[anticorporate]

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.

[thorin]

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.

[Keyframe]

I think the question posed is whether that's due to Ballmer or despite him.

[alephnerd]

Because of him.

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.

[nobodyandproud]

Sadly, Ballmer couldn’t reign in the Windows team before they effectively killed Windows Phone.

If I recall, the team had a large hand in hindering Windows Phone up until Windows 8; when everyone was too fed up to develop for the platform.

[alephnerd]

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.

[Jean-Papoulos]

You don't, but companies sure do, and they're the ones with deep pockets.

[anticorporate]

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.

[ghaff]

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.

[anticorporate]

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.