life and monetization through purchase of hardware and software instead of our current model where the hubs are large centralized services and monetization is through ads.
For comparison, Apple's stock about 20x'd during Ballmer's tenure and that was after atrocious AAPL performance from 2000-2003.
Balmer's biggest failures were mirrored by Apple's enormous success. The two areas this article calls out as Balmer's missteps were the exact areas Apple flourished in -- hardware innovation and operating system.
I don't see how you can "underrate" Ballmer as CEO given his mistakes allowed a nearly-dead rival to grow to be larger than Microsoft. The opportunity for Microsoft to capture a significant chunk of that was completed squandered.
I guess it depends on your measure. Personally, the Ballmer era represents Microsoft going from being "the" software company to just another dying giant that wasn't relevant to me. I used fewer Microsoft products in 2014 than I did in 2000 when Ballmer took over. Sure, they expanded the product categories they competed in, but any company with that kind of capitalization could have chosen to do the same.
Yet still most enterprises use windows, O365, teams outlook, AD/entra etc. Azure has like 30% of market share. Copilot, visual studio, Dotnet framework, Microsoft dynamics, Power Automate are massive. I prefer the current incarnation of MS to any of the previous ones TBH, experience of Xbox has been pretty good as well.
Ballmer backed the "Enterprise Business" (precursor of Office 365) and "Server and Tools" (precursor of Azure and MS Security) divisions over the then prominent "Windows" division.
MS back then was in a weird transitional phase where it as a company needed to decide whether it wanted to prioritize B2C or B2B/Enterprise. Ballmer made the call to go for Enterprise.
There was also no guarantee that then-resurgent Apple or new-kid-on-the-block Google wouldn't be able to eat into MS's Enterprise market share with release of the iPad+iWork and Google Apps (now Google Workspaces) respectively.
Before Ballmer, it was the Windows and B2C teams that had the upper hand internally at MS instead of Enterprise.
Imo, it's good that the Windows Phone died - it would have distracted Microsoft from the much more lucrative segments it's in today and opened the door to potential antitrust litigation.
Hence my comment "it depends on what you measure."
Microsoft is clearly continuing to find success in an enterprise space that had its addressable market grow astronomically during Ballmer's tenure.
At the same time, they went from absolute dominance in the 90s software market to having a smaller share of a much larger enterprise market today. Is that success? Maybe. Was it due to Ballmer, or was it inevitable? Also unclear.
It's actually an interesting case study. As a consumer, I'm basically no longer a Microsoft customer at all. It's not an ideological position. It just is.
But they're obviously doing pretty well. And, if I were an exec at a large business, I'd at least be talking to them.
You and I have a shared experience of working for years at a different operating system vendor who also pivoted into the enterprise space and expanded their offerings significantly beyond the OS.
It's clearly possible to be very financially successful with this kind of a pivot, while also having a lot of previous fans and customers be quite disappointed with it. An install base can increase while the user base decreases.
Not by any stretch of my imagination is the man underrated. I'd say, like many American CEO's, he has vastly been overrated through a failure in capitalism.
If I do some back of the envelope calculations, a teacher makes about 50k a year, so about 2 million in a career. In his career so far, Steve Ballmer has made as much as 75k teachers do in their career. For comparison, Arizona has about 50k teachers.
Now, the man has achieved a lot, maybe even a lot compared to other CEOs. But by this measure, he must be overrated.
It's easy to look like a genius when your company engages in sleazy, underhanded business practices and becomes a near-monopoly as a result. Stac, the paying off of Ziff-Davis publications, etc.
Ever since Bill Gates snookered Ed Roberts , Microsoft has had
'flexible' business ethics.
This single incident perfectly demonstrates Ballmer's failures and Nadella's new vision. Had he remained at the helm Microsoft would have continued to stagnate and sink with the likes of IBM, Cisco and HP rather than stay on top of technological shifts and become the biggest company in the world.