[scosman]

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.

[alephnerd]

> 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.

[ghaff]

>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.

[alephnerd]

> Apple would like a word

Apple's success is a form of survivorship bias.

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.

[ghaff]

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.

[scosman]

> There's way more money in Enterprise B2B than there is in B2C.

Definitively not true by a huge margin.

[alephnerd]

I disagree and I'd like to see numbers proving otherwise.

B2C might be more prominently known, but Enterprise and B2B companies tend to make up the majority of the F1000s.

[rasz]

>Both

so why are there rumors of MS debating not releasing next generation Xbox and switching to streaming?

[actionfromafar]

Threw Mobile 7 developers under the bus. The most ambitious and commited.

[ThrowawayB7]

That was more directly on Terry Myerson, VP of Mobile and Embedded Devices or whatever it was called at the time, than Ballmer.

[paxys]

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).

[scosman]

CEO of the PC company can't miss the new primary form of personal computing and blame a VP.

[ThrowawayB7]

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.