This article doesn’t understand what was fundamentally wrong with Ballmer’s leadership and what Nadella actually changed.
The specific technologies that were successful is irrelevant. Microsoft has and continues to invest in nearly every computer related technology that may come around the corner or they got late on.
The problem with Microsoft was everything went through Windows. The entire company was designed to promote Windows.
This was the fundamental flaw with Microsoft that Nadella changed. He quickly not just made Windows just another part of Microsoft’s business, to a great extent he actively devalued it.
The fact that Ballmer invested in Azure, etc before Nadella would all be irrelevant because under Ballmer Azure would have remained a red headed step child to Windows, so it’s unlikely to have seen much success under him anyways. Same goes for pretty much everything else Microsoft is doing right now.
Lately it has definitely felt as though Microsoft is resurrecting Ballmer's old meme as "AI! AI! AI!"
I was at Microsoft for the last couple years of Ballmer and the first few years of Nadella. He definitely did change the company and I remember at the time feeling that he handled the change really well, but from where I sat he spent the first part of his tenure evolving Ballmer's final push to move focus from Windows to developers. Everything Microsoft did prior to LLMs was to bring developers over, from VS Code to GitHub to WSL.
Now the company seems fully baked I to LLMs with everything they do chasing that. It would even make sense if the developer push was driven in part by the need to build up training sets for the eventual LLM work, though I really have a hard time believing that Microsoft was so well ahead of the game that they started grooming developers to provide data more than a decade ago.
> Them along absolutely everyone else. ChatGPT was an iPhone moment.
Old guy here, but it feels more like a Netscape moment than an iPhone moment. We'll end up with our pets.com of the LLM age, the whole thing will implode, and the few companies that were actually doing useful stuff with LLMs will survive.
Except that LLMs have way worse unitary economics than the web or a phone's app store.
What comes back to the old data-inefficiency of machine learning. There hasn't been visible improvement on this, and it is looking more and more as a fundamental limitation of AI.
Microsoft seems to be a company that has 1) working chat: Copilot 2) chat integrsted with their tools (e.g. ms office and teams, although quality depends on product) 3) subscriptions to actually monetize it
Are those moments really that different? Motorola was practically the Netscape of the iPhone era, as those early Droids were everywhere. There were tons of others too, then it all imploded with only a few companies really surviving in the smartphone space.
It's not about who is the "Netscape" this time around, it's about the irrational exuberance surrounding the entire thing.
These days it seems like anybody can throw "AI" into their company name (even if it's complete BS) and it has the same effect as adding ".com" to a company name did in the late nineties.
IMHO AI is a .com-like hype cycle that's orders of magnitude larger and more irrational than anything that happened post-iPhone.
That's not to say that there aren't good businesses in there (the same was true of .com, of course), but there's a lot of junk that's getting a lot of money thrown at it.
I would press X to doubt just because of profitability.
It’s cute that we now have image and video gen AI. Also we have now Turing test passing chat bots (Id say). But although they are very impressive, and I know lots of people who use them for various tasks, I haven’t seen a “killer app” yet.
For iPhone the killer app was making calls. It was the best phone you could get. Then it had apps. It was undeniably better.
LLMs are good at a lot of things, but they don’t seem to excel any particular task - yet. I’m not sure they are a revolution yet.
I’d say they’re more of Macintosh moment. A hugely useful technology no doubt - but useful for what exactly? For Mac it was desktop publishing.
I agree generally with what you're saying but feel you were all over the place in your comment.
The killer app on the iPhone was not "making calls" — I suspect instead it was Safari, the other 1st party apps, the touch screen and the slick integration of all of that to make it a no-brainer device that even my mom and dad could use (they were approaching their 70's when the iPhone debuted).
Your analogy that ChatGPT (or LLMs generally) are more akin to the Mac feels close to the mark to me. Your comment about the Mac's killer app, desktop publishing, suggests that LLM's killer app will follow, just hasn't arrived yet.
The analogy is a little shaky though since, some would argue, it was the laser printer (plus the Mac) that kicked off desktop publishing.
"The killer app is making calls" is me quoting Steve Jobs on the Iphone 1 presentation. I get that it doesn't sound true now, knowing all we can do. It's true Iphone was a lot more, but that was his conviction at the time, and I think it makes sense. Their aim was to make the best phone in the world.
I also think yeah, it is a bit like Macintosh in the sense that this is a new general purpose technology, and I'm not sure we've really figured out what's going to the most transformative about it yet.
Want the whole premise of the original iPhone keynote that it was a fusion of three things - telecommunications, an iPod and internet? (Is that right?) That seems to place "phone" as not the killer app, but rather a pillar of three things that made up a "killer app" when combined.
I do remember the initial visual voicemail implementation being very appealing of course. Especially since it seemed they had enough leverage to get the carrier/s (just one at the beginning) to do whatever they needed.
That's true. I think his idea was to beat the competitors in every category - it was the better phone, it was the better internet device, and it was the better iPod (apparently that was one of Apple's main reasons for making the iPhone at the time, they felt like phones would start having mp3s).
I think we agree. All I meant is, yes LLMs seem to do a lot of things, but nothing quite perfectly. Yet.
I'd say the killer "app" for the iPhone was the touch-screen. There were plenty of other phones that could be used to make calls, at the same quality for a lower price. Frankly, I still find the iPhone to be way too expensive for what you get in return.
For LLMs, the "killer app", for me, is already here. And there's two of them right now.
The first is the chatbot (like chatGPT or Pi or Claude). Having someone who you can just ask for any kind of information, from book recommendations to hypothetical space travel situations to advice about birthday gifts, and to get answers that are better than what I'd get from 90% of real humans, is huge to me.
The second one is the coding assistant, in my code copilot. It has made me at least twice, if not thrice as productive as I was before.
A killer app in the like-an-iphone context is something that provides obvious value - if not outright delight - to a huge demographic.
Coding doesn't do that, because the demographic interested in coding is not huge compared to the rest of the population.
Chatbots don't do it either because they're too unreliable. I never know if I'm going to get a recommendation for something the LLM hallucinated and doesn't exist.
There's also huge cultural resistance to AI. The iPhone was perceived as an enabling device. AI is perceived as a noisy, low-reliability, intrusive, immoral, disabling technology that is stealing work from talented people and replacing it with work of much lower quality.
It's debatable how many of those perceptions are accurate, but it's not debatable the perceptions exist.
In fact the way OpenAI, Anthropic, and the others have handled this is a masterclass in self-harming PR. It's been an unqualified cultural disaster.
So any killer app has to overcome that reputational damage. Currently I don't think anything does that in a way that works for the great mass of non-technical non-niche users.
Also - the iPhone was essentially a repackaging exercise. It took the Mac+Phone+Camera+iPod - all familiar concepts - and built them into a single pocket-sized device. The novelty was in the integration and miniaturisation.
AI is not an established technology. It's the poster child for a tech project with amorphous affordances and no clear roadmap in permanent beta. A lot of the resistance comes from its incomprehensibility. Plenty of people are making a lot of money from promises that will likely never materialise.
To most people there is no clear positive perception of what it is, what it does, or what specifically it can do for them - just a worry that it will probably make them redundant, or at least less valuable.
Making calls was the killer app for Nokia brick phones in the late 1990s.
The killer app for the first generation of smartphones (Windows Mobile, Blackberry, etc.) was email and calendar.
The killer app for iPhone and Android was the capacitative touchscreen combined with the ability to run 3rd party apps (yes, I'm aware there was an extremely brief moment in the history of the original iPhone where Apple opposed this), and 3G mobile internet (yes, again, I realize this came a year after the initial iPhone release). Mobile web browsers and Maps/GPS got the party started.
> Them along absolutely everyone else. ChatGPT was an iPhone moment
Nice analogy. My sense of things is that the iPhone was a win for all of its users. While ChatGPT may make some/many of its users more productive (see Ethan Mollick's work), the driving force behind 'AI! AI! AI!' in the corporate world is an executive hope that complacent AI can replace expensive people. That's not a win for all of its users.
Copilot works with MS office apps and is monetized by microsoft via subscription.
Of course it could be better, but of all companies it seems that Microsoft managed to monetize best - sice copilot gets integrrted to the MS Office package
Manufacturers started pivoting almost immediately when the iPhone debuted. Yes, eventually it delivered, but nobody waited for that before they started aping it.
...or it could turn out to be a 3D-TV moment - the jury is still out.
For a while, all OEMs had 3D TV models, and it seemed their ubiquity was inevitable by sheer force of manufacturers ramming the products down consumers throats (like AI). The only debate was over which solution was superior: active or passive. 3D movies are still with us, so the tech didn't completely disappear - only from the consumer space.
A Blackberry moment, perhaps. There appears to be something there, some groups are latching onto it and deriving value from it, but we haven't yet seen the iPhone come along to transform that initial interest into something that sweeps the world.
> Lately it has definitely felt as though Microsoft is resurrecting Ballmer's old meme as "AI! AI! AI!"
You nailed it! Having spent significant time (as low-level minion) under both Ballmer and Satya, it certainly feels like the old Ballmer-time meme is coming back with the AI!
Also with it, the forced-curve ranking that Satya disbanded is being re-instituted under a different name.
I agree but I'm not sure it's just microsoft- meta's instagram, whatsapp and quest are all acquisitions of already sucessful products. Oracle are similar.
I think, up to a point, and especially in the US where antitrust is pretty lax, it's a very safe investment to just buy other already sucessful companies.
The most glaring example in recent memory would be the amazon monopoly and the evidence i submit is diapers.com
with enough money, you can fund your investments to strategically take down every mom and pop.
amazon can’t take on every consumer vertical simultaneously, but they used their funds to drive diapers.com into the red, because as a parent you’re scrwed either way and comparing food to diapers, will buy the cheaper diapers instead of the cheaper food.
amazon wanted diapers.com
diapers.com said, we’re good this isn’t a billion dollar enterprise, but it pays the bills.
amazon bought it after making sure they couldn’t actually use it to pay the bills.
> With GitHub, TypeScript and VS code I'm probably using more Microsoft products than before.
cool, how much money have you paid to Microsoft to use those?
Except for Github (which they bought, by the way) probably not much. And github has some serious competitors (Gitlab which is just great and to a lesser extent, bitbucket).
Not true, at least not according to MS themselves. MS have done several studies and adoption of these tools drive adoption of Azure. That's why MS invests in it.
They've been quite clear about this. The one platform/OS was Windows. The new platform/OS is Azure/Cloud. It's almost like saying Google doesn't make any revenues from search, only from selling ads.
VS Code is also low-key keeping Windows relevant as a developer OS. If something else came along which was truly very excellent but was only working well with Linux, and VS Code was not there to be the de-facto go-to solution for most new devs, it could eat away more of Windows marketshare.
So I see VS Code as a slight moat, also in its promulgation of dotnet-isms. So I think VS Code drives some revenue Microsofts way in a pretty diffuse but real way.
That's why I wrote slight. VS Code is more of a backstop to make sure developing on Windows doesn't suck. Don't let Windows fall behind kind of thing. Every cross platform thing is biggest on Windows by default because Windows is the biggest platform.
VSCode Server and other remote dev servers are a big deal. Before we had to sync or mount a remote partition to manage the gap between Windows and the *nix server. I remember just plain using vim over ssh to avoid the hassle.
That pain existed under macos and linux as well, but to such a lower extent as you could do so much more locally.
While Jetbrains does it too, VSCode being strong guarantees it stays a viable path in the future.
How is VS Code a moat when it's platform agnostic? Plus the developer market is just a fraction of the overall market.
MS Office is the real moat, as is Windows XP/7. Everyone use MS Office because Google Slides/Docs/Sheets is a silly contender to the MS Office suite. Windows XP/7 because that's what a huge percent of the human population using computers grew up on today, so they're most familiar with it. And let's be honest, that's not going away, even as MS enshittifies Windows 11, simply because no Linux build can apparently mirror the Windows XP/7 UI (for some reason, not even Mint) while Apple is hell-bent on doing its own thing on the sidelines.
The day MS breaks Office suite is the day Microsoft goes down, but that's unlikely because the current crop of devs at MS don't even know how to get started. Microsoft could literally not do anything and still make tons in revenue.
> And let's be honest, that's not going away, even as MS enshittifies Windows 11, simply because no Linux build can apparently mirror the Windows XP/7 UI
Windows 10/11 does a really bad job at emulating XP/7 UI. It is about as foreign to XP users as Debian or whatever.
I made a XP VM the other month to run some insane software I had to run at work.
I felt so much at home. It was so nice. Everything was awesome. The control panel was awesome. The distinct buttons were awesome. The start menu was awesome. The 'My computer' at desktop root was awesome.
All in muscle memory, still.
Then I am back out to 10 and can't figure out where my app shortcuts are without knowing their name or what of the 3 or 4 different control panels I am supposed to use.
> he is doing is alienating a lot of customers with his terrible decisions
Windows doesn't even make up 1/5 of their income, and in contrast a bit over half of their income is Office and Cloud*
The real money is in enterprise IT and cloud services. The average consumer doesn't keep their prebuilt computer long enough to buy another version of the OS. They don't need to keep a niche within a minority (privacy-oriented customers who would buy an OS) happy with Windows to continue drowning in revenue.
It seems like he has done a fantastic job, if the goal was to decouple their fortune from Windows.
*Based on googling and a lazy reluctance to dig through their earnings calls
Only PC enthusiasts buy Windows. 99% of the population gets it bundled with their computers and who knows how much MS is charging those OEMs. Probably pennies.
Windows already has a de facto monopoly in desktop OS. They don't need to be nicer and give it for free to get more market share. They have all market share they every will.
It basically already is, at least for consumers. You can download an .iso of whatever the latest Windows version is and install it, and although it will prompt you to put in a product key, nothing stops you from continuing to use it if you don't. You can't customize certain cosmetic settings, and there's a small watermark in the bottom left corner, but it's hard to imagine that it being fully functional otherwise is an oversight rather than something they're fine with. The only people who will go through the effort to install it like that and keep using it are the ones who are least likely to pay for it.
This is true: my gaming PC had that watermark for nearly 10 years. You can't change the wallpaper, remote desktop doesn't work, but that's the only downside to not paying for windows (and using Microsoft's free iso, instead of pirating a key).
It's quite clear to anyone who's tried it (at least since Win10), that Microsoft does not care at all if you pay for Windows.
It comes preinstalled on most computers. The consumers don't pay, OEMs do. And they'll continue to pay because most people don't want an OS-less machine.
This is true for me as well. I do have a VR gaming machine which I don't think will linuxify soon but I would if I could. Nadella has grown Microsoft no doubt. But in the process has trashed Windows. One of the most valuable pieces of software. I wouldn't be surprised this will bite them in the long run a lot.
Our company is absolutely full of Microsoft products (all the Office 365 stuff, PowerBI, Azure, Microsoft SSO etc. etc.), yet most of our teams use Macbooks. Windows is no longer a necessity to work in a mostly-Microsoft environment, and that strategy is making Microsoft fabulous amounts of money.
Exactly this. Today I can switch from Linux to macOS to Windows and 99% of what the average users does can be done in the browser. Worse, in a smartphone.
So it was very smart of Microsoft to realize Windows was going to stop being a hard requirement for most use cases.
honestly that was the case about a decade ago. small / boutique MSP I was at cut costs by buying everyone white-label laptops, since one of the manufacturers was a client in LA and SF.
anyone who really wanted a windows license could get one, but most of the staff used Unbutu, with some AD and other stuff on the backend
Tools like PowerBI are quite good, the data pipelines are amazing, but at the end of the chain Microsoft always makes mistakes so that something good like PowerBI will only remain an advanced Power Point version. If you go a bit deeper the platform is fairly locked down behind artificial restraints.
Azure has good parts, auth with Microsoft is perfect for software in the office world and goes beyond the usual LDAP Active Directory. But on the other hand it is quite slow to a degree that it really affects productivity. The damage is probably in the billions/trillions for their many customers. That is the real price of office cloud versions.
Indeed. Conversely, Apple are the ones now forcing you to buy into their walled garden if you want to support users on their devices.
We are a mostly Windows+Linux shop, but we need Macs to build and test iPhone apps, investigate issues with Safari on iOS, do certain iPhone support tasks, etc.
Sorry, but how is that a response to what the GP said? It was not necessary to keep making Windows worse and worse to decouple it from other MS products.
As a 100% Linux user with good memories of that era (flying chair, Linux==cancer, etc.) I may be the best person here to actually defend Ballmer, having for sure no hidden interests in doing that.
Everything changed in those years: Google was cool, Linux desktop almost non existent, cryptocurrency not even in the head of its creator, AI was a myth and the best voice recognition could offer was the hilarious "double the killer" demonstration [1]. How can we compare CEOs actions separated by two decades? Ballmer did what was perceived as useful for its company back then just as Nadella is doing that now. Perspectives have changed, hence companies and their CEOS had to adapt. I'm 100% sure that if Ballmer were MS CEO today, he would include advertisements as well, as today putting advertisements in every free corner of the known Universe is perceived as acceptable, if not necessary, which was not the case 20 years back.
Since Nadella took over, Microsoft stock has gone up from $30 to $400 with a market value of over $3T. Satya understood that for MS to compete, they have to get out of the "Windows Only" mentality. For example, .NET Core was a huge thing when it finally came out. I don't think that he has made any terrible decisions for the company. May be for some users like you, sure. But not for the company overall.
Except Steven Sinofsky, longtime head of the Windows division and one of the internal forces preventing Microsoft from going in alternate directions, was pushed out under Ballmer's tenure, not Nadella's.
Granted, Ballmer made the mistake of putting Terry Myerson, who headed up the failed Windows Phone effort, in charge of Windows but that's another story.
Windows phone was damn good and was growing in popularity when Nadella came in and killed it. When you are #3 in a market, you need persistence to win. One cannot expect immediate, massive profits in a saturated market. Yet, Windows phone by itself was a growth multiplier for Windows which Nadella annihilated in order to turn Microsoft into a cloud & ad services company.
Except from a project management standpoint, if you don’t have a vision for a project, the people on that team would get up and leave. And there was no short term vision for the phone in the face of android and iPhone. The long term vision did not have team buy-in.
And then further the phone was a distraction for all of the other teams who were expected in someway to provide some software that would work on there as well as android and iPhone.
I agree that the phone would have been great … at some point. But in an MBA world, it was a liability
Windows Phone is surely symptomatic of Balmer's milking the cow rather than innovating approach. A smart phone is not a small desktop computer - it needed a complete rethink of user interface as Apple had done.
It's also a bit strange that the success of Windows was based on the ubiquity of clone PCs rather than single vendor, yet Microsoft instead tried to follow Apple here and let Google become the "clone PC" (Android phone) OS supplier.
I can't fault Balmer for at least trying to get a slice of the pie by belatedly putting out me-too products like Bing and Azure, but it's precisely because of Microsoft/Balmer missing the importance of the internet that it was put in position of being follower rather than leader.
Microsoft is really a bit like Intel in having totally dominated a product category, but then having missed on most of the major industry trends they might have been expected to lead on (for Microsoft, internet, mobile and AI; for Intel mobile, gaming and AI). They are lucky to have had a second chance with Nadella who seems much more in tune with industry trends, willing to rapidly pivot, and who seems to have made a masterful move with their OpenAI partnership in buying time to recover from an early lack of focus on AI/ML.
The user interface did have a complete re-think. Windows phone popularized tiles and live tiles which was not just innovative, but an order of magnitude easier and more ergonomical compared to icons, esp for older people. The comforting common-cross-app back button, the metro UI, the smooth performance, ability to store all apps on SD card, best phone keyboard of that era, integration with windows PC - they had the bare-bones down fine. But simply gave up after a few years, instead of incrementally improving.
I thought it was a bad mistake to bow, kneel and surrender the smart-phone market space. Today, I am fully convinced it was a critical, life-threatening mistake as more folks move to the Apple ecosystem - buying both iPhones, Macbooks and Apple Watches because of a fully-integrated ecosystem. The funny thing it was Microsoft who popularized Continuity, but after they gave up due to lack of willpower, it was Apple who took over, executed better and won. Really frustrating to see the state of Windows OS and device market today.
I don't think they missed AI boat. Their culture would not have allowed them to create OpenAI, but they were fast to leverage their moat and push AI into their office and windows suites and azure. Hell, they are even trying to catch up with search using AI and are trying to push Azure for various AI startups and stuff.
MSFT rarely leads on anything - arguably even Windows is something they created being inspired by something else, while not going deep into hardware. Which what became the undoing of IBM. They are much better at being second. Azure - they were behind AWS, but not as late as Google.
I bet with Satya, even with mobile they would have grabbed Nokia much earlier and pushed Windows Mobile before Android took off.
Amazon have a very close relationship with Anthropic, which seems like a good match (Anthropic focus on business use), and win-win. Anthropic gets access to the compute they need, and Amazon get AI to integrate into their AWS offerings.
I don't know the contractual basis of the relationship, but it seems this has to be pretty long term and strategic. A significant part of the competitive advantage of one AI vendor over another comes down to inference cost, which in turm comes down to customizing the model architecture for the hardware it is running on, which in this case either is, or will be, Amazon's home grown Graviton processors.
The problem with Amazon is not their closeness to Anthropic, but more of the fact their moat is not big enough to integrate AI in a way MSFT can. Even their Azure services somehow feels natural with AI support.
I don't know if Satya predicted it or not, but their push into open source and Github acquisition were very helpful for AI.
It wouldn't and it wouldn't need to. The decision was still very likely wrong, especially transparent after Apple proved with silicon that ARM platforms can be that competitive. Windows wasn't ready here and platform interop wasn't at all it strength.
If Windows phones would have had an emulated x86 mode, many people would have bought it instantly due to the momentum that now steadily decreases.
There can be solid business revenue if you are "just" #3 and the experience with development is very valuable. Although it is true that Microsoft and hardware has always been turbulent, with partners or without. Sometimes they simply created the best products in their class with a lot of margin, sometimes they basically sold scrap.
The entire mobile market was immature back then, people didn't expect much interoperability and Windows Mobile 7 Nokias were slick and faster than iPhone or Android. They could have become the "contrarians luxury" if you didn't want to just get an iPhone. A bunch of hardcore Microsoft fan developers were gearing up to develop for Windows Mobilet dotnet when Microsoft changed the APIs with Mobile 8 (IIRC) and this dedicated bunch of developers just dropped the platform and just embraced Android or iOS instead.
Just a spitball idea, but rather than focusing on the consumer market, they could've been the new blackberry for businesses (that give employees phones). Native active directory and group policy integration would be a good solution for the myriad of third party apps/services/devices that attempt to control the other phones.
For sure. Enterprise mobile was not really a thing back then. (Laptops with VPN was state of the art.) Microsoft could have organically owned the enterprise mobile market but chose not to.
Windows Phone was indeed damn good. I held on to my WP 10 phone a lot longer than anyone sane would have. However, the only growth for WP was in the negative direction. There were no apps for WP because of past compatibility breaks, Google was sabotaging access to their services, carriers and OEMs were unhappy because of low sales volumes of WP phones. Windows Phone was already very clearly dead before Nadella took over.
I really wanted windows phone to be a success and am still sad it wasn't. I loved the interface. The native integration between my desktop/laptop and phone would have been great. Nowadays with so many apps being PWAs and built with nativescript or ionic, maybe windowsphone has a chance again? I have no idea tbh.
Not just that everything was going through windows as GP said, whatever market they entered, they acted like their product will be like windows in that sector too from day one. Zune was like that, but the best example is windows phone, version 8 more precisely which is the first proper modern smartphone version.
Google realized that if they want to stand a chance in catching up to the iPhone, they need to shove android in people's faces, and lure in devs.
Microsoft entered the game (WP8) when android already had a foothold, making it even harder. They started with a mostly empty app store, and while they were clever enough to make sure the most widely used apps would be available by effectively bribing those big companies to develop windows phone apps, they pretty much gave the middle finger to all the small indie devs. I remember when android 2 was around I just downloaded android studio and played around a bit, making a simple scrobbler app for my Samsung device. Sideloadong was king back then, but even up to this point I had to pay zero bucks and jump through no hoops to try this out. I don't remember what putting this on the Google play store would've cost me back then, but not much.
The windows phone experience was: sign up for a dev account to download visual studio with WP support. Start up VS, asked for your account again. I think in the beginning this was actually a paid account, probably because apple did it that way and again, you're Microsoft so act like you already own the place. But later in they reversed course here at least and you could log in with a free account.
So you start building a small test app and then you want to run it in the shipped emulator but surprise! Your laptop only shipped with windows 8 home which doesn't include virtualization features, so tough. So the only way to test the app was to push it to your phone, which was another overly complicated mess where your phone had to be in developer mode and you could only "sideload" one app at a time, iirc. The result was an app store with mostly tumbleweed. Whatever small utility or gimmick you wanted, when on android a search would give you dozens of results, on WP, there was maybe 4, and 3 of them almost unusable and abandoned.
I'm not blaming ballmer for having decided this specifically, but holy hell how did this pass any meetings with the higher-ups? You're uo against two tech giants who have a head-start of a few years, you try to get people to switch to your platform by being pricey, having no apps, and being hostile to smaller devs?
The same played out with all the phone makers, who had to pay license fees for WP when android was free to use. Guess which phones were cheaper in the end. And when Microsoft bought Nokia, Nokia had the unfair advantage of getting WP for free, making it even less attractive for others to compete in that sector.
And let's not get into the botched Nokia acquisition because I also don't think this can be blamed on ballmer that easily, or primarily.
> The windows phone experience was: sign up for a dev account to download visual studio with WP support. Start up VS, asked for your account again.
This is something that Microsoft still struggles with. Some things have improved, but a lot of the dev experiences on the Microsoft side are still cumbersome and not aimed at small time devs.
My experience here is with browser extensions and publishing these for both old Edge (pre chromium) and the newer Edge. The entire publishing dashboard is/was overly complex and assumes you are either a single person or a big organization with (azure) AD set up. With Mozilla AMO you can just add individual developers to your extension by mail, and with Google it is as easy as setting up a group.
With browser extensions specifically (and Edge as well) you can also clearly see where it is still a dedicated motivated internal team setting things up and where things were handed over to more general teams and support was also outsourced to somewhere else.
Anyway, my main point is that even now, many years later, Microsoft still struggles in this area making me think this is more fundamental to the company culture and way of operating.
I would argue that specific technologies changing is super relevant fact.
In 90's and 00's "everything Windows" made loads of sense for a company so being hard on any competition was the right thing. Also I don't see people saying it about MacOs you cannot do software to this day for MacOs or iOS without having actual device and operating system from Apple.
What changed for MSFT was that operating system in 2010's and forward became irrelevant. Cloud is where the money is and now MSFT is "all in Azure or nothing company", entire company is designed to promote Azure and O365.
To properly promote Azure they need to run Linux on that cloud and they need mind share of developers that will develop products using Azure - earlier they could force developers to use Windows because that was where software was running.
I don't know anything more than the next guy here, but just reading this, it seems like a really underrated and insightful comment. Thanks for explaining it so clearly.
It's not a strategy, it's a recognition that the Windows org has decayed and they apparently don't know how to turn it around. Apparently simple projects take forever, new code they launch is often filled with bugs, different parts of the org don't talk to each other and they can't explain why anyone should write an app that targets the Windows API. I support customers shipping apps to every platform and Windows is nowadays 90% of the pain, it's worse even than Linux. Microsoft just don't care either, you can tell the devs who work on it are overwhelmed by the sheer size and tech debt levels of the codebase. Decades of compounding bad decisions have well and truly caught up with them :( This is a pity in a way, the desktop OS market could use more competition.
Nadella de-prioritizing Windows was the right thing to do for the business because it had a monopoly, so after PC sales saturated the market the best they could achieve was treading water, but also because the strategy of tying everything to Windows assumed the Windows team would continue to execute well and these things would all be mutually reinforcing. In the 90s Windows did execute well but by 2010 that had stopped, and so the tying strategy also had to stop. A better CEO than Ballmer could possibly have turned the Windows situation around and avoided the need for the disconnection, but instead it was left to drift.
It is in "everything is cloud" and "most of software runs in browsers anyway" world where operating systems don't matter .
I would not say it was by any means one or the other CEO "insightful" choice but it was more of market choosing on its own. Microsoft had to make own cloud or die that was the choice and better to put loads of investment in that. Ballmer started Azure because Amazon of course was first and Google did the same so Nadella was just playing cards he was handed by the world.
Running a cloud and developping an operating system are two separare activites that don't need to be tied together. There is a lot of proprietary software in companies around the globe that rely on windows low level APIs and it will last for decades. There is a lot of things that are running outside the browser. The whole gaming industry is still tied to Windows directx.
The thing is that OS is not important these days as you can apps on thin clients now and a lot of folks are spending most of the time within apps and doing nothing else.
I think that it is not exact. OS is as important as yesterday since you need them to run your containers that provide your services used by your thin clients. This is still the backbone of everything. But you have a point windows kinda lost the servers battle.
yeah. I think they have did some refactoring in OS though, to make it more modular. Not sure what are their long term plans for Windows. They probably would have benefitted from some handheld UI for sure.
They tried a handheld UI, with Windows phone but it failed. I think mostly because their UI was too far from what people expected aka something looking like ios (Android UI is almost a copy of iOS UI) and also because they came into the market too late with too few product innovations to be appealing. With 5% of market shared, this was not worth the cost, for devs on the plateform. If they want a comeback in the smartphone industry, maybe they have something to play with copilot and AI. Like an Android with free AI agents out of the box.
Selling licenses is not where the money is. Selling subscriptions to corporations so that every corporate-supplied computer (including Macs) pay Microsoft for something, be it Office or a full Windows+Office+Sharepoint license. All things considered, they can give Windows for free and they'll still profit from it as an enabler for further Microsoft lock-in.
Yep, aside from the legacy desktop environment & gaming I don't really have any ties to MS anymore, and I was a pure MS developer for 20+ years. Now with .NET superior on non-windows platforms and the nonsense their hostile consumer & enterprise side keeps pulling why would I stay in the ecosystem? I agree that Ballmer was unfairly used as a punching bag, but MS today (both the good and bad) is all Nadella.
This sounds right until you realise how much market share Windows captured, held and now even solidifies from the Ballmer era.
I don't agree with you, and I believe the Ballmer era did wonders for Windows and was a turbulent period. The new era of MS now is quite stable because of this.
Having spent some time at the Microsoft campus, I can tell you this is basically the consensus view from employees today. Ballmer was not a cool, trendy, or fun CEO who people rallied behind - but he more or less "got the job done". He was the captain of a massive ship with a turning radius the size of a continent guiding it through icebergs.
Azure's success was specifically set in motion under Ballmer. Owed to the fact that it was developed to Microsoft's strengths (enterprise support) that it didn't piss off too many of their partners and sales channels. Same with Office 365 and all of their other successful services. None are glamourous - but all are impressive with how not awful they are given their design constraints.
Even things like Surface, while considered a failure, did its intended job of getting hardware partners to get their act together and make better consumer products.
Ballmer hated Linux & open source. He would've driven their cloud division to the ground trying to sell Windows servers in the cloud. It would've taken him another 20 years to accept that Linux was key to the cloud. VSCode (Visual Studio Code) - would never have taken birth. Microsoft survived and thrived once Ballmer had no option but leave.
In this era of Python development, Microsoft Windows still feels a step or two behind as far as using a Windows laptop for coding in the cloud. Python is the language of AI - not Asp.net, not C#. Ballmer would never have seen the writing on the wall. He would've pushed something wierd, like VBA .
I have as much disdain for the monkey man as the next OSS fan. But VSCode was always closed sourced crap at the arbitrary whims of a soulless zombie corp, and they never promised otherwise in a significant way. It's not relevant and not a good foundational signal or basis for any argument.
> they never promised otherwise in a significant way
It’s commonly promoted as „open source“ and this seems to be commonly believed. Pretty much everyone I tell that the official builds of VSCode are proprietary (and how proprietary they are) is pretty surprised.
That is Code OSS, MS official binary builds of Visual Studio Code, as explained at the top of the Readme, include proprietary code. MS also has several very popular proprietary extensions. Some of those extensions, older cersions were open source.
the old ‘embrace-extend-extinguish’ model is what it _truly_ is, f.e. , you cannot take extensions from m$ store and use it.
there have been large number of discussions around this topic, and folks have highlighted these concerns more articulately than i could ever hope to do.
The destructive EEE strategy is replaced by a constructive poisoning the well strategy. That's arguably moral progress while there is no legal or financial incentive to do so.
That's praise for Nadella, not Ballmer.
That was Bill Gates. Bill Gates founded the company on BASIC and seemed to remain a fan of the language even as the rest of the world moved on to other languages.
Ballmer wasn't technical so appeared to have no skin in the game of which language "won", so long it was Microsoft Developer Tools like Visual Studio developers used to work on it (and what would become VS Code, which as many point out did start under Ballmer's tenure). That "Developers! Developers! Developers!" meme was directly an "I want to support developers wherever they are and however they want to work". Sure he was a huge Windows cheerleader and would want those Developers working on Windows machines, but he really did seem to want to see Windows be the best platform for developers to code for anything (including/especially the cloud).
In terms of Python specifically, IronPython was active and interesting during Ballmer's tenure and Ballmer helped form a team that was actively contributing to open source projects like Python (and Node and Redis and others) to make them all run better (sometimes much better) on Windows. Ballmer may have been afraid of open source as a business model, but he also seemed to realize the usefulness of open source for bringing developers (back) to Windows and he did start efforts in that direction.
Actually there was a lot of open source happening under Ballmer - not because of him but in that time. VSCode’s beginnings were in an earlier similar product were from that time. He didn’t interfere or stop those projects. Attributing that to Nadella is just false.
This is hindsight bias. Because other people took some of his later initiatives and made them successful, it’s tempting to look back and grant him these as wins.
We should resist that temptation and judge him on the results he delivered. MS was the essential tech company, king of the world, and under his leadership their innovation stalled, they lost in markets where they were leading, the stock stagnated, and huge piles of money were vaporized on acquisitions that were poorly planned or executed.
He tried to buy Yahoo for $44 billion! Only Yahoo’s greater idiocy saved him from that gargantuan mistake. And that was just one of many.
Would Yahoo under different management have done better?
Yahoo.com remains the 8th most visited website on earth[1] (I had no idea until I read that on HN some months back). It sits between Wikipedia and Reddit.
Well, I think the Bing search deal would have been a lot different if Microsoft had owned Yahoo.
Yahoo management was looking to reduce the cost of running web search and advertising platforms, but ended up still having a large expense to crawl the web and basically do web search in order to enhance Bing results. And then the Microsoft ad market managed to be worse in all sorts of ways (for advertisers and publishers) compared to the existing yahoo one, plus Microsoft took a cut of the revenue. Some of that should have been better if it was one company; plus, I bet Microsoft would have sent Yahoo employees an Xbox360 or something. (I worked for Yahoo Travel from 2004-2011)
> under his leadership their innovation stalled, they lost in markets where they were leading, the stock stagnated, and huge piles of money were vaporized on acquisitions that were poorly planned or executed.
A lot of this sounds like Google under Sundar's leadership, although I'm not sure if there is a parallel to the failed acquisitions, and some of the rot had set in well before.
Microsoft was under consent decrees and anti-trust / anti-monopoly scrutiny for much of Ballmer's tenure and had to tread very carefully in the marketplace. Pichal doesn't have that excuse. In fact, Google is staring down the barrel of a barrage of anti-trust / anti-monopoly lawsuits itself and the real test of Pichal is how well he is able to get Google to perform over the next decade when it's laboring under similar restraints. I would not bet money on him doing a better job than Ballmer did.
Developing OSes and software was clearly an unsustainable business. It's obvious in hindsight that cloud infrastructure was the way to go. But at the time placing a lot of different bets to find a few successful product-market fits was the best you could ask for.
While it may be true that the OS itself isn't really a cash cow anymore (if it ever was), I still think Microsoft's greatest failure of the previous decade was exiting the smartphone OS space and ceding it to Google and Apple.
I think that Ballmer's management can take a lot of blame for that. I think a different CEO could have executed and possibly have kept Microsoft in that market with success.
The Apple App Store by itself is a trillion dollar ecosystem. Microsoft being able to gain even a sliver of that size would be worth quite a lot.
We might give Apple similar criticism on the other side of this coin by saying that it's somewhat insane that Apple hasn't tried entering the public cloud market, especially given the fact that they now design their own ARM processors that are essentially the market leaders in that architecture.
> While it may be true that the OS itself isn't really a cash cow anymore (if it ever was), I still think Microsoft's greatest failure of the previous decade was exiting the smartphone OS space and ceding it to Google and Apple.
I mean, Microsoft was too early and too late on smartphones. I never cared to look into the pre WP7 history.
But the more recent Windows Phone died with WM10, which I don't think is fair to blame on Balmer. WM10 came out in public beta in Feburary 2015, and Balmer was replaced in February 2014. Microsoft eliminated their legendary testing program in August 2014, and the WM10 betas and release in November 2015 had very poor quality. On my phones, I had to choose between annoying bugs in notifications in WP8 or WM10 with a subpar, laggy experience with mobile Edge that managed to be worse than mobile IE. They did manage to get a decent final release together in 2020, although mobile Edge was still crap. You can blame Balmer for not letting Firefox on their app store, I think; a browser that didn't suck would have helped me stay on WP longer anyway.
Still, I think Continuum with an x86 phone could have gotten market share, but Intel cancelled atom for phones in April 2016.
I tried various "weird phones" on my way to standard Android, among them a high-end WinCE phone (Xperia X1a) and a WP8 one (Lumia 520). Make no mistake about it, WP8 was a good mobile OS, even if they did stick the dreaded "Windows" name in there. Smooth, reliable, battery efficient, well-thought-out UI. But alas, too late. By then Android had captured the "not iOS" market and it would have taken a miracle to bring a third OS to the mainstream.
I very briefly tried WP10, and it actually seemed a step backwards; in their desperate attempt to somehow unify the desktop and phone thing, be it in code base or user experience or whatever, they tried too hard.
Yeah, the idea that Nadella killed Windows Phone only makes sense in the context of Windows Phone already having failed under Ballmer.
I was a Windows Phone user during 8 and 8.1. There was a short period where I felt like some traction was taking place. My bank even had a Windows Phone app, until they didn’t.
Windows 8.1 was the most competitive version against contemporaries, but then the delays and issues surrounding 10 really took the wind out of those sails.
My perspective as a consumer is that Microsoft buying Nokia seemed to have made Nokia worse and delayed their phone development process. I found myself without any upgrade path, while Apple and Samsung users could get a pretty significant upgrade in capability every year at that time.
Nokia was also better at making low-end phones and had very few flagship products that were iPhone and Galaxy competitors.
On the business side Microsoft didn’t focus on having their entire lineup available on all four US carriers. They had all these weird carrier exclusives where getting a new Windows Phone would mean switching carriers.
I have to think that the break in compatibility between Windows 7 and 8 really screwed over developer relations as well. On the Apple side they were delivering an experience very familiar to Mac developers, and on the Android side the experience was an open source free-for-all playground.
That's exactly it. There were a bunch of hardcore Windows dev shops getting ready to support Windows Phone who jumped on WP7, ready to dig down, but who felt betrayed when WP8 was a clean break. You lose that hardcore bunch, then you are just evaluated on the generics and Windows Phone had no edge.
WP8 was compatible with Silverlight (ie. WP7) apps. The problem was splitting app model into half-abandoned Silverlight and new WinRT, and not providing WP8 upgrade to any WP7 phones.
Treating his tenure as just a bunch of vague bets that didn't pan out does not give Ballmer enough credit. He was a hands-on leader responsible for how MS executed, which had a direct impact on product success or failure.
MS did not just have bad luck, they lost to competitors.
Developing OSes and software was clearly an unsustainable business. It's obvious in hindsight that cloud infrastructure was the way to go.
Cloud infrastructure has become a commodity though and you can replace your cloud provider easily (theoretically, lol). What moat can MS or anyone else build around cloud infrastructure? Compare to OS' where MS may never have had a competitor catch up if they'd kept up speed on their OS teams.
Same with video games these days. Adding in digital casinos may seem nice but now you're just the same as every other digital casino offering.
One of the points in the article is that he made many bets, some of them panned out really well, others didn't, but on the whole he set Microsoft on a really good path.
Buying Yahoo would have been a bet that didn't work out, probably, but I don't think it goes against the point in the article.
I remember working with Microsoft as a client in 2000-s, it was awesome. We started as a startup, and enrolled in a BizSpark program. It gave us basically free access to Microsoft tools and with very responsive support.
We later transitioned into volume licensing, that also was simple and straightforward. The business side of Microsoft was a streamlined unstoppable train at that point.
The technical side, not so much. Microsoft was still trying to be the only software company in the world, and it was pushing all kinds of WPF, WCF, and other WTFs. So they completely missed hyperscalers and the growing market of Linux-based servers.
Sure. MS had tons of resellers with somewhat different markups, although not that different.
We needed only the basic stuff: Windows Server, Exchange, MSSQL, a bunch of XP licenses. And this all was straightforward. We also got MSDN subscription basically for free.
> The business side of Microsoft was a streamlined unstoppable train at that point.
Surprising. As a startup I just couldn’t understand how to subscribe to MS Office, seems like it required a hotmail account or something, it always bored me before completing the steps.
Ha! It was a trap, they are likely talking about Surface, the big table-computer. It was such a failure that they repurposed the name for something else and you might have never heard about it. We had one at work circa 2013.
Azure may be successful financially, but as someone who has finally used it for the last two years after 15 years of AWS and a little bit of GCP, I can't help but think the world would be a better place if it didn't exist or if some lesser player had that market share.
Maybe it's just "what you're used to", but I'd swap Azure and AWS in that statement. Going from Azure to AWS, I found it not nearly as nice to use or easy to understand. Even basic features like "see all the resources in my account" were missing from AWS.
I use all three regularly. AWS has a horrible, inconsistent UI, and the Azure portal is mostly ok (although I think GCP is the best of the three)
But OTOH AWS generally works and usually does what you think, whereas I'm never surprised when Azure breaks or some random Azure API works nothing like we expect.
The biggest difference IMO is in how they're handled by large organizations and how prod permissions are provisioned by them. In Azure you have one user account and one org, with subscriptions for your user account to activate to get permissions. You can have multiple subscriptions but they're under the same login/user account and you can have multiple active at the same time. In AWS, you get access to an account or accounts that have different logins, so you get to juggle those with login/logout, even if there's SSO. In GCP, there are multiple projects, under a single login, but you may have to juggle projects.
The other aspect is how regions are dealt with. AWS global resource index/search thing is useful, but it totally feels like I spend more time juggling regions with AWS. Azure's regions themselves are, let's just say, interesting. GCP is better at it than AWS, and less interesting than Azure (which is a good thing).
I must have very different needs. In my perception, AWS is the best of the three, Azure is second, and Google would be #3. Depending on your unique news, you might choose different CSP's, from Digital Ocean to Oracle or IBM (the only place you can get AIX, IBMi, and z/OS)
Do you do cross-region work in AWS? For me that is just bad. I usually want to work at a service level and see across all regions, where as AWS wants me to work at a region level and see everything I have running there.
I think it's a bit the services - I am very impressed with Aurora on AWS for instance, and there isn't really anything equivalent to it anywhere else. Also, some of the services elsewhere seem easier to deploy or more convenient to use.
In any case, all three big ones are pretty good for almost anything, and I don't think there is anything that's doable on one that's impossible to do in the others (IBM is the exception here - if you need AIX, IBMi or Z, they are the only ones who can offer that).
AWS feels fundamentally better engineered than Azure but Azure's GUI and API feels more consistent. AWS has never had the kind of global outage that Azure has had.
For most stuff Azure is pretty meh, but it seems to have the best features for running Windows servers and integrates well with Active Directory (or MS Entra or whatever they currently call it). Features that I don't need as a startup founder, but that would be very interesting for many places I worked at.
Basically the cloud for everyone but the tech companies
> Basically the cloud for everyone but the tech companies
And most companies are not tech companies. This is something that tends to be lost in HN discussions (not saying that applies to you, specifically).
I've spent a lot of time in the Microsoft world. I worked for AWS as well. In general, Microsoft executes on platform and ecosystem in a way that works very well for a lot of customers. In general, AWS executes on products better, which tends to appeal more to those who are focused on technology, specifically.
Azure existed long before ScottGu took over. It started with dueling projects from Ray Ozzie’s world and Bob Muglia’s world. Ray had great ideas but no idea how to run something like Azure at scale. Bob brought the enterprise mindset and retooled it, and of course Scott owns the lion’s share of the credit for its growth and technical qualities.
I began recruiting for what became Azure in Jan 2006. I was chief software architect / cto at the company. Amitabh Srivastava and the legendary Dave Cutler were the leads, with Dave focused on the hypervisor. (I'd met Dave in the 80's when he was at DEC and I was at DG.)
The project was in my team (CSA labs) but was cross-funded behind the scenes by Kevin Johnson, the president of Server & Tools. KJ & I did this because there was passive-aggressive resistance to a 'cloud first' design/architecture philosophy from within his org, where there was a deeply-rooted belief that enterprise servers and ops management tools would adequately scale-up.
KJ bought in and was all-in, as was the 'tools' part of his org (Soma & ScottGu). SteveB initially didn't quite know what to make of my desire and myriad efforts to fundamentally transform the company from packaged products toward services, and he had to cope with some of the wake I was leaving. It wasn't all smooth. But he believed in me and helped me to recruit internally, which was essential.
My explicit cross-funding agreement with KJ, my peer, was that when I decided it was the 'right time', I'd hand off my Azure org and it would be re-merged into S&T in more-or-less a 'reverse merger', with cloud leadership taking over server.
I launched Azure at PDC 2008 with what today we'd call lambda's (functions-as-a-service based on .net) & blobs & cloud database as the core services. Why no linux or windows VMs? They were absolutely part of day 1 plans, but a major political ploy from within KJ's team ('this will kill the server business') resulted in an active decision (mine) to defer until post-launch. It wasn't a technology issue, nor was it an OSS issue; the team believed in OSS & Linux. But shipping was top priority, and we shipped.
When I ultimately left the company in 2011, it was time to do the reverse merger that KJ and I had planned. A proven, super-talented manager from Bing that everyone loved, Satya, was chosen to lead the org as it was moved into S&T upon my departure. James Hamilton, the architect of Azure's relational DB, left for AWS.
Ultimately, under Satya, ScottGU & co ended up re-plumbing much of the original code with a by-then-ready Windows hypervisor, VMs & Linux, and all that you see today. By then the org finally was aligned and 'believed', and SteveB was genuinely 'all in'.
Getting products from 0 to 1 is sometimes a challenging process involving incredible people and stamina from believers at every level. In this case I'd say it was worth the effort.
BobMu left Microsoft because he was not sold on cloud, he was an advocate for 'on-prem' solutions (and for its time it made sense since enterprise customers were against cloud).
Azure, AWS and CPQ are all platforms that are good enough. If you need a cloud which is standing out and will be the best place for you workload over the next decade or more you have to look to OCI.
The Azure project was run by Nadella before he became CEO. And it succeeded despite Ballmer. Azure was seen as the Microsoft cloud, where people ran Windows Servers. But Microsoft had long lost the battle for the server space to Linux.
When Ballmer stepped aside, only then could Nadella drop the limiters and push the Microsoft <3 Linux perspective to get the message out that Azure is a home for Linux workloads too.
Yep, people forget, but Azure launched as Windows Azure in 2010 - they dropped Windows from the name a few years later, but it was obvious what it was trying to be at launch.
I’m guessing you don’t know any Microsoft employees who were from that era and sufficiently senior to know. Azure was not run by Nadella. Its predecessor was Bing and much of Azure then was just a reselling of Bing services. Bing was something Ballmer invested in and pushed for. Nadella didn’t drop any limiters or push the Azure perspective - that was people closer to Azure.
This is not true when your employees’ compensation depends on the stock. They all implicitly become speculative traders and watching the employees at Amazon/Google become millionaires in a couple of years caused a lot of brain drain at Microsoft.
I was looking at the candles for all of Microsoft the other day and was surprised (and kind of pissed) that Microsoft didn't really take off until 2015. You could have gotten Microsoft dirt cheap for decades compared to the current issue price.
Azure launched as (and still is) a complete dumpster fire. Unless your company has business ties to MS (e.g. your usage is heavily subsidized, which is most of their large clients from what I understand), I would never in a million years use it over GCP or AWS.
I worked at Microsoft from 2003-2007, and left a couple months after the iPhone launched (for totally unrelated reasons, but I wanted to situate the timeline).
Steve was a terrible leader. He helped the company grow moribund, lazy, and self-absorbed. Stack ranking was a cancer[1]. Employees were far more interested in stabbing each other in the back than building world-class products.
I disagree with Dan due to my experience as an low level employee under Ballmer. He encouraged political infighting and backstabbing and dog eat dog internal competition, while praising and desiring tight integration between teams.
He wanted "cloud first, moblie first" - two firsts! The culture at the time was built around RAID - the internal bug datadbase and that there should be clear prioritization for everything.
The inability to decide between enterprise cloud and consumer client devices held Microsoft back.
Ballmer had customers asking for enterprise cloud in 2000 but he kept listening to people talking about lifting windows sales by 10 percent with search integrated to the desktop.
And then they chose the bloated SQL server for that and wondered why that couldn't run on normal consumer hardware in Longhorn.
The fundamental tradeoffs between something that sacrifices generalization for specialization and efficiency meant that what is good for running server rack NASDAQ didn't work for low powered laptops.
From a low level employee perspective Ballmer was the ruthless guy that wanted people to hate each other at work as they fought for survival lord of the flies style but was pikachu surprised that we could never deliver integrated experiences that worked together.
Satya's two key abilites to me were the ability to actually prioritize in a coherent way and the decision to bring the rank and file infighting down because integrated experiences are hard to build when you want your brother and sister departments to fail so yours gets more budget because thats how Ballmer worked.
This one’s on Jack Welch - a pioneer in short term gain over long term building. You absolutely can juice a company’s performance by going dog-eat-dog, but inevitably when the smoke clears you’re left with jackals and hyenas stretched too thin.
Always worth mentioning that this culturally altered America in a way that we’ll probably never unwind.
> Always worth mentioning that this culturally altered America in a way that we’ll probably never unwind.
I think this about a lot of things, such as certain events in politics or generative AI. I'm curious how you apply this to ruthless cutthroat policies at a handful of (admittedly quite large) tech companies?
I'm not informed enough to rebut this, and don't want to be quoted in the follow-up article that suggests HN is still too dumb to get the genius of Ballmer, but here's my take.
It's only the footnote of the article that mentions Ballmer's "stage persona". I think that's the important point, and I would add that his "interview persona" might have been even worse. Back then, he was quoted as saying insanely dumb shit all the time. Like when he literally publicly laughed about the iPhone. Or when he called a Zune feature to share files between devices "squirting".
Maybe he did make all kinds of brilliant decisions internally. I wouldn't know, but neither would the stock market. If the CEO comes across as not understanding tech, it's likely the market will price that in.
I think a better way of understanding Ballmer is that he really struggled to relate to end consumers, but he understood their business partners very well.
He was very much an '80s/'90s exec. Back then, execs were not "visionaire rockstars"; they were wisecracking boomers in suits. Microsoft walked a very thin line between very different worlds, and Ballmer was closer to the old-world type than the new.
I've been involved with computer networking since approximately 1982, and I've never once heard someone use "squirts" outside talking about Zunes. I don't doubt that it was jargon inside very specific niches, but it has never been common elsewhere.
Before the Ballmer/Zune use of the term I remember my father talking about data being squirted to A2A missiles (he was military) prior to launch, so perhaps that is one of the niches.
I take that back. An old issue of Wired had a jargon watch mention of “squirt the bird” as bouncing something off a satellite, which I remembered only because they misspelled it and I wondered what “quirt” meant.
So yeah, maybe that’s a military or adjacent thing.
What does Microsoft do now? Most every major tech company I’ve seen uses stack ranking - even if they don’t use that name. Hell, a lot of startups I’ve been at even use that. The founders and executives love it as far as I can tell - why else would they do it?
At Microsoft in particular, stack ranking has always been used in the sense of trying to put together a rough ordering of employees at similar levels.
But "stack ranking" in scare quotes at Microsoft referred to the specific practice of the 20/70/10 rule -- the top 20% were the standouts, 70% was fine, and 10% was "this person needs to be eased out". This was applied for any org with more than a certain minimum number of people, and led to a very very toxic review process.
This is pretty much what I see at almost every company I’ve been at in the last decade though… The review process is always toxic and has always lead to my peers in the industry being more likely to sabotage than help me since that’s the best way to look good in reviews. That with 80% of my peers being permanent H1B means they will do whatever it takes to stay employed.
I would be happy to know big tech companies that aren’t doing this but I don’t know any?
I would argue that Microsoft's original practice (without the 20/70/10) is actually pretty good. Have managers make subjective evaluations, merge them together at higher level meetings, and then work out compensation from there.
There's a big cottage industry of trying to back everything up with data, to provide actionable feedback, etc., and these end up being giant time-wasting cover-your-ass exercises, which always end in an uncomfortable non-working system for everyone -- "I did the thing you asked but my review is the same as last year, why aren't I getting promoted". Mentorship and growth has to be more than just "here are your goals". Peer reviews can be okay, but only if you force people to make judgments -- "rank these three people against each other" rather than "give these people a rating 1-10 in each of these five areas".
The subjective evaluation process doesn't work unless you trust your managers, though. And that invariable means that it doesn't scale.
"grading on a curve" is a good idea, and if athletics wasn't run that way, nobody would watch.
that doesn't mean it's easy to implement, manage, or impossible to game, or that it plays nice wrt human factors, but to attack the core idea as essentially wrong is anti math, science, and rationality.
Microsoft always suffered from rewarding egotists and political animals over people who did actual work.
> but to attack the core idea as essentially wrong is anti math, science, and rationality
The way Microsoft implemented stack ranking was anti math. You're supposed to measure the data then calculate the level of fit to a distribution, not artificially shoehorn the data into buckets to create the curve. If you analyze the data honestly you may find you have a bimodal distribution, or a heavily skewed distribution, who knows.
Stack ranking just clumsily says, I'm gonna give x% a bad score, y% a middle score, and z% the top score.
>Stack ranking just clumsily says, I'm gonna give x% a bad score, y% a middle score, and z% the top score.
as long as the ordering top/middle/bad is preserved, I don't see a problem. there are entire respected statistic methods based on rank ordering, not raw metrics.
People don't have a right to fall on a normal distribution. Employers do have a right to grow or trim the workforce, and those numbers are driven by factors that are not necessarily normally distributed.
the people who downvote me simply want participation trophys, and "no" is the answer.
You absolutely can argue that Microsoft pursued a system that hurt both Microsoft and its employees, but not by attacking rank ordering.
>Ah, "participation trophies" and "if you disagree you're a snowflake."
actually, my comments have all been about math, and i gave an explanation as to why some people don't like the math. It's your comment that talks about snowflakes.
Athletics is an actual competition where the expectation is that "you win".
When you hire 12 baristas are they competing to make the most coffees or is their job to handle customer's orders? If their job isn't to compete with each other then don't stack rank them. Use other metrics like #of incorrect orders or w/e and decide what you think they should've done and if they did more than that give them a bonus. If they do less then maybe you need a new employee.
> Microsoft always suffered from rewarding egotists and political animals over people who did actual work.
That has nothing to do with grading on a curve. You can assign people to the top of a curve based on "egotist" criteria or based on "work". Nothing about a curve or stack ranking requires it to be based on "real work".
That's great. If you regularly fire the barista who brings in the least amount of money then you will find that nobody sane will take the slower shifts.
Because how much money a barista brings in is mostly a factor of how busy the coffeeshop is. Which is largely a factor of what time the clock shows, and that's not something a barista will be able to influence. (baring circumstances where a barista is so incompetent that costumers walk out of the shop.)
What do you do in athletics? Do you tell the kids (graveyard shift) they aren't allowed to participate in sports anymore because they can't compete with the big leagues (peak hours)?
Probably not. More likely you would look at the different leagues individually. I'm surprised this idea is novel to you.
Why do you talk about athletics? Baristas are not athletes. Coffee shops are not the olympics. You are stretching this analogy beyond its usefullness.
> I'm surprised this idea is novel to you.
Could you possibly express your thoughts without putting down others? Thank you.
To address the meat of your comment. It sounds like you are proposing to grade the baristas working the bad shifts and the good shifts separately in different "leagues". The problem with that is that assumes that you are aware of all the factors which form the different leagues. If there are clear "night time" vs "daytime" barista groups that works. but if you just assign baristas as scheduling works out then you will realise that some people (randomly, and through no fault of their own) will be assigned to the slower shifts. Will you fire a perfectly good barista who is meeting the expectations of your establishment just because scheduling worked against them in that evaluation period? That is what stack ranking did in the case of microsoft.
The thread seems to be about how one would manage baristas. It spawned off where lesuorac pointed out that baristas working for a coffe shop are different from athletes in that they are not competing with each other.
> Did you forget to read the thread?
> You've lost your sense of reality.
I guess that’s a no then. I hope you have a good day.
> The thread seems to be about how one would manage baristas.
What gives you that impression? It isn't not about baristas, but namely about a parallel between baristas and athletics. That was the context that was setup at the head of this particular thread branch, and we haven't change the subject (aside from that irrational attempt related to being "put down", whatever that was).
> I guess that’s a no then.
Correct. There is no logical place for pointless emotions here. Save it for human interactions.
> It isn't not about baristas, but namely about a parallel between baristas and athletics.
And what is the paralel? That is what i was asking and that is what you are dodging to answer. Why do you feel that the management of baristas can be usefully inspired by lessons from the management of athletes?
> Save it for human interactions.
Thank you for your candor. It is good to know that you don’t characterise our conversation as a human interaction. Puts it into perspective, and explains a lot.
I mean you do tell the kids they can't participate (in that league). There are woman playing ice hockey but none of them have survived an interview (professional try out with an NHL team and so they've all been told no.
---
It's novel because it's not how its done.
It's a big part of the stack rank hate is that people just blindly rank everybody and then adjust compensation that way. Taking more granular detail into account just isn't done.
But also because you're hired to do a job. If you do the criteria of the job then you should get a satisfactory rating. Similar to test taking, if you demonstrate knowledge of the material then you should pass. If you got 99/100 questions right and everybody else got 100/100 then you shouldn't get an F despite you being the worse of the group.
> Taking more granular detail into account just isn't done.
Where'd you dream up that idea? I operate a restaurant, so I at least have first-hand experience in overseeing barista-like workers, and I don't know how you could possibly ignore such details?
I'm sure I'm not perfect at it. I'm certainly not accurately capturing the butterfly flapping its wings in Africa. But you'd never flat-out ignore the blatantly obvious like shift times.
Perhaps with a statement like "But you'd never flat-out ignore the blatantly obvious like shift times." then you understand why people don't like stack ranking because yes people do ignore blatantly obvious things.
Not forgotten, but not particularly relevant. The context we followed only inherited the athletics analogy and how it parallels with baristas.
Sometimes it is necessary to ignore the blatantly obvious. You can't meaningfully alter the ranking of a sports team because their star player was out with a broken leg. You have to accept the circumstances for what they are.
But I'm not sure that translates to something like shift times which are fundamental to the game.
Why the hell are your baristas competing? Why are you not just measuring whether or not they are acceptably good at their jobs? If they are superior, promote them. If they are acceptably OK, keep them. If they suck, fire them. You shouldn't have to arbitrarily put someone at the bottom of the curve; that's ridiculous.
Because that's what is necessary in a market economy? If they don't put in effort to compete, the customer will find another team of baristas that will. It is not like it is hard to find another coffeeshop.
> you shouldn't have to arbitrarily put someone at the bottom of the curve
What is arbitrary about it? The reality is that more coffeeshops open than can actually be supported by coffee drinkers, so it is an economic necessity that some end up shuttering due to being at the "bottom of the curve".
This is ridiculous. You grade people to a standard, not against each other. Stack ranking Jack Welch-style is basically operating under the assumption that if you had Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Satya Nadella, and Jeff Bezos on a team, that one of them would have to get a shitty grade and be fired.
All it does is make true talent not want to work with other true talent for fear they get screwed over.
>Stack ranking Jack Welch-style is basically operating under the assumption that if you had Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Satya Nadella, and Jeff Bezos on a team, that one of them would have to get a shitty grade and be fired.
no, it's not, you are wrong. It is based on the probability that you will not have all those outliers on one team, a probability that is very very high.
also, it's not used for teams of a dozen people where you can easily know everybody personally, it's used for teams of 1000 people, and Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Satya Nadella, and Jeff Bezos 'S jobs would all be safe (if they could get along with each other, which they couldn't, there'd be so much backstabbing productivity would grind to a halt :)
Nadella didnt build anything though. He is there to outsource.
Microsoft products start to feel cheap and buggy. But hey, they are probably made by people who are earn less.
> Much like Gary Bernhardt's talk, which was panned because he made the problem statement and solution so obvious that people didn't realize they'd learned something non-trivial
His "using you're types good" talk being censored is my go-to example for how "cancel culture" and "wokeness" has gone too far, a good useful talk not meant to be harmful to anybody, with no evidence that anybody was hurt by it, is removed from the world for the far reaching fear that one day some person might not be happy about it.
The fact that years later people still want to learn from it and nobody has every talked about it being an issue shows we have gone too far as a society on the side of caution and never doing anything that wouldn't stand up to a fortune 10 HR exec panel.
He effectively pretended to be dumb. And that included using the wrong "you're" and very simple dialects of English and mannerisms which he thought could potentially be seen as disparaging some groups.
I think it was so generic and so clearly a joke it would be insane to pretend it was making fun of a group that existed in real life.
For reference in the talk he also listed strongly typed languages as "weekly typed", static as dynamic, and had a MacBook on stage display a BSOD.
The talk was comedic genius and a fun tongue in cheek commentary on the industry in 8 minutes. But it has been deemed to dangerous to society to be allowed to exist.
Is this a real thing that happened? It's framed as a young child making a lot of misconceptions, you'd have to be pretty darn sensitive to get offended by that.
Look, I don't know the video but how do we know - or why do we assume - that it was taken down out of fear of future weaponized wokeness? Maybe Gary took it down for Gary's reasons.
Edit: from the couple of descriptions in this thread I could totally envision an empathetic individual waking up one day and deciding that talk felt too much like punching down and taking it down because they felt like they could do better.
It’s funny how all the comments here are falling in the trap described in the beginning of the article of disliking Ballmer because he comes from the sales side and they can’t fathom someone not coming from the tech side leading a tech company.
What’s undeniable in the article is that Ballmer literally built what remains Microsoft best asset even before being a CEO there: it’s incredibly good relationship with its corporate customers. Honestly, it’s really what sets Microsoft apart for me. When you do deal with them as a corporate customer, you really get the feeling that they understand the way things work in a big corp IT department and will be reliable and predictable.
When you do deal with them as a corporate customer, you really get the feeling that they understand the way things work in a big corp IT department and will be reliable and predictable.
Just got done negotiating our E5 license last year and omfg is this laugh-out-loud untrue. Don't even get me started on how we have to check the Azure websites before every meeting with our M$ counterparts to figure out what Azure services they've changed the name of since the last call.
But yes, completely agree it's the corporate customers that are the wind beneath their sales. But it's because they understand that for almost any large corp IT department on the planet, telling the 85% of their employees who don't give a steaming crap what the nerds think about Windows or Ballmer, "you have to dump Excel & Word and learn something else"[1] is not a hill any of them are willing to die on. We have people that won't use Excel on a Mac because once they found a place where it didn't work exactly like the Windows version.
> We have people that won't use Excel on a Mac because once they found a place where it didn't work exactly like the Windows version.
Then again, Excel on a Mac is significantly inferior to the Windows version to be honest.
> Don't even get me started on how we have to check the Azure websites before every meeting with our M$ counterparts to figure out what Azure services they've changed the name of since the last call.
Not my experience at all and we spend millions of dollars a year with them.
Really? You mean you missed Azure AD renamed to Entra ID? How about Microsoft Azure Security Center + Azure Defender combined into Azure Defender for Cloud? All the products that were "Azure Defender something" that became "Microsoft Defender something"? Yammer -> Viva? MyAnalytics -> Viva Insight? How about the 20-something products that changed to the "Microsoft Purview" branding.
By our count, Microsoft renamed something like Azure 60 products in the last 5 years. And you didn't "experience" any of that?
we spend millions of dollars a year with them
Oh my...I sure hope you don't think spending "millions" of dollars a year with Microsoft makes you special; our mid-8-figure USD yearly spend sure doesn't move us to the front of too many lines. But they do let us know when they change product names...
I wouldn’t use that language exactly. I think they’ve set up a very effectively profitable relationship with the industry - part carrot and part stick. But I don’t think AWS usage would’ve exploded as it did if their clients truly felt both respected and understood.
What Dan doesn't mention is that Steve was given the reins to a sinking ship if I recall.
The US Govt was just finishing it's trial on Microsoft & was watching them closely.
Tech bubble just burst.
On day 1 of the transition after Steve, the stock jumped like crazy & continued that momentum. The stock was, as Dan mentions, at an unfairly low p/e ratio too.
Idk if Steve was great but seems he was given the role of transition CEO. Plus did Bill ever really leave?
It'll be interesting to see how Satya finishes his career & the first few years after. Microsoft was making really good software the first few years after Satya took over & a lot of people were wanting to work there. Since Covid though, their software quality & updates have crashed imo.
> On day 1 of the transition after Steve, the stock jumped like crazy & continued that momentum.
Many people would interpret that as "investors had no faith in Steve Ballmer and were delighted to see his back." Do you have a different interpretation?
Also, you seem to be implying that the trial was some external event, and not directly the fault of Bill and Steve. That is not how most people felt at the time.
> Many people would interpret that as "investors had no faith in Steve Ballmer and were delighted to see his back." Do you have a different interpretation?
You're 100% right. Starbucks just did something similar. I personally don't believe these jumps are warranted until the new CEO proves their ability to change the ship. It would be really interesting to hear from Microsoft insiders what changes were being made before the CEO changeover & what ones were heavily done by Satya.
> Also, you seem to be implying that the trial was some external event, and not directly the fault of Bill and Steve. That is not how most people felt at the time.
While many people may have felt they were being very anti-competitive at the time, the same standard has not been held to other companies or Microsoft much over the past 20 years in the United States.
In many ways, it was. The political stars aligned "just so", in a way we've not really seen before or since. Many, many other companies got away with much more egregious behaviour (hello, Apple).
Apple does not have the percentage ownership of the market that Microsoft had with both Windows and Office. And to my knowledge Apple operates out in the open, i.e. they do not lie to everyone, and do not bundle shitty products with monopoly products in the way that Microsoft habitually did - and may still do.
He's underrated in the sense that a lot of CEOs of his era completely destroyed their companies, see Intel, GE, GM, Yahoo, etc and he didn't. So that's already a win, he set up the company in a decent position so that when someone with more vision takes over they'll have something to work with, even if he didn't have the talent to pull things off himself. He had a couple of wins (Azure, Office 365) along with many many losses, and they're good enough to secure him a 6/10 on my ratings.
If you trust the article, then Azure and O365 are each, independently, easily Fortune 100 companies if separated. These "couple of wins along with many many losses" are some of the most valuable products in the world.
Imagine a VC fund that invested in a few dozen product companies, two of which were Azure and O365. Is that a 6/10 VC company? Why is the logic different for a CEO making bets for a company's next several decades?
Because the company has more strategic resources than a VC, and has need to defend existing businesses.
MS should've been able to simply just extend their OS monopoly into all platforms and all architectures, but they didn't, and to a vast swath of the world have become irrelevant, and worse, have lost their ability to become relevant.
It's a decline from being the monopolist to simply a player, sure they executed well in enterprise sales and was fast in picking up OpenAI, but they have lost the ability to use their strategic resources to save xbox, help azure overcome competition, or push a mixer or Surface or whatever.
Edit: For people who don't understand the last sentence think about the way that O365 was able to help MS push Teams to stave off Zoom and others despite being objectively trash. MS should've been able to keep control of the internet, but they lost their moat to Google (Chrome), and the same story for various consumer products. Bing was a decent win but with a better consumer story they should've also been able to threaten social and youtube and so on. But now they're completely irrelevant there.
> MS should've been able to simply just extend their OS monopoly into all platforms and all architectures, but they didn't, and to a vast swath of the world have become irrelevant, and worse, have lost their ability to become relevant.
Microsoft is, pretty famously, on the receiving end of one of the most significant antitrust judgments in modern history. Choosing to further a monopoly seems that it would be a phenomenally bad decision for the company.
Despite that, Windows remains the dominant operating system for businesses worldwide. So I would argue that the OS is far from "irrelevant".
Beyond the OS, they are comfortably #2 in the public cloud market, with little threat from #3. Indeed, #1 has been relatively stagnant in market share, while Azure has been steadily growing.[0] It seems that a consistently growing market share in such a large industry shows that not only are they relevant, but they are becoming more so, and have not "lost their ability to become relevant". Additionally, it seems that they are "overcoming competition".
> It's a decline from being the monopolist to simply a player ....
> MS should've been able to keep control of the internet, but they lost their moat to Google (Chrome),
They legally could not maintain that monopoly. Again, see the antitrust ruling. The antitrust case was about the impact on Netscape, and was too late to save Netscape. But it is a pretty straight line from a case about bundling IE with the OS.
To be clear, the finding in this case originally held that Microsoft needed to be broken up.[1] Microsoft won on appeal, because of impropriety by the original judge in the case, but the appeals court upheld all findings of fact.[2]
Much of what you are saying Microsoft should have been able to do on the basis of their OS monopoly would have been begging for further antitrust action.
> Bing was a decent win
Bing, on its own, would be the 12th largest tech company in the world, per the original article.
And Microsoft is worth $3T today, largely on the basis of investment under Ballmer (and continued strong execution under Satya). Is the argument that Microsoft should instead be a $10T or $100T market cap company today if you graded Ballmer better than a D?
I don't buy the "MS purposefully let IE die to avoid anti-trust" story. Ballmer was an enterprise sales guy, no wonder his enterprise software business did great, IE lacked focus and died. Just keeping IE around, they didn't have to kill Google, but just keeping it around would've been interesting in 2020 as they can conceivably use it to move onto rivals. Similarly, windows phone didn't die because of anti-trust but because of Ballmer failure. Windows server is a fail because of Ballmer. Yes MS should've been a ~6T company today. Operating systems were their territory and Ballmer lost ground. There are 6ish other major battlefields: search, e-commerce, social, consumer devices, enterprise software, cloud. Ballmer lost 4/6 despite major advantages going into the last 4 of these.
I'll give credit to Ballmer for being early enough on supporting Azure where it's ahead of GCP, but for how well Azure is doing now that's on Nadella.
Am I supposed to give Ballmer credit for Bing? I'm not going to do so. With enough money any CEO would've been able to crank out a Bing (Same way I'm not impressed by Tim Cook's Apple Watch).
If it's better, by tying it in with your other products, by making it compatible with the market, and by building an ecosystem moat on top of it. You can also lower the price to capture marketshare. Plenty of proprietary systems won despite being late and the open source system had become incumbent. See discord/slack, MATLAB, Spotify.
If Windows Server had a better DX, had supported everything Linux did, AND had proprietary features on top of that, it would've done well I reckon.
See my sibling comment. Windows Server dominates server OS revenue share at ~70%. They get most of the money that people are willing to spend on server OSes.
> I don't buy the "MS purposefully let IE die to avoid anti-trust" story
I don't know who you'd buy it from, certainly not me. If that's what you've read into my comment, that is reflective of your perspective, not mine. IE was never that good. It was bundled with the predominant operating system, so had massive market share. As soon as Microsoft had to open the OS more and draw a line between OS and IE, it was pretty much inevitable that there would be other browsers. And too-aggressive positioning of IE would be highly legible to regulators.
I agree that, absent regulatory scrutiny, Microsoft could have flexed muscle here to effect different outcomes in the general internet space. I disagree that such a decision would be a good idea for Microsoft in the climate of the aughts.
Server market share is tougher to find, but it appears that Microsoft captures a large majority of revenue in the server OS space. I know the install base proportion is smaller than the revenue proportion, but it seems to me that they are capturing most of the market willing to pay for a server OS.[0]
As to your 7 major battlefields and Microsoft's major advantages:
1. Operating systems. Most other major OS vendors collapsed or were collapsing in the 90s. It seems naive to expect that there would continue to be no pressure on the OS front. Part of their dominance was circumstantial. Nevertheless, they continued to dominate desktop market share and server market share (both by revenue). Losing install share to OSes that people don't pay for is expected, especially as those options improve.
Apple came over to x86, making MacOS (again, an OS that people don't pay directly for) much more viable, because application developers no longer had to target two ISAs.
And mobile came to the fore. Consumer devices is a separate category, though.
Overall, I'd consider this a win for Microsoft and a continuing area of dominance, in the face of many new entrants and threats: ChromeOS; tablets becoming a viable option; Linux becoming usable for laypeople; and much of computing moving to the browser such that the OS doesn't matter as much, yet Windows still dominates when OS doesn't matter.
2. Search. Google was already positioned for market dominance in the early 2000s. Microsoft began their indexing project in the early 2000s. Other players entered and left the market. Amazon had a search engine, and they are all about the consumer market (especially before AWS). That folded in the mid aughts. Yahoo collapsed. AOL, Excite, Lycos, and many others failed. Yahoo now uses Bing's index. DuckDuckGo uses Bing's index.
Bing is a solid #2 in search, earning $10Bs annually. That is an entire business.
Microsoft started from a disadvantage on search and is #2. #2 is not a loss. Also definitely not an overwhelming victory, but the world is not binary. Writing off a business with $10Bs of revenue as a loss seems absurd ... may we all be so blessed as to lose like this.
3. E-commerce. Amazon was already positioned for dominance and was solely focused on this for the early aughts, and primarily focused on this for the duration of the aughts. Microsoft had no major presence here.
To make significant headway, Microsoft would have had to go against one of the most single-minded and aggressive companies that was out there. (Amazon is less single-minded today). And we know what Amazon's successful strategy is in retail, and that is essentially no profit. Microsoft, both in terms of its corporate culture and in terms of its major shareholders, would never have been able to compete with Amazon in that way.
Microsoft had no major advantage here. This is certainly not a win, but they didn't want a piece of it anyway.
4. Social. Do we count messengers as social media? If yes, then yeah Microsoft had MSN messenger. If we don't count messaging, then they had no specific expertise or advantage here. In fact, many of their attempts at more lighthearted computing were panned: clippy, Microsoft Bob, Comic Sans. Microsoft has always been nerdy and never cool until others made nerds cool.
Regardless, they purchased Skype and LinkedIn and have a combined MAU of ~1.2B, putting them comfortably in the top 10 of social media companies.[1] I'll note that this list includes Teams, but I'm going to count that as enterprise software, because it is included with almost every O365 SKU.
LinkedIn was a Satya purchase, so Ballmer can't get credit there. Nevertheless, I wouldn't argue that Microsoft had a major advantage for social media. I'd agree that they lost in this space.
Arguably you could put github in here, too, but also a Satya acquisition.
5. Consumer devices. Microsoft is a software company to its bones. Windows was a definite advantage here. But Microsoft does not have a strong history of device manufacture to lean on. They tried to acquire for this with Nokia. And yeah, they failed here.
Again, though, they were against one of the most single-minded and aggressive companies out there, this time Apple. And Apple already had the pedigree for prestige consumer devices. Apple was defining hip and cool with regard to technology through the aughts. Again, Microsoft is neither.
Additionally, they were up against another competitor for whom smart phone market share was an existential concern, Google. Google does not have the single-minded focus of Apple, but when it comes to threats to their core business (selling ads), they can execute well enough.
Microsoft does not have the single-minded focus of Apple, nor did they have the fundamental imperative to make something work on mobile that Google had. Still, Microsoft should have done better here, and in fact Windows Phone OS and devices were largely well reviewed. Nevertheless, they couldn't make headway against their rivals.
Microsoft had an advantage here and lost.
6. Enterprise software. Microsoft was the dominant player and remains the dominant player in this space. O365 is undisputed. You will pry Excel from many people's cold, dead hands. Microsoft may not be cool, but no other tech company has a product on ESPN. The Excel championship is something else.
And I will note, specifically, that O365 began under Ballmer.
Microsoft is also a huge player in data platforms. They have specific product wins and losses, but as a whole, they do very well in this space. Data is a specific niche of mine, and I can tell you that there is no other vendor than Microsoft that companies will routinely go all-in on for their data platform. Don't get me wrong, this is not the norm, but I only ever see it happen on Microsoft, never for another vendor's platform all-in.
I covered Windows Server above, but again I will note that they capture a large majority of server OS revenue share (which I argue is the category to measure this in).
Microsoft is a dominant player in this space, and I would count this as a win. It was part of their core business, and that business tripled sales and doubled profit under Ballmer.
7. Cloud. Amazon moved first. Microsoft followed quickly. They are #2 in the market and growing fast. Google is no threat to either Azure or AWS. Alibaba probably will be in the next 10 years.
Azure would not exist in the way it does today without significant investment under Ballmer.
#2 for a second mover (using "second" as "non-first", here) is not at all a loss. And threatening to overtake the first mover is a powerful position to be in.
I expect you'll disagree that any #2 position is worthwhile, or at least that seems to be your stance.
Success: 4/5: OS, Enterprise software, Cloud, Search, Social (social only by acquisition, mostly post-Ballmer, but they were in a position to make multi-billion dollar acquisitions, so Ballmer can't have ruined things)
Failure: 1/2: Consumer devices, Social (if you want to argue that only Satya's acquisitions count, and no credit toward Ballmer).
> I don't know who you'd buy it from, certainly not me. If that's what you've read into my comment, that is reflective of your perspective, not mine. IE was never that good. It was bundled with the predominant operating system, so had massive market share. As soon as Microsoft had to open the OS more and draw a line between OS and IE, it was pretty much inevitable that there would be other browsers. And too-aggressive positioning of IE would be highly legible to regulators.
I was not thinking about being more aggressive with bundling, but was commenting on the quality of IE. Not sure why you're giving a pass on IE sucking. It's not a coincidence that Ballmer, the Enterprise sales guy, developed an excellent enterprise sales machine at Microsoft. If he were a good tech guy he would've developed good tech there too. So yes, that Microsoft's tech sucked is on him.
There's a certain inertia to a huge company, if we're talking about executive wins I expect something above what I consider the bare minimum. For example everyone agrees that Intel is a failed company, but if you actually look at them they still have majority marketshare of x86 CPUs in both client and server. So would you say that they successfully defended their traditional business or would you call them a failure? I think it's pretty clear that if you strip away everything else about MS, and just look at Windows by its lonesome, it would be considered a loss today. It's only bigger by dint of the entire market being larger. But in the market it has lost a lot of power vs the day Ballmer started.
So
1. OS - Loss IMO.
2. Search - Loss, similarly to above Bing is a bare minimum for what I expect a company of this size to do. Look at Sogou vs Baidu in China for example for what other companies are able to achieve. But all in all I'm knocking Ballmer less for Bing than for how late Bing was. For 9 years of his time as CEO we had trash MSN as MS's search engine and the default through IE. Gave away all that time to Google to build incumbency, develop an ecosystem around gmail, etc, and grow their cash position. IE was a huge advantage for a long time... but by the time Bing came out it had eroded and Google Chrome was released. Microsoft was in a great advantageous position due to their Windows monopoly but acted too late to serve relevant products.
3. E-commerce - Loss, I wasn't thinking about competing with Amazon but more the Windows Store, bookings.com, airbnb, and steam. Why did the windows store take until the app store to come out to copy them? Why did steam come out in 2003 and Microsoft did nothing? It's because Ballmer isn't smart enough to understand how these things work. By the time windows store came out it was very late, and once again the software sucked. Owning the operating system was an advantage that a good CEO could've made something of, and he didn't.
4. Social - Loss, yeah MSN was a huge deal, along with windows to push it and later acquisition of skype, MS certainly did try. You can also consider something like Steam or xbox Live to be a social network. Regardless went nowhere and loss of opportunity. Certainly he made acquisitions too late and failed to make much of the social networks he had. Also anyone could've bought Instagram, anyone could've bought Youtube, he just didn't. Bought Skype instead. Sure after him there's more acquisitions but it has nothing to do with this discussion really.
5. Consumer devices - Loss, this one I'm most willing to give him a pass on actually. MS is mostly a software company, and partnerships are hard. But Zune was an alright product, and here is mostly a marketing fail. But wouldn't you place blame for bad marketing on the CEO? You can also imagine there's a lot more you can do with Zune. Microsoft had xbox too but never tried to get these parts together, letting Nintendo DS take the handheld market. Today zune is dead and xbox is not successful.
6. Enterprise Software - Unequivocal win, probably the best thing Ballmer did and most of his score.
7. Cloud - Win, acted not too late and was okay with it, Nadella fixed it though.
So definitely I would put E-commerce and social up into "advantaged but loss" and I tried to explain why I count search and OS as loss.
> For example everyone agrees that Intel is a failed company, but if you actually look at them they still have majority marketshare of x86 CPUs in both client and server. So would you say that they successfully defended their traditional business or would you call them a failure?
I do not think we live in the same world. As one data point, the majority of analysts still list Intel as a buy or a hold.[0] In the very same industry, AMD showed us that it can take more than a decade to turn around a poor architectural turn in semiconductor manufacturing. Their stock price peaked at the beginning of 2006 and then were in the doldrums until 2017-2018 (depending when you want to count their return). It may well turn out that we are witnessing Intel's death spiral, but to claim that with certainty, and further to ascribe that belief to "everyone" tells me that we see the world incredibly differently.
What does analyst have to do with anything? Intel can still be a buy even if it's failed because it's either very cheap or there's the possibility of geopolitics or acquisitions. In fact being failed sometimes makes it even easier to buy.
It's obviously failed even beyond the massive share loss in the semi industry. It's stock price is down 60% since 2018 (not even a particularly interesting year), and its value is now literally lower than its book price. That's when you know everyone agrees it's a piece of junk.
> > MS should've been able to simply just extend their OS monopoly into all platforms and all architectures, but they didn't, and to a vast swath of the world have become irrelevant, and worse, have lost their ability to become relevant.
> Microsoft is, pretty famously, on the receiving end of one of the most significant antitrust judgments in modern history. Choosing to further a monopoly seems that it would be a phenomenally bad decision for the company.
They tried and failed to extend their OS to other platforms and architectures many times. That they weren't successful wasn't due to some big brained decision to avoid antitrust issues. They just couldn't execute.
Windows runs in more places than it probably should. And the OS is just fine on other platforms. Windows on ARM works quite well. As I understand it, it worked just fine on Itanium. NT launched with support for PowerPC. I'm sure RISC-V support will be there pretty quickly. NT was designed for this sort of portability.
Most user software is not ready for the transition. Microsoft doesn't impose the same kind of control over its application ecosystem as Apple does. This prevents Microsoft from being able to make architectural shifts like Apple has. Arguably, this more open and flexible ecosystem (and bending over backward compatibility) has been one of the driving factors in Windows's popularity over MacOS. I have no strong opinion about which is a better business strategy.
I was at Microsoft under both Ballmer and Nadella leadership.
Ballmer was stuck on the old ways. I was connected to a team that had made iOS office apps but Ballmer blocked because MSFT jewel apps on Apple meant Apple would gain marketshare over Windows Mobile. That team was fairly pissed and some folks quit.
Nadella was leading cloud division at that time, but they were not getting the firepower to go against AWS. Azure succeeded despite Ballmer. Nadella clearly saw Cloud was going to be the next big revenue firehose.
Ballmer closely held onto Windows walled garden. His bet on acquiring Nokia and Skype had spectacularly failed. Android and iOS had won, they entirely lost on Windows Mobile.
VSCode had just started but it was seen as an experiment and the sentiment was it could absolutely not jeopardize actual Visual Studio. Linux was seen a competitor to Windows.
Under Nadella, he saw an entirely different Microsoft. He was playing bets on the future, while Ballmer held onto the past. The game had changed.
Nadella didn't care about Windows walled garden. He wanted Microsoft on every platform where developers and Enterprises were. VSCode wanted to cannibalize VS go for it. MSFT apps on iOS go for it. Linux on Windows, go for it. All of MSFT switches to git, to for it. Acquire github and cannibalize Azure pipelines, go for it. Use chromium base for Edge instead of mshtml, go for it. Nadella made good bets over and over again. Ballmer doesn't have the same record.
Nadella + Scott Guthrie went all out on Azure to be #2. The infra spend alone was in billions. Remains to be seen how OpenAI bet pans out.
> Even Bing, widely considered a failure, on last reported revenue and current P/E ratio, would be 12th most valuable tech company in the world, between Tencent and ASML.
A tiny slice of the search market (4% IIRC) is worth this much? Incredible. Everyone knows Google is swimming in money, but I guess it never really computed for me that managing to grab a tiny slice of the search market would be so valuable. If I was making a guess prior to reading this, my intuition would have been that Bing was some kind of loss leader. Shows what I know! Hah
Bing Ads is big business. Digital marketing is enormous. Google and Facebook have larger portions of the pie, but a sliver of a huge pie is still a lot of pie.
"To sum it up, for the past twenty years, people having been dunking on Ballmer for being a buffoon who doesn't understand tech and who was, at best, some kind of bean counter who knew how to keep the lights on but didn't know how to foster innovation and caused Microsoft to fall behind in every important market."
It's important to keep the lights on while waiting for the next new development to take off. I think it's an undervalued skill.
He didn’t keep the lights on while waiting for new development to take off. He actively lost 40+ billion dollars on horrible acquisitions, and actively stifled internal innovation to ensure existing product lines weren’t threatened.
On the sales side he streamlined Microsoft into a single monolithic sales motion that killed dozens of products before they started because the target customer/market didn’t fit the EA model.
This included Azure that took nearly a decade after his departure to unwind so the sales force could actually sell consumption based products and services.
I honestly can’t think of anything substantially positive he achieved in his tenure other than promoting Satya and Scott G and a handful of others.
All of the contemporary media reports don’t know about the laundry list of near sighted, anti competitive, anti innovation shit he put on the company.
> I honestly can’t think of anything substantially positive he achieved in his tenure other than promoting Satya and Scott G and a handful of others.
Ok, but apart from fostering a great generation of new executives, investing in currently extremely profitable products and business lines, streamlining our sales operations and getting us out of these life threatening antitrust cases, what did Steve Ballmer ever do for us?
Underrated? He is properly rated in the sense that he owns 10s of billions even though he singlehandedly killed the windows smartphone and tablet business and also killed Nokia. Granted that apple killed them but with Microsoft’s resources there was no reason to just give up like they did. Buying Nokia was a historic bad decision that screams he didn’t understand the business at all. There was a huge opportunity to just emulate apple and just suck in all of the corporate market in one swoop and add them to their recurring revenue office service but Ballmer didn’t see it. He just saw them as phones and hardware.
> Ballmer, or Microsoft under Ballmer, had to have been laying the groundwork for Azure, TypeScript and VS code before they took off under Nadella.
More specifically: Nadella under Ballmer laid the groundwork for those things.
Dan lists three big wins for Ballmer: Bing, Azure, Office365.
Nadella led Bing and Azure. Not sure where Office365 sat in the org chart, but even if he wasn't managing it a _lot_ of services at Microsoft at that time relied on technology that was developed in Bing and Azure.
Baller was the right CEO for 90s Microsoft up through about 2002. He was the wrong CEO for 2010-onward Microsoft but it took a chunk of years for the board to realize that.
WSJ had a great write-up that was very interesting about the plans Ballmer was trying to get rolling. I really gained additional respect for him after reading this.
He wanted to overhaul the company, but realized people would struggle doing so while he was in charge. He realized sometimes you have to let someone else do it.
No he wasn’t haha. The only thing he did was slide the company sideways via pre existing illegal monopoly. In fact, they lost most of their monopoly under his supervision . At no point did the quality of their products improve, and that’s evidenced with this year’s massive massive Windows outage, or Garmins mega ransomware, out a hundred other people who’ve been hacked via Windows.
If you’re running Windows for anything, it’s only a matter of when, not if.
Agreed. He was the "put windows everywhere" guy because he forgot that Microsoft and Windows weren't the same thing and thus he failed Microsoft AND Windows.
Microsoft is a software company, they sell software (and now software services). Steve thought that because their main product was Windows, that Windows was the only product that mattered and everything else had to depend on being run on Windows. Office sells very well on Macs. Office in the browser is really improving every year. XBox 360 was a huge hit while not really running "Windows" at all, just a related kernel and DirectX APIs; it wasn't even x86!
Steve made MS a Windows First company, and the entire company stagnated for years. He may have been a great number two to BillG but that doesn't mean he was suited to being CEO. Being the XO is a very different job from being the Captain, and a lot of times they take two very different types of people.
I'm assuming that "this years massive Windows outage" refers to the Crowdstrike thing, which wouldn't have happened if Microsoft had been able to lock down the kernel, which antitrust regulators prohibited. (The essay extensively deals with antitrust, I'm sure you have thoughts on this.)
I wonder if Windows is even their flagship app any more. I think people will give up Windows before they give up Excel. And they might not even notice a different OS, so long as it had the same file manager. In fact Excel is the last non-FOSS app that I still use, even if sporadically.
Don't forget gaming. Gaming on Linux is possible but Windows still has the advantage in both software and hardware support.
I particularly like the video series from LinusTechTips where they try to use Linux as their daily driver because it is very telling. They manage to do stuff, but it isn't great. I find it interesting because it is done from the point of view of computer enthusiasts but not IT professionals or programmers. The kind who know about the command line, but are not very comfortable with it and would rather do without.
I don't think calling gaming on linux "possible" gives it the justice it deserves, with the arrival of the Steam Deck and all the improvements Valve contributed to the upstream. The experience is practically _seamless_.
I agree though that linux _on desktop_ is pretty janky, or at least it always was for me, having tried daily driving numerous distros.
IF you buy through Steam. IF you have an AMD GPU. IF by seamless you mean that regardless of the aforementioned BIG assumptions you still have to go and play with winetricks or whatever to get some stuff working and it can take you hours of tinkering.
Okay, that's fair enough. Though even if you have a game that you bought outside of Steam, you can add it as a non-Steam game to benefit from the compatibility layer and all the bells and whistles.
I still use it, it seems a little stagnant in development nowadays. No ssl on the website etc.
The free software distros really lost something going all in on open/libre office which is just not nearly as good as a replacement for excel. I think if it was still the free software goto, installed by default first choice etc there would be more development. The feature list and quality is impressive and has been for many years.
For better or worse, my last Excel use case involves a VB macro that I don't want to re-write, and printing to a Dymo label printer, for putting serial number labels in my product. For anything else, I now use Python.
My mom is happy with LibreOffice. For myself, I try it every few years (usually when there's some big announcement) to see if it's improved. There's some kind of latency in the UI that makes it laborious, if not painful, to use. And recalculating a large spreadsheet, or reformatting a graph, takes an eon. I found that out when trying to graph data sets with thousands of rows. Now I use Python.
This may be a place where the major paid apps still have an advantage. I think that MS sweats the details of Office the way that Apple sweats the details of the iPhone, and it's laborious work that can only be done by hiring a huge army of programmers and paying them a lot.
Default UI configuration in LibreCalc is such that until recently it always resulted in enraged searching of the MS Office support status in Wine.
Funnily enough recently I found out the UI style switch and lo and behold, when you switch from default to emulating Excel 2007 ribbon, the critical "cell data type" button is front and center just like it was in every version of excel since 1997 that I have used.
Windows Desktop still feels very important to them. Windows Server on the other hand feels very "Fine, since you are willing to pay for it." Thud "Is there any features?" "More money and your welcome I'm even giving this to you."
Ballmer's tenure started with XP and eventually gave us Windows 7. Nadella gave us 10 and 11. Though 10 was largely developed under Ballmer before its initial launch, it's been under Nadella's stewardship ever since. I'll take Ballmer, thanks.
Ballmer also gave us the maligned Windows Vista and Windows 8. Microsoft has also been way more open source friendly during Nadella's tenure, whereas Ballmer was openly hostile to FOSS. I'll take Nadella, thanks (although he should fix his user-hostile spyware).
Windows 8 was misguided but not user-hostile. I miss not being repeatedly asked by my OS to create an account or share my data. If it was a human doing it rather than software I am not sure it would be legal.
WinXP was developed mostly during Gates' tenure. Ballmer is responsible for the disastrous Windows Vista, Microsoft phone operating systems, and Windows 8.
You mean the best mobile phone OS that we ever had? Unfortunately disastrously managed and then squandered, but still.
Also, Vista was a mess, but it was ambitious and it laid the foundation for 7 and it was only around for a few years before being replaced. Unlike 10, where Nadella has doubled down on the worst choices and even worse ones were made going into 11 (HOW THE FUCK DO YOU SET DEFAULT APPLICATIONS NOW, THIS IS FUCKING NONSENSE).
> that’s evidenced with this year’s massive massive Windows outage, or Garmins mega ransomware, out a hundred other people who’ve been hacked via Windows
Window's massive install base is not really a testament to their failure.
Satya's tenure has seen the fall of Xbox, the lost relevance of Windows. While moving to a services model is going to be very lucrative for them, they risk competitors offering swap-out models.
The fall of Xbox started with the Xbox One, which was developed and released while Ballmer was CEO. They put an enormous amount of investment into that console, but made some bad calls in both its development and marketing that put them in a deep hole that they've been unable to get out of since. The increasing backwards compatibility of modern consoles means that the current 4th generation Xbox is paying for the sins of the 3rd generation in addition to dealing with its own struggles. Really the only thing that can fix the situation is money, but the business is probably under pressure to show profits after two decades of heavy investment with minimal return.
I don't necessarily think you can blame Ballmer for the missteps the Xbox team made, but I definitely think you can't blame Nadella.
Yes, one can't blame Ballmer for the missteps of the Xbox team directly (that honor goes to Don Mattrick, VP in charge of IEB at the time of the Xbox One launch). Divisional VPs get a lot of latitude in how they run their org. However, Ballmer does have to accept ultimate responsibility for allowing Mattrick to head up IEB and how long he allowed him to stay there.
I agree with this. And it wasn't just Don Mattrick. Late in Ballmer's tenure there were a lot of VPs with poor track records who weren't being held accountable (or, in some cases, were being given more responsibility). Microsoft is still feeling the impact of those people today.
Out of curiosity, what do you see as the fall of Xbox? It seems to work fine to play games, even if they had missteps with certain things (eg. Kinect being deprecated after being mandatory, some hardware issues).
> Out of curiosity, what do you see as the fall of Xbox?
The ever-declining hardware revenue and market share. If the decline that started in 2013 continues long enough it will stop making sense for Microsoft to sell consoles at all. They seem to be planning for this, as they're clearly pivoting the Xbox business towards "content and services".
This is a stark contrast to how Xbox was positioned prior to the 3rd gen. Xbox One. They had taken significant market share away from PlayStation and they were expecting to continue to do so, particularly outside the USA. They were also trying to get a foothold in the household computing market (this market was in its infancy then, now: Alexa/Fire TV, Nest/Chromecast, Apple TV/HomePod). Those ambitions are gone.
Windows was already losing relevance in the data center when Nadya took over -because of Linux. At AWS in 2008 / 2009 adoption was all about LAMP stack - AWS's tools were all geared for LAMP. AWS offered some Windows + SQL Server licenses on their cloud, however it was a struggle to get a deal (any deal) with Microsoft.
On the mobile side Windows was losing relevance to iPhone - which Ballmer so famously derided.
Satya figured out that with cloud computing Microsoft would still interpose between hardware makers and the customer - and the results show. (Why hardware makers do not figure this out for themselves is a different topic..)
In Apple's case, the lost relevance of one platform lead to the increase in relevance of another one - that they controlled. Microsoft has no such "luck".
Also, it does matter, because there's over a billion Windows PCs in active use. It's still relevant, but it's getting eroded. That's a huge issue.
Gamepass and the lack of first party exclusives both seem like moves to kill the console in the long term, but as of now it's still a serious competitor to playstation and switch no?
Nintendo's always been on its own for these sorts of things, but even the folks I know with an XBox just use their Playstation these days if they have both. XBox just isn't really in the conversation any more. That could totally change in another generation of consoles, but their position wasn't great coming into this generation and it doesn't feel like it's gotten any better.
Basic numbers I've been seeing on a quick search has PS5 almost doubling the Series X sales.
XBox's irrelevance is thanks to Don Mattrick for ruining the XBox One release.
It is fair to point out that XBox continues to stagnate and despite many billions of dollars that Microsoft has pumped into gaming and acquiring numerous studios and publishers, they still have yet to succeed in that area.
My understanding is that Azure became an incredibly profitable cloud platform once it became open to Linux, which was something done after Ballmer had stepped down and Nadella became CEO.
I'm still somewhat bitter about the failure of Windows Phone and can't believe it even happened. The iPhone wasn't even that good at the time and Android was a total mess. Microsoft dropped the ball on their first party app dev, and several flagship phones had great hardware but terrible driver support.
Microsoft clearly wasn't interested in the consumer market anymore and it shows through to today.
I worked at Nokia Maps at the time the Microsoft acquisition of the phone business was being negotiated. I never met Ballmer but I heard some stories of people that did. Intense guy apparently. I was at two joint meetings with MS to discuss some of the details of things related to the thing I was working on. Ultimately that wasn't transferred to MS.
MS made a big mess of the whole windows phone project. First it royally screwed Nokia over by deciding to do a big overhaul of Windows Phone OS internals and effectively leaving Nokia dead in the water with now obsolete products that they just launched. I'm sure this was intentional on Ballmer's side: weaken Nokia and acquire their phone business. But he threw out the baby with the bathwater. The first generation of windows phone was basically windows CE repackaged. The second one was a whole new kernel (windows NT based, I guess). The transition took crazy long. MS announced early and this made the old generation of Lumia phones a really hard sell. There was a vague promise of upgrades that of course never happened. And then the acquisition rumors destroyed the OEM ecosystem because they'd be competing with MS on phones.
Then MS bought what remained of Nokia's phone division and it got busy demolishing it right away (including an actual Nokia Android phone that existed). When Nadella inherited this train wreck, he unceremoniously put an end to the whole thing and fired pretty much the whole team. At that point it very little hope of catching up because the OEMs and users had left. As much as I loved Nokia, it was the right decision at that point. All the good stuff had long been killed/cancelled already.
It was Ballmer's fixation on Windows that led to this. Nokia had a bonafide Android competitor in the form of Meego. Backing Linux would have been the right move. Nadella might have approached this differently.
The Acquired podcast also supports this claim in a 2-part episode on Microsoft I’ll link below.
Their evidence is from interviews with current and former Microsoft employees who worked with Ballmer IIRC including Ballmer himself. They basically describe him as being the rock that cheerlead, navigated, and held the company together through a decade of legal troubles. He also started many important businesses like enterprise, gaming, and cloud.
The amazing thing about the internet is that it’s always just a matter of time before something negative gets completely reversed by someone. For every “best, coolest thing ever,” there will inevitably be an article arguing that it was all hype and actually the opposite.
And the same thing happens with a bad product / action eventually, there’s always an article attempting to redeem it.
Why is that? Is it just human nature driving our need to be heard and seen as visionaries?
I don't think Ballmer was underrated as CEO personally (windows phone lol) but goddamn he's the platonic ideal of a hype guy. The amount of energy and enthusiasm emanating from him is always incredible. I'd at least say theres a good chance he was instrumental in Microsoft being as successful as it was.
I disagree. Tech companies need tech leadership, and Ballmer didn't have the chops for that, or imagination either. He got some deals done, I'm sure.
How so? Missed mobile after working on it for a decade+ previously. Despite developers⁴ they didn't implement a decent terminal until a few years ago, thirty years late. Enough said.
It's probably better for the industry Ballmer was mediocre or worse. I'm often forced to do business with Microsoft already. His horrible deal to buy Yahoo would have improved the playing field further.
> Microsoft under Ballmer made deep, long-term bets that set up Microsoft for success in the decades after his reign
This is no doubt true.
Under Ballmer, Nadella "led a transformation of the company's business and technology culture from client services to cloud infrastructure and services." [0]
But the number of failed mobile (phone, small PC) initiatives and products, from long before the iPhone to multiple waves of multi-billion dollar write downs afterward, (phones, music players, ...) despite Ballmer clearly wanting Windows "everywhere", and no limit on his spending, was just as large of an opportunity, cyclically bungled for a couple decades.
I had one of the earlier generations/extinct-species of Windows phone. At the time I had given up on Palm following through on their great start, but found the Windows phone was just frustrating in other ways.
(I did have friends with Microsoft's last phone, and they really liked it. Just too late.)
Apples market cap today, approximately its iOS market cap, is a good proxy for the ball Ballmer couldn't stop dropping. Even when only his team was on the court.
So I give Ballmer a 5/10. :)
But any massive hypergrowth business, is still a massive hypergrowth business. Microsoft gets 10/10.
There were a lot of mistakes by the Windows Phone division but ultimately WP had zero chance of succeeding with Google sabotaging access to YouTube and their other services.
Are you remembering Windows Mobile? That sucked, but Windows Phone did not (and was famously built by a totally different team). But it was too little, too late.
>Are you remembering Windows Mobile? That sucked, but Windows Phone did not (and was famously built by a totally different team)
This seems to show another of MS's big problems in those days: too many different products doing the same thing, and a lack of focus. IIRC, they went from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone (version x) and then to Windows Phone (version y, totally incompatible with version x). Each time, this alienated 3rd-party developers because all the apps they wrote wouldn't work on the all-new platform.
For me it was more his personality that made me dislike him. He acted like a baboon on stage. Nadella is much more composed and seems more intelligent as a result. I don't like that kind of extreme expression and this is important because I wouldn't respect such a leader at work. See also other stuff like the chair-throwing incident of course.
Also something I didn't see covered, this was also the dark age where Microsoft hated linux. Now they say they love Linux and there is certainly some affection going around (though I remain sceptical).
One thing I don't really like about Satya Nadella by the way, his AI strategy is a mess. They're slamming stuff on the market way too quickly (see the recall fiasco), they call everything 'copilot' so even their own people get confused which product does what because there are literally over 30 separate copilot products now. Stuff is changing by the day (until 2 weeks ago the copilot button controlled both consumer and corporate copilots, now it only works with consumer). It's the kind of overeager rush that makes it feel like nobody has a clue what they're doing anymore.
> One thing I don't really like about Satya Nadella by the way, his AI strategy is a mess. They're slamming stuff on the market way too quickly (see the recall fiasco)
Google did an even worse job in that regard, Gemini's reputation is still greatly tainted in the tech world despite now being competitive with the other frontier models.
What I'm getting is that Google did push too hard, they gave Bard/early Gemini demos when the product was still miles from ready and compared awfully to GPT, and they're still suffering from it.
Gemini is currently atrocious compared to Chatgpt, they cant even do a good integration with the data they have on other google products like search, maps, youtube, gmail, calendar.
The frontend of the B2C product, on desktop, sure. I was talking about the LLM itself, i.e. API-based usage. And there's a good number of tasks it's better at than any other model. Same goes for GPT and Claude FWIW, each have tasks they beat the competition on.
Even on the consumer side though, the overwhelming majority of usage will be through mobile apps, and I find the Gemini app significantly better than e.g. the Claude app - one of their two main competitors.
Is there a name for this phenomenon when past leaders are viewed in a better light than they objectively deserved? I see this in politics a lot (eg Dubya) but in business too.
I think this is a facet of human memory - eg thinking childhood was better than it was because the bad/boring parts aren’t memorable. I also get this with anxious/stressful periods of time, which are overwhelmingly bad at the time but very quickly forgotten.
This is what I always said. Nadella ruined Microsoft for consumers. Ballmer literally saved the Xbox business during the RROD fiasco and he made sure Windows Phone could thrive - it was an established 3rd operating system in Europe with over 10% market share and it could've been more but Nadella killed it because it wasn't popular in the US. Also, Windows was definitely better under Ballmer.
The biggest problem with Ballmer's tenure was stack ranking, which led to the famous org chart where every org in MSFT points a gun at every org in MSFT.
Things like LINQ and VScode are very nice but they weren't created by Ballmer. Ballmer's org allowed them to flourish to the point where they needed serious capital, then the org gave them that capital. Sun was like that too, but ultimately the management at Sun failed in so many ways. It's not just the technologies you choose to invest in -- there's something more needed, and the nicest thing to say about Ballmer is that he didn't ruin MSFT. The nicest thing to say about Satya is that he made it a nice place to work at while also greatly growing MSFT's cloud business.
Intel also had the stack ranking. I think this management technique originated with Jack Welsh at GE. It does pit groups against each other. Even for individuals on the same team, it pays to sabotage each other's work. I heard of managers hiring people so that they could be offered up when layoffs came around. It was kind of like how the Celt's had human sacrifice. Families would adopt people so that they could be offered up if they were chosen to give a family member for sacrifice at a later date.
I don't have a strong opinion on his tenure at MSFT, but I don't know many sales jocks with a 1600 SAT score and a degree in applied math from Harvard.
Two small anecdotes about Ballmer from my internship there:
At an intern event an intern asked some question along the lines of "What's one quality of a competitor you wish Microsoft had?" They were clearly asking about cultural qualities but Ballmer's response was "I'd take Google's search engine because that thing prints money". Then he did this super exaggerated gesture and noise imitating a money machine printing money.
At the time that was a super disappointing answer to me because as an intern within the Bing division I really felt like there was this culture of "Bing is better and it's not our fault Google is beating us". To see Ballmer not use the question as an opportunity to talk about ways Microsoft could improve felt like seeing the source of that cultural problem.
The other was from an intern event with Phil Spencer. Phil Spencer at the time was the head of Xbox's Games Division, but not yet the head of Xbox. Spencer said he was in Ballmer's office one day and Ballmer asked him "Why don't you just make the games that sell?"
Nadella has been horrible and a huge mistake for Microsoft. They will continue to suffer under his leadership.
At least ballmer had goals and pretended to care what customers want. Windows is an unmitigated disaster under nadella and it doesn’t need to be. No new innovation is happening and hardware is more performant than ever. Windows had issues under ballmer because the hardware wasn’t there yet and they were trying new things. Nadella only wants spyware and bloatware and everything as a subscription / service. The leadership can’t change soon enough, hopefully his back room deals with OpenAI come to light and blow up sooner than later.
There's no evidence Ballmer would have avoided spyware. Especially for money. Who was the first boot-licking corp in the NSA Prism slides? That's right—MS 2007.
So azure was a hit and Office moving to a saas model was a hit.
Balmer lost: the most popular consumer operating system, the most popular web browser, the most popular media player, the most popular instant messaging platform.
To the list of misses he forgot to add Skype and Nokia purchases, IE market share decreasing from something like 90% to less than 20%, Windows losing the battle in the data center, deriding iPhone and open source.
Ballmer blocked Office on iPhone even though it was ready to go: Office on iPhone was released on Sep 2014; Satya became CEO on Feb 2014.
Never-mind stack ranking (which he copied from Jack Welch) and the cut-throat culture it inspired (seeing Somasegar bicker with the head of Excel over porting Excel code base to VS .Net in 2003 at a DevDiv 'morale' event was something)
So yeah, good riddance!
Unfair thing to measure him by in my opinion. Steve Ballmer inherited Microsoft when the stock traded at a P/E of 60. When he left it was 14, in line with many other tech stocks during that time. (Even Apple was lower)
He took earnings per share from $0.70 to $2.63 during his tenure. A CAGR of 10.5% across 13 years in one of the world's biggest companies. He couldn't control multiple compression following the dotcom bust.
Mostly agree, but curious about the claim that Bing is profitable: how does that account for being the default search engine in the windows start menu and microsoft edge?
I hate to say this but I’ve been using Bing for two years now on my corporate notebook and it’s pretty good. I could change it to Google if I want to, but quite honestly since Google’s search results have gone so spammy, I haven’t seen the need to switch.
I’m really looking forward to his autobiography, not just another Isaacson-style biography, but something from the man himself, even if he has some help writing it. Reading Paul Allen’s autobiography gave me a deep understanding of his and Bill Gates’ journey long before Microsoft. Their story started much earlier than the usual DOS narrative!
I guess Steve Ballmer deserves to be richer than Bill Gates today because he held onto his MSFT stock while Gates sold the majority of his :)
Also, the Acquired podcast also makes the strong argument that Ballmer lay a lot of the foundation of what powered MSFT’s growth under Nadella e.g. Azure.
Too bad there is no mention of Nokia at all: that was one big blunder, but maybe if Ballmer did not step down a year after finalizing take-over, it wouldn't be as much of a bust.
Isn't it pretty well documented that he made several decisions that turned out to not pan out and then were nearly immediately reversed by the current CEO that turned out to be massive successes? That doesn't scream "underrated".
having worked there for a long time (left in 2013), i'd say the best thing that happened under ballmer was getting rid of sinofsky. sinofsky was the worst - windows8 had some great low level bits, but the shell and app models were total crap. and wait until the jeffrey epstien connections comes out...
I think that a lot of people are commenting here without actually reading the article. The article lays out a concrete (and imo pretty persuasive) argument as to why the author thinks that Ballmer was a decent CEO. You should really read it, but the TLDR is:
* Some of the big feathers in Microsoft's cap today (O365 and Azure) started during Ballmer's tenure
* While the company had plenty of failed initiatives during his time, what matters in the end is that the hits made up for the misses in terms of profit, and they did
* Metrics like revenue and so on were all positive during his tenure
Frankly, unless the author is factually incorrect on these points (which I don't have the knowledge to assert either way), I think it's a good argument.
He was a good CFO type of a leader. Unlike a lot of other companies like Intel or Boeing, that were run by CFOs, he did not last long enough to run MSFT into the ground due to being too late to modern trends.
Sure he build the foundation, but he was not smart enough to lead the path forward. With him MSFT would have never reached top 3 most valuable companies - I would say it would be at 500-600b maybe at best.
Even with Azure and Office, he was too much into "bundle with Windows" type of guy. Similar to how he was saying that touchscreen would never work as businesses needed buttons to type. I think with Satya, they would have tried multi touch screen at least for sure.
By and large, Ballmer was not the very open minded person. And his attempt to buy Yahoo...Oof.
> Unlike a lot of other companies like Intel or Boeing, that were run by CFOs, he did not last long enough to run MSFT into the ground due to being too late to modern trends.
How can you right this in good faith while replying to a comment laying out to you that Microsoft most successful investments a decade later were all started by Ballmer and that he took a lot of risks with R&D?
> Even with Azure and Office, he was too much into "bundle with Windows" type of guy.
Seriously? Ballmer started Office365 you know. Also the Microsoft Phone with, you know, touch screens. The sheer amount of historical revionism in this thread even in the face of hard facts is mind numbing.
Honestly, even discarding all the rest, Ballmer would deserve more respect than he gets there for getting Microsoft out of the antitrust lawsuits alone.
> How can you right this in good faith while replying to a comment laying out to you that Microsoft most successful investments a decade later were all started by Ballmer and that he took a lot of risks with R&D?
Investment in R&D means nothing if you can't deliver. Intel has enormous R&D budget. Boeing too. Did it help them? No.
> Also the Microsoft Phone with, you know, touch screens
With Windows Phone he was too late to the market. It does not matter if he thought of it later - he famously disregarded iPhone saying that it did not have keyboard. They had Windows Mobile, but they were busy competing with Blackberry instead of going after innovation.
> Investment in R&D means nothing if you can't deliver. Intel has enormous R&D budget. Boeing too. Did it help them? No.
The most profitable current divisions at Microsoft were started under Ballmer. That’s literally stated in the original comment in the thread you are replying to.
We cannot tell if the currently most profitable divisions would become that profitable under Ballmer.
That's the whole point - Satya somehow was able to develop the platforms through acquisitions and business vendor lock much better than Ballmer ever could. And we saw what happened with Windows division under Ballmer - it was profitable but it had no future. MSFT could become another IBM.
With Ballmer we could get some Windows hubris like "Azure only with Windows OS license" or something.
My only issue with Satya is that he is not "a cult of personality" type of person like Jensen Huang or Phil Spencer. He is basically a guy who "walks softly and wields a big stick".
> And we saw what happened with Windows division under Ballmer - it was profitable but it had no future.
Microsoft under Ballmer was insanely profitable, more than its competitors and far more than before he took the helm. And despite that Ballmer launched Azure, started the push towards Entreprise software and at no point stopped investing.
I don’t think Ballmer was the best CEO ever but his poor reputation is very much undeserved.
> Microsoft under Ballmer was insanely profitable, more than its competitors and far more than before he took the helm.
Yeah, that's the thing - he was a good CFO. He was able to maximize profit and stuff. But people remember CEOs by their achievements - "a founder", "made MSFT into top three world companies"...With Ballmer people remember the lost decade and that's it.
They come to the same conclusion as Dan - that Ballmer did a ton of things right and he was actually a much better CEO than the credit he's given today.
Part 1 of the podcast focuses on Bill Gates' era - both episodes are super engaging, the research and preparation they do is remarkably good.
Second this podcast. Ballmer basically setup Microsoft as the enterprise software company. From the first episode it seemed that Bill was actually more interested in the consumer side of things and wasn't that interested in the enterprise, but it was Ballmer that basically setup that entire business line in the first place especially with him managing the OS/2 with IBM and later NT.
I think a lot of fails for MS during the Ballmer era was them toeing the line post their anti-trust.
Great podcast and I really enjoyed their MSFT episodes.
I thought their pro-Ballmer angle was interesting at the time too (it was the first long-form defense of his tenure that I had heard), but I wasn't sure how much of that was due to him being a primary source for the podcast's material.
When I judge someone I compare them to what they ought to have been able to do. Bing, Azure, and Office 365 were mid and it's the person in charge's responsibility to do better than that. The world would be a better place if he had done a better job.
But maybe he was a fine CEO, dunno about that. I guess that's measured in profits.
"$500? Fully Subsidized? That is the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine."
The only thing missing from the article was to say that Ballmer loved Linux and open source but that he was misunderstood lol. Ballmer was a fucking despot and a piece of shit. That article is an ode to the disgusting despotism that Microsoft had.
But here is the thing - launching the initiative means nothing. Satya is able to expand and develop it.
Like with Ballmer we certainly would not have got O365 to iOS for example. It would be 100% bundled one way or another to Windows services or something or browser or whatever.
Even with Azure we would not have got such aggressive expansion and attempts to push services across Windows and Linux or playing with Open Source platforms like K8S. I think Ballmer was closer to the modern Google who is hell-bent on not using anything Windows.
Ballmer's attempt to buy Yahoo and disregard for touch screen phones is what defined his legacy. He was a good CFO who knew how to run business, but not a great CEO.
> Satya has been good with acquisitions but what else?
Ability to buy right things is important too. Like Ballmer wanted to buy Yahoo, while Satya bought Github. One cost 80b, while another created a whole foundation for Copilot push. Linkedin purchase was great and with OpenAI I am 100% sure that Ballmer would have missed AI train (like AWS did).
> Ballmer's attempt to buy Yahoo and disregard for touch screen phones is what defined his legacy.
You are weirdly obsessed with that but Ballmer actually started Bing and bought Nokia to make touchscreen phones. I think you are extremely biased to the point of being entirely disconnected from the facts at hand.
> Ability to buy right things is important too.
Ballmer bought Skype and launched the foundation of what would become Teams - you know - arguably the most important corporate piece of software after Covid.
Not OP, but Ballmer's attempt to reinvent Windows Mobile to compete with modern smartphones was too little too late.
Microsoft during that era was one bad call after another. When Apple saw multitouch they made a phone; Microsoft made a giant table[0] (very little imagination beyond the Jeff Han demo[1]). When Microsoft saw the iPhone reception, they sunk 2 years an $1B into the Kin line of phones[2], which lasted all of 2 months before being pulled from shelves. It was several years later when they bought Nokia, when then iPhone was already 6-7 generations in. By this time the world was already moving to "mobile first", and Microsoft was being left behind without a platform.
For a couple decades Microsoft worked to convince the world that Windows, Office, and Microsoft as a whole was needed to get real work done. It was during Ballmer's time at the helm that this belief eroded. People saw they didn't need Microsoft to make a good smart phone. They found they could get work done with Google Docs and didn't always need MS Office. They found macOS could be used to get work done just as well as Windows... and in fact, a desktop OS might not be needed at all. Ballmer's biggest failure was giving his competitors time to show the world that Microsoft wasn't as necessary as the world was led to believe.
As far as Teams goes... it is used a lot by companies that are all-in on O365, but Slack and Zoom were the two household names in the space during the pandemic. Once again, the world was shown that work could be done without Microsoft.
> As far as Teams goes... it is used a lot by companies that are all-in on O365, but Slack and Zoom were the two household names in the space during the pandemic.
Tell me you have no idea of what’s happening in the real world outside your small tech bubble in one sentence.
Nobody uses Slack outside of tech. They are virtually unknown in Europe.
I don’t use Slack personally, but it’s always what I hear mentioned online. It’s also what I hear friends mention (who don’t work in tech) who aren’t working at big cooperations.
I’ve also heard many people use the phrase, “it’s like Slack”, when trying to explain what MS Teams is to a non-technical friend. It was all over the news during the pandemic, so people learned what it was. Same with Zoom.
"Microsoft made a giant table[0] (very little imagination beyond the Jeff Han demo[1])"
This is a wild take. Both the original Surface 1.0 table and the second SUR40 had some really amazing, highly-imaginative multi-user compute paradigms (a multi-user interface with no concept of “up”? Come on now.).
Commercially successful? No. But calling them "very little imagination" is a real head-scratcher.
What’s also interesting about this comment is that, in this very same Ballmer era, Microsoft later acquired Jeff Han’s Perceptive Pixel to create the Surface Hub product.
I am biased but I am not disconnected from the facts. I am still pissed at Ballmer with how they missed search and mobile market. They were late with Search and they were late with mobile.
With Teams it was just luck, but even then Team's growth happened years years after Ballmer and can be attributed to the multiplatform push of O365 by Satya.
> Microsoft under Ballmer was insanely profitable, more than its competitors and far more than before he took the helm.
Being profitable means nothing if your marketshare in low 10%. You are leaning too much on "profit". Ballmer was a good CFO (finance guy), but not CEO.
Azure Search is still broken FWIW. A lot of Azure is still vapor ware; it works in the tutorial but not in real life. Every time my company signs/re-up a contract with Microsoft, I die a little.
I think the fact that Steve Ballmer could be considered a good CEO by anyone today is just another reminder of the fact that our society has lost all understanding of what a sustainable business model is and our modern conception of capitalism is really just feudalism, i.e. private owners with significant political influence eliminating all competition with the help of the state and wielding monopolistic control over essential resources and earning their profits by charging rent rather than actually producing anything of real value.
We've been locked in this cycle for centuries now - technological progress opens up some new uncharted territory that is up for grabs and there is the brief period of booming growth and diverse competition in this new thriving industry, then the boom is over and the system no longer encourages competition or innovation or intelligent decisionmaking, instead it encourages overreach and incompetence and cancerous uninhibited growth and parasitic behavior - stealing ideas and flooding the market with cheap inferior imitations, aggressive anti-competitive practices, increased lobbying and increased dependence on state funding. The industry becomes dominated by these bloated behemoths that add nothing of value to the world and are an enormous burden on society and eventually they become so unsustainably huge that even the combined wealth of every sovereign nation cannot keep them afloat and then they collapse.
I mean, seriously, everyone knows Windows has always been shit and people have never had anything but negative things to say about it, everyone knows that every product Microsoft has ever produced has been absolute trash and that they have never had any interest in doing anything innovative or original or contributing anything useful to the world. Microsoft isn't a company and people like Steve Ballmer are not CEOs or businessmen of any kind, they're just landlords.
Funny story. I used to see Steve almost every weekday for a couple of years.
I can't speak to his business skills, but I can attest that he never once offered a tip for his daily black iced tea. We'd even have it ready for him before he showed up so he never had to wait! He would pay with cash, and I'd hand him his change and drink, and that was that.
It's funny to me now: one of the richest men in the world and he never once offered a tip.
Frugality aside, he was always very polite and warm so I can't be mad. Makes for a good ice breaker story.
Edit: holy moly, this is a sensitive subject. Please remember this was from a time before tipflation. Tipping meant you left your change behind once in a while only if you felt the desire to show appreciation. It wasn't an obligation. Yes, I still do think it's a funny story. Roast me for being entitled lol
Reminds me of his visit to my undergrad. He had a niece or nephew or something (I never met them) who went there, and he was going to visit them. The university planned what amounted to a large science fair to showcase all the projects around and everyone was required to put something together. The day came, he walked in, made a beeline for his relative's project, talked to them for a minute, then hurried right out. My mentor ran after him trying to get him to take some merchandise.
In retrospect it's pretty obvious there was a big miscommunication, and he didn't really seem rude about it (supposedly he did talk to a project they put outside the hall because it used a Kinect IIRC). It really wouldn't surprise me to find out the university told him we just so happened to have this research fair going on the day he'd be visiting.
Maybe what he really wanted was a super duper whipped cream topped pumpkin spiced coffee and sprinkles but thought he'd save you guys the hassle and just order something that can be poured out of a jug
First, I love this story. I'm on your side. For me personally, the most charming detail is that he paid in cash. I guess it was a while ago! Your story makes me think of the scene from the film "Casino" when the mafia guys spit into the "free" sandwiches that they give to the police. (Ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPufB6oaJFE)
It is weird to me that a guy like that even bothers to pick up his own daily black iced tea. Once you are making a few million dollars per year (and you have a net worth > 1B USD), I would assume that everything would be brought to you. Literally, have an assistant who does all of this stuff and brings it to your office. The most highly paid people that I have ever observed up close were in non-stop meetings all day long -- talkin' money! They had no time to buy their own daily coffee or lunch. There was an assistant who would bring everything to their office. That said, maybe he did it to "feel normal". For any human being, having a net worth > 1B USD must really screw with your world view.
We allow wages you can't live on but then expect customers to randomly make up the difference but only for some jobs.
Make too little to afford an apartment, healthcare and food and you work in the food service industry? You deserve a tip. You work in a meatpacking plant? Oh, get screwed.
This ignores how feast-and-famine tipping is; there's a high ceiling for potential earning, but it's not always a reliable income; and this also ignores how only those working in front-line service roles benefit.
Are you the kitchen hand washing dishes? Are you the chef or cook who makes the meals and food that the customers eat? Are you a cleaner mopping the floors after business hours? Nope - none of you get a tip, unless the restaurant has a policy of collecting all tips and redistributing them to all employees. But how often does that happen? It's really easy to just pocket the tip and keep it for yourself.
Britain has tips. Every restaurant adds 12.5% as an 'optional' charge but they know full well that Brits are allergic to causing a fuss and will never ask it to be removed.
Do US waiters really get paid more than UK with PPP/forex? You seem to have the data to hand.
> Britain has tips. Every restaurant adds 12.5% as an 'optional' charge but they know full well that Brits are allergic to causing a fuss and will never ask it to be removed.
That "service charge" is usually (mandated?) listed on the menu, so it would lead to quite an awkward conversation if you then complained after sitting and eating the meal. It's quite often specified for groups over a certain size and it makes more sense than getting into a "tipping" argument after the meal.
Got a citation for that? Lots of waiters in the US make $2/hour or something before tips (can anyone correct me here?) where the expectation is that tips will bring them up to $7-8/hour, more in line with other minimum wage jobs.
Back in 2008 my sister would easily make $200 a night working at Red Lobster in a town of 80,000. That was just the tips, not wages. Prices have probably doubled now, along with the tips.
Very few waiters are making as little as you say. Just think of what you pay as a tip for one table for 2-4 people and remember they’re handling quite a few tables at a time. Quite often if they get a bachelors degree and the attached salaried job they take a significant pay cut, but the hours are better for having a family.
In California (the most populous state), there is no “tipped minimum wage”. Everyone earns at least $20/hr. In fact, about 1/3 of states don’t allow employers to pay less for tipped employees.
I'm going to the US in a couple of weeks and I'm already abhorring the prospect of spending some time looking at the specific tipping requirements of the state I'm going to, to then spend a week awkwardly guessing if I'm tipping enough, too much, or offending someone in the process; while having uncomfortable feelings about the people serving me food, drink, tour guidance, etc. (on the one hand because they all seem to be hunting for my money and being a foreigner, they might be hoping that I will tip too much, on the other hand because they might be underpaid and I might be an asshole to them if I tip too little).
I suppose people who have lived there all their life just don't notice it, but for me as an outsider the amount of stress and awkwardness that the tipping culture produces in daily life is ludicrous.
Not even close. They are showing up anywhere a person might open their wallet. I have seen tip screens in gas stations, fast food restaurants (where you order at a kiosk), vendor booths, etc.
Yes it's weird. It's basically charity re-framed as capitalism. As if it's the waiter's performance which determines their tip as opposed to just blind luck.
If each waiter could provide their own menu on which they could set their own prices individually and take their own hidden cut, then that would be fair capitalism.
They'd make a lot more money because consumers would be too lazy or too embarrassed to ask a different waiter for their version of the menu...
That would be a much better culture for workers.
Unfortunately the current system is set up to make every form of payment for labor into a charity. So workers are always in the position of begging their boss or customers and they are never in the position of intermediating transactions.
Rich people are the most oddly tight people I've ever met. They'll buy a £5m house one day then the next spend 30 minutes arguing with the gardener that the broken 10 year old mower should just work and most definitely doesn't need replacing
Boris Johnson (ex-Prime Minister) is the classic example here in the UK. Fantastically wealthy, yet infamous for stiffing other people with the bill and never paying them back.
I worked in restaurants, and let me tell you, I never felt exploited in tipped positions. If anything, I felt like lucky at least compared everyone else in the restaurant industry. The real exploitation happens in the back of the house…
I believe GP meant exploitative towards consumers.
The customer was presented a deal. That the deal includes non-written, ever increasing additional charges unilaterally imposed by other side is exploitative.
I guess if you are talking about the customers then you technically might have a point…
tipped workers would probably be making considerably less on average than now if tipping just disappeared. Especially in states like WA, CA, NY etc. which don’t even have a tipped minimum wage
But in this culture that Steve exists within, those positions are paid mostly by tips. He certainly could afford to help out the people that prepared his iced tea ritual for him in a timely manner, but he did not.
> But in this culture that Steve exists within, those positions are paid mostly by tips.
False. Presumably this was in WA, employers have to pay full wages. there is no carve out "tipped" wage (most) of the rest of the USA has. Currently, min wage in Redmond (King County) is $20.29/hr.
Many businesses in King County do not allow tipping.
Even in states with a lower tip worker's minimum wage, they are still guaranteed to make the standard minimum wage if the tips don't make up the difference.
Serving up food you didn't even cook isn't an intensely difficult or skilled job. Nobody should expect a 20% cut for doing that. It is not a customers responsibility to ensure unskilled service workers are rolling in largesse. Just making minimum wage is fair for that kind of work provided the minimum is livable.
>Serving up food you didn't even cook isn't an intensely difficult or skilled job.
Then it should be easy to automate, but the best I've seen is a conveyor belt or a box on top of a roomba.
In reality it's a very skilled job, it's just that most everyone is capable of doing it.
And "fair" is any wage were you can live and increase the quality of your life over time as much as your work has increased the quality of others.
lol forreal? its not skilled work i dont know what to say. your definition everything is skilled but thats not how people use it in this context and it becomes a useless term.
also have you seen a vending machine? its already automated.. its literally what this person is doing: taking order, giving correct drink. yes they have ones that pour it and everything. even give the correct change.
and i dont even know where to start of your ideology of fair either. i feel like its flexible enough to use it however fits your idea why denying any other
My gripe with "living wage" is the term (to me) is too subjective.
MIT's living wage [0] seems to include car ownership (despite King county having a decent public transit system and I know several people that don't have cars working in tech). My first place in a great part of town was $1,400/mo in a roomshare. The podments are as low as $750/mo, but MIT says you need at least $2k/mo.
No you are not. The tipping culture in the US is insane (along with the idea that employers want their stuff to be paid via tips). Good for Ballmer for sticking to his values.
I am also Norwegian and I also dislike tipping culture, but when they have your daily ice tea ready for you before you come in I would say it would be strange to not say "ah, just keep the change" now and then to show that you appreciate (and essentially pay for) the extra service.
Baristas in Norway get paid far more than here in the USA except in the fanciest of coffee shops. Tip culture is simply a part of the restaurant scene here, while I don’t agree with it, I don’t see hurting the baristas/waitstaff as an option either. I may not give exorbitant tips, but I give a reasonable 10-15%
Are they? Google claims the average is about NOK 200 per hours? That’s barely above the tipped minimum wage in Washington or California. So it would be considerably less with tips?
Regardless of how you feel about tipping culture we're not talking about the average person nor are we talking about the average *experience*. The dude is worth north of $100bn, and is making nearly $10k per minute![0]. Someone who cannot spend his wealth. Someone who'd have to spend tens of millions of dollars every single day just to stop his wealth from growing. Someone who makes money faster than he can throw hundred dollar bills handfuls at a time.
We're not talking about anything normal here because no one here *literally* makes thousands of dollars in the time it takes to wipe their ass. You can become poor, he would need an act of god to do so.
We can have a conversation about tipping and how much everyone hates it, but to ignore the fact that we're talking about someone with this kind of money is... ludicrous[1]. Throwing down a hundred bucks means literally nothing to the man. It is not even what a penny is worth to most of you. He's not you and framing the discussion this way is obtuse. Rage on tipping, I don't give a fuck and I'll probably join you. He's not "sticking it to the man" or "standing up for his values" he *is*" the man. He's playing an important role in creating this machine you're raging against. I just don't understand any of you
[0] 1e11*0.05/365/24/60
| | | | |_ minute
| | | |____ hour
| | |________ day
| |_____________ Conservative 5% yearly return
|_________________ At least 25bn less than he is worth...
[1] FWIW, I hate tipping too. Fuck the till based tips with the ever increasing percentages. I frequently click 0. But fuck it man, I'm a grad student. Still, if I'm a regular somewhere and they are giving me special service, I'm gonna throw a few dollars into the tip jar. Tipping culture or not they're going out of their way for me and I should show gratitude in some way (you can also do by other means)
> Still, if I'm a regular somewhere and they are giving me special service, I'm gonna throw a few dollars into the tip jar.
There are some philosophical problems there. The business/servers can't renegotiate the menu like that - if they aren't getting paid for a service and the customer didn't ask for it then there is no reason they should get more money for it.
Also, an observation about how the economics of regulars work - if you are a regular the business is probably already making a lot of money off you. Someone who goes back even a single time earns them 2x as much as a one-time walk in. Being a regular is already a favour to a business even if all you do is order something cheap off the menu. In my experience, when a business identifies that I am a regular they try to make me pay less to keep me coming back.
Actually, there is a restaurant where I go sometimes that when I pay cash instead of with a credit card, the owner gets so elated that rounds down the amount to pay in some 3-7%. The countertip I guess.
Yes thats normally the main drive, cash is usually just annoyance and additional risk to business.
I wouldnt be too harsh judging that business though, quite a few restaurants are barely cutting it so this may help them stay afloat. Its this or generally higher prices in restaurants.
> It is the workplace's responsibility to pay their staff adequately. NOT YOURS.
I don't get this argument, because at the end of the day you're paying both ways.
Either you're paying higher menu prices (because labor costs have increased) or you're paying tips (because labor costs are artificially low and you're supplementing them).
There is no magical "the business pays its employees more, but everything you buy stays the same price."
There are lots of instances in which it is in fact your responsibility to pay the staff and if you choose to ignore that fact and stiff them that's on you
I do tip, but is this perspective really helping the people that live off their tips?
You don’t feel the need to tip the people stacking shelves at Walmart or the Amazon driver.
In almost any other job we reasonably expect that someone’s compensation is between them and their employer and that the state should be making sure they’re protected from exploitatively low income.
Why are waiting staff a special case? People have worse jobs that come without tips and it doesn’t seem to bother anybody.
Those tips are expected now and irrelevant to service so it’s also just helping employers get away with paying those staff members less, so it’s really just subsidizing restaurants and cafes at this point.
This is a pretty heartless reply. I will be downvoted for expressing my view here.
> It is the workplace's responsibility to pay their staff adequately. NOT YOURS.
Yeah, except that most of these (low income/low skill) service workers don't have the negotiation power to change this power dynamic. Thus, you, someone with enough means to eat out, can offset that gap, just a little bit, by tipping.
Interestingly, I have never seen tips being demanded by restaurant staff almost as an entitlement in any other country other than the US - even in far poorer nations.
And you work to keep the system the same way. You work to earn, and then spend your money sponsoring the system when it's optional for you to sponsor it.
The funny thing is when people reasonably say raise the price to actual costs, the answers is "Customer may stop coming..". As if the whole point to scam customer with fake low prices.
Thats exactly the point. Raise the price then customer can decide if they can afford it or not. With fake low prices customers may not know what they are getting into.
I also use that one park garage all the time and my streets are snow plowed and I appreciate that. Still I don't know anyone who tips those workers. Do they provide less service than the person making me a drink?
I personally only tip if service was extraordinary and I appreciated it. Which is once a full moon at best
It really rubs me the wrong way that you tell everyone to chill and then go on to levy your own value judgement of the situation. If you want to larp as the ref or moderator you don't get to pick a side.
Like you say, at his level of wealth, the actual dollars and cents become almost meaningless. Setting aside whether somebody in that position should be leaving a tip, how could you not want to? I would love to have the experience of just dropping a $1k tip to see what it's like. Maybe he did that once so never felt the need to again.
I'm not sure, that's exactly why I'd like to experience it and find out! I guess the server would be very grateful, but who knows. They might tell me it will change their life in some way, the restaurant might name a dish after me, countless things could happen.
Or maybe he does tip generously, and maybe he does throw of dollars, but only does it to actual waiting staff? After all, that's the issue most people seem to have here.
It makes no sense to psychoanalyze a Ballmer's mind from this short episode.
I read “everyone chill” to mean “there’s a lot of bad takes here”, not literally “remain calm”. In that context, I think the comment makes sense — they’re illustrating just how wrong the common take is
Random person writes completely unsourced negative comment about someone HN dislikes for no reason. HN cheers before launching in a pointless and already rehashed a thousands times discussion about tipping culture.
I don’t know if it’s well intentioned but it’s peak HN.
Chill because you all are giving me anxiety that I don't need.
Idk how to tell you this, but this is a pretty common pattern for human speech. You see it in plenty of countries, plenty of cultures. Welcome to Earth. Words mean more than the literal dictionary interpretation of them.
Why should he give money to someone over literally any other person in the same establishment or outside of it? What does that have to do with "the man"?
That's not the point, though. It's not how generous he is with his money. It's how he sees money, its purpose in his life. People who see wealth as a force multiplier don't gorm habits of being careless with it. Just like you see people who have no money live pay check to pay check, take on debt just to assume a class they don't exist in. Yet you used to see Bezos in a camry and Buffet in some equally run of the mill car. It's because these people place value on everything, a car to themis just depreciating numbers. They formed a habit of critically assessing the "why".
Back to the topic at hand: Tipping is a ridiculous notion that the wealthy can see through, while the rest of us are too brainwashed to objectively analyze
> Back to the topic at hand: Tipping is a ridiculous notion that the wealthy can see through, while the rest of us are too brainwashed to objectively analyze
Oh yes, the wealthy are superior to us unwashed masses in every way. How I wish I could see through and objectively analyse, but my bank account won't allow that.
The phrase, penny wise and pound foolish comes to mind, though probably doesn't strictly apply. I don't spend my life reading. I read then live.
I don't see this hyper-optimization as a good thing. Externalities and so on. Of course dragons hoard coins. They look nice, bring good things, and who is going to stop them? "Game theory" is broadly applicable
All this to say: if tipping is a life altering decision for you, I have news. You're closer to the townsperson than the dragon, outlook is grim. Now the cycle may continue!
> Tipping is a ridiculous notion that the wealthy can see through, while the rest of us are too brainwashed to objectively analyze
Tipping culture is quite different in the Americas than it is in e.g. the UK. I don't think it takes much effort to analyse that the winners of tipping culture are the restaurant/bar owners as they don't have to pay their staff properly and can avoid tax.
Whilst I don't like tipping culture, I think there's a different reason as to why billionaires might not tip - greed. Normal people would never get to be a billionaire as it takes a particular kind of greed to have millions of dollars and to be determined to hoard even more money when you know full well that it's often made by exploiting the employees that made you all those millions. It's a very nasty, selfish form of hoarding that hurts society, so don't be surprised when billionaires demonstrate that they don't care about anyone else.
Maybe. Or maybe he still lives like he is poor. If he does, or if he lives in any way where he is considering money as meaningful, then he is delusional. The man has so much money he can buy a mega yacht with less than a week's passive income. If money means anything to him, he is does not understand. If he also doesn't see how he can fundamentally change people's lives in a single act that means nothing to him, what does that say? After all, this is a man who could dump a pile of hundred dollar bills on the table every day, at every restaurant and coffee shop he visits and the act is less of a burden to him than it is for us to hold a door open for someone who's an awkward distance away.
One problem with unbounded capitalism is that people can’t understand how big big numbers are. They think of themselves but slightly richer. So of course people should be able to accumulate the wealth of a city or a country, and there’s no negative aspect to that at all. They just worked like we do. And they should get gains on their wealth just like we do for our retirement. There’s no difference except a couple of zeros.
I'm not against "unbounded" capitalism, but certainly there should be things in place that ensure adequate competition is taking place. So I prefer "unfettered". I think this is of special concern given that the Silicon Valley Model is to literally become a monopoly. That's not good for anyone, including the company.
That said, obviously I have some concerns on the billionaire class, especially the hundred billionaires.
> can’t understand how big big numbers are.
It isn't just this (though it is true[0]), but that money works extremely differently at this scale. Interest is not a rounding error, or something you think about being influential down the line. Passive income is so great that it gets difficult to imagine. There's those sites[1] that have you try to spend a large fortune and they don't even get to the different part. That being that for people like Elon, anything on that list can be bought by a week's worth of... doing nothing. That the passive income is so high that the problem isn't even that you couldn't spend the money if it was not growing, but that it grows so fast that you can't even spend it if you tried really hard. Spending a static billion dollars is incredibly difficult and you have to get creative. But in the real world with interest, it is exponentially more difficult.
I think the best example of this is MacKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos's ex-wife. She's been spending her money as fast as she can and she "hasn't lost a dime". Forbes had her starting at $36bn and currently has her at $35.6B[2]. In the time since she has divorced Bezos she's given away nearly $17bn. We're talking less than 5 years.... In <5 years she's "spent" half of her static wealth and still has what she started with. Money at this level simply does not work the same way and a lot of people do not fundamentally understand this.
But there's also a psychological issue I don't get. What is the point of having so much "fuck you money" if you are not going to tell people to fuck off. Certainly they do at times, but often they don't. To have the wealth to do whatever you want, to be unconstrained, unburdened, and to still have anxiety and concern? To be stressed? I can understand that old habits die hard, but they do die.
[0] I started my academic life in physics. We do giant numbers and tiny numbers. I can with great certainty assert that our brains are not made to actualize these numbers. It is amazing that we have the math to work with them but when you stop to compare and it blows your mind. This is not done enough.
That's crazy, i didn't know that. That is a guy who is 2 orders of magnitude above a 'mere' billionaire. And for what? Because he was friends with bill gates at Harvard, and employee#30 at microsoft. Talk about capitalism's greatest mistakes.
Developers, developers, developers. I'm no fan of the guy but he definitely had a bigger role than proximity.
My distaste is exactly because of how he spent his time working. I believe we'd be further along without them, considering efforts against free/libre software.
Annual bonus is either performance based or as a retainer to make up for differences in the wages since the person was hired.
Stock options are because you could be paid more or you are taking risks for future rewards.
A mandatory tip is because your employer doesn't want to pay you full wage and instead of increasing the price and pay you more, they pass it over to the customers. So they get the same profits without having to bother.
A mandatory fixed/clearly defined tip is effectively a service tax. Nothing wrong about that if it’s clearly advertised (e.g. you don’t have to pay it if you take out). Quite a few countries in Europe have stuff like that.
Variable, pseudo-optional tips seem like a much bigger problem.
Employees are paid for the work they are expected to perform during the hours they are at the office. The company doesn’t expect them to do more than that, however if they do, they get a nice bonus for it.
Baristas are paid to make iced tea. The customer doesn’t expect them to do more than that, but they can be nice, learn your name, prepare your tea ahead of time, change the tea recipe to something you enjoy more. Don’t you think they should get a nice bonus too?
Bonus/Options are to be paid by the employer. Essentially, what you are asking for is that you go to Netflix subscription page and there is a dropdown saying "how much bonus to pay our employees this year?"
Yeah no. Your annual bonus and stock options is between you and your employer. Your end customers don't pay for it directly, they are paid for within the cost of whatever product your employer is selling.
When tipping is no longer customary to receive good service and seeps into other aspects of lives it leads to all sorts of problems and situations.
This[1] is an extreme example of that situation in a different country but are we really ready to accept similar consequences and say they should've just paid the poor nurse ?
>Your annual bonus and stock options is between you and your employer. Your end customers don't pay for it directly
In the service industry, you wouldn't need to say end customer, because the person you're delivering to is already the end customer. Either way is still a results based cash reward paid by the entity receiving the direct output of your work.
Since tipping is done by customers. It is like employers tell employees you can let customers know good service is for good tippers. Maybe car repair mechanic can pour sweet tea in instead of engine oil since customer is known to be bad tipper.
I am sure that will go very well with that business.
A lot of the times your contract will actually include bonus and stock options, so those are part of the price. And if not, then the employer absolutely does not have to pay bonus or offer stock options. The employee, ofcourse, has the right to move jobs if they desire.
This was a coffeehouse in Redmond. Tipping baristas has been a common thing for the past 50-60 years or so on the west coast of the US.
And no, I don't think we "should" have received a tip. Most regular customers did tip occasionally. He was an outlier but only notable because of his wealth.
Other customers who do never tipped were treated the exact same.
So you seem to think that simply because of his wealth he should have been tipping you? The corollary would be the notion that regardless of where you were working at the time, you would have expected a tip from him simply on account of his wealth? There's a huge difference between tips being a thing certain patrons do every once in awhile, and something being an established norm - are you trying to say that in Seattle at the time tipping baristas was literally a well-established norm (ie., not just that it was common but that it was actually the predominant behaviour if not outright expected)?
I'm American but have lived in Australia for nearly 20 years, and in Melbourne for the past 15. There's a huge coffee culture here and almost all cafes have a tipping jar. But I can't imagine any baristas finding it odd to the point of mentioning if a patron, even a repeat patron, never put money in the jars.
I've never been a Ballmer fan myself although he's gotten more likeable post-Microsoft IMO, but to me it says a lot about his character that he both got his own coffee/tea (as opposed to having a PA do it for him), and if you're saying he was always polite then I have no clue why you'd feel the need to cast aspersions on him by suggesting he should have tipped but didn't.
> So you seem to think that simply because of his wealth he should have been tipping you?
No. But it's funny that he, of all people, didn't. It's the juxtaposition of wealth and frugality that are amusing.
> are you trying to say that in Seattle at the time tipping baristas was literally a well-established norm?
Yes. Without a doubt. But the norm was to tip infrequently, and not everyone did it. Those that did tipped once a week or 1x/2x a month. And it was usually just their change, significantly less than 10%.
> I can't imagine any baristas finding it odd to the point of mentioning if a patron, even a repeat patron, never put money in the jars
No one blinked an eye at the regulars who didn't tip. It wasn't a concern. The only exception is when it was a famous billionaire. It's notable.
> why you'd feel the need to cast aspersions on him
How so? I shared an objective observation. And I made clear that there was no ill will. Not even the slightest bit upset.
I feel like a lot of commenters are working through their own issues with tipping that surfaced with this light hearted story. Tipflation sucks, I get it. But this story isn't that.
Well, I guess what I’d say is this: if you told the story but left out the part about the tips, but then people asked if ever tipped and you said no, that would be a very different story from one where the fact he didn’t tip looms large because of how you tell it. I think the story is notable just because a billionaire both ordered his own drinks personally and was a nice guy. Aside from Buffett going to McDonald’s in Omaha I don’t think the super rich ordering their own fast food is especially common these days.
I do agree though in general about tipping culture and how most people feel about it. I’m not necessarily trying to white knight for a billionaire here, either.
Hope that makes sense and I do appreciate your responses.
> one of the richest men in the world and he never once offered a tip.... he was always very polite and warm so I can't be mad
I bet Mr. Ballmer saved a lot of money from his "polite and warm".
I once watched one of TED business talk videos. In the video the businessman proudly claimed that from a very young age, he learned to take advantage of people's empathy towards him as a kid to get a better business term (or something like that, it was long ago I can't fully remember).
From that video, I've learned to reduce my empathy/emotional reaction when making decisions. Because you just don't know if the other side is manipulating you into making mistakes. Money is money, you pay what you should've, we'll discuss extra things after that.
If Mr. Ballmer never pay the tips that he should've, then he needs to pay more for the product (in the form of added on convenience fee, for example). Of course, if you failed in charging such fee, then that's your fault, for falling into the "polite and warm" trap.
BTW: "sensitive" not. But comments on Hacker News are often trended to demand stuff for free, including kindness which is independent of the original stuff. That's very foolish.
Today at least you have 15% 20% 25% choice to punish or reward people who directly serve you. If everything is 20% included in the price (oh, it will be like this, it always goes like this), then you just have to sit there and take in whoever got the altitude that day. That's not even how capitalism let alone democracy works.
This article doesn’t understand what was fundamentally wrong with Ballmer’s leadership and what Nadella actually changed.
The specific technologies that were successful is irrelevant. Microsoft has and continues to invest in nearly every computer related technology that may come around the corner or they got late on.
The problem with Microsoft was everything went through Windows. The entire company was designed to promote Windows.
This was the fundamental flaw with Microsoft that Nadella changed. He quickly not just made Windows just another part of Microsoft’s business, to a great extent he actively devalued it.
The fact that Ballmer invested in Azure, etc before Nadella would all be irrelevant because under Ballmer Azure would have remained a red headed step child to Windows, so it’s unlikely to have seen much success under him anyways. Same goes for pretty much everything else Microsoft is doing right now.
Lately it has definitely felt as though Microsoft is resurrecting Ballmer's old meme as "AI! AI! AI!"
I was at Microsoft for the last couple years of Ballmer and the first few years of Nadella. He definitely did change the company and I remember at the time feeling that he handled the change really well, but from where I sat he spent the first part of his tenure evolving Ballmer's final push to move focus from Windows to developers. Everything Microsoft did prior to LLMs was to bring developers over, from VS Code to GitHub to WSL.
Now the company seems fully baked I to LLMs with everything they do chasing that. It would even make sense if the developer push was driven in part by the need to build up training sets for the eventual LLM work, though I really have a hard time believing that Microsoft was so well ahead of the game that they started grooming developers to provide data more than a decade ago.
> Now the company seems fully baked I to LLMs with everything they do chasing that
Them along absolutely everyone else. ChatGPT was an iPhone moment.
> Them along absolutely everyone else. ChatGPT was an iPhone moment.
Old guy here, but it feels more like a Netscape moment than an iPhone moment. We'll end up with our pets.com of the LLM age, the whole thing will implode, and the few companies that were actually doing useful stuff with LLMs will survive.
Except that LLMs have way worse unitary economics than the web or a phone's app store.
What comes back to the old data-inefficiency of machine learning. There hasn't been visible improvement on this, and it is looking more and more as a fundamental limitation of AI.
Microsoft seems to be a company that has 1) working chat: Copilot 2) chat integrsted with their tools (e.g. ms office and teams, although quality depends on product) 3) subscriptions to actually monetize it
Are those moments really that different? Motorola was practically the Netscape of the iPhone era, as those early Droids were everywhere. There were tons of others too, then it all imploded with only a few companies really surviving in the smartphone space.
It's not about who is the "Netscape" this time around, it's about the irrational exuberance surrounding the entire thing.
These days it seems like anybody can throw "AI" into their company name (even if it's complete BS) and it has the same effect as adding ".com" to a company name did in the late nineties.
IMHO AI is a .com-like hype cycle that's orders of magnitude larger and more irrational than anything that happened post-iPhone.
That's not to say that there aren't good businesses in there (the same was true of .com, of course), but there's a lot of junk that's getting a lot of money thrown at it.
Yeah, they are. I'm using an iPhone now.
I would press X to doubt just because of profitability.
It’s cute that we now have image and video gen AI. Also we have now Turing test passing chat bots (Id say). But although they are very impressive, and I know lots of people who use them for various tasks, I haven’t seen a “killer app” yet.
For iPhone the killer app was making calls. It was the best phone you could get. Then it had apps. It was undeniably better.
LLMs are good at a lot of things, but they don’t seem to excel any particular task - yet. I’m not sure they are a revolution yet.
I’d say they’re more of Macintosh moment. A hugely useful technology no doubt - but useful for what exactly? For Mac it was desktop publishing.
I agree generally with what you're saying but feel you were all over the place in your comment.
The killer app on the iPhone was not "making calls" — I suspect instead it was Safari, the other 1st party apps, the touch screen and the slick integration of all of that to make it a no-brainer device that even my mom and dad could use (they were approaching their 70's when the iPhone debuted).
Your analogy that ChatGPT (or LLMs generally) are more akin to the Mac feels close to the mark to me. Your comment about the Mac's killer app, desktop publishing, suggests that LLM's killer app will follow, just hasn't arrived yet.
The analogy is a little shaky though since, some would argue, it was the laser printer (plus the Mac) that kicked off desktop publishing.
You're right it is a bit all over the place.
"The killer app is making calls" is me quoting Steve Jobs on the Iphone 1 presentation. I get that it doesn't sound true now, knowing all we can do. It's true Iphone was a lot more, but that was his conviction at the time, and I think it makes sense. Their aim was to make the best phone in the world.
I also think yeah, it is a bit like Macintosh in the sense that this is a new general purpose technology, and I'm not sure we've really figured out what's going to the most transformative about it yet.
Want the whole premise of the original iPhone keynote that it was a fusion of three things - telecommunications, an iPod and internet? (Is that right?) That seems to place "phone" as not the killer app, but rather a pillar of three things that made up a "killer app" when combined.
I do remember the initial visual voicemail implementation being very appealing of course. Especially since it seemed they had enough leverage to get the carrier/s (just one at the beginning) to do whatever they needed.
That's true. I think his idea was to beat the competitors in every category - it was the better phone, it was the better internet device, and it was the better iPod (apparently that was one of Apple's main reasons for making the iPhone at the time, they felt like phones would start having mp3s).
I think we agree. All I meant is, yes LLMs seem to do a lot of things, but nothing quite perfectly. Yet.
I'd say the killer "app" for the iPhone was the touch-screen. There were plenty of other phones that could be used to make calls, at the same quality for a lower price. Frankly, I still find the iPhone to be way too expensive for what you get in return.
For LLMs, the "killer app", for me, is already here. And there's two of them right now.
The first is the chatbot (like chatGPT or Pi or Claude). Having someone who you can just ask for any kind of information, from book recommendations to hypothetical space travel situations to advice about birthday gifts, and to get answers that are better than what I'd get from 90% of real humans, is huge to me.
The second one is the coding assistant, in my code copilot. It has made me at least twice, if not thrice as productive as I was before.
A killer app in the like-an-iphone context is something that provides obvious value - if not outright delight - to a huge demographic.
Coding doesn't do that, because the demographic interested in coding is not huge compared to the rest of the population.
Chatbots don't do it either because they're too unreliable. I never know if I'm going to get a recommendation for something the LLM hallucinated and doesn't exist.
There's also huge cultural resistance to AI. The iPhone was perceived as an enabling device. AI is perceived as a noisy, low-reliability, intrusive, immoral, disabling technology that is stealing work from talented people and replacing it with work of much lower quality.
It's debatable how many of those perceptions are accurate, but it's not debatable the perceptions exist.
In fact the way OpenAI, Anthropic, and the others have handled this is a masterclass in self-harming PR. It's been an unqualified cultural disaster.
So any killer app has to overcome that reputational damage. Currently I don't think anything does that in a way that works for the great mass of non-technical non-niche users.
Also - the iPhone was essentially a repackaging exercise. It took the Mac+Phone+Camera+iPod - all familiar concepts - and built them into a single pocket-sized device. The novelty was in the integration and miniaturisation.
AI is not an established technology. It's the poster child for a tech project with amorphous affordances and no clear roadmap in permanent beta. A lot of the resistance comes from its incomprehensibility. Plenty of people are making a lot of money from promises that will likely never materialise.
To most people there is no clear positive perception of what it is, what it does, or what specifically it can do for them - just a worry that it will probably make them redundant, or at least less valuable.
The Killer App was the user-interface. There was not tutorial video, there was no long explanations. It was touch and go. And it worked.
>For iPhone the killer app was making calls.
What?
Making calls was the killer app for Nokia brick phones in the late 1990s.
The killer app for the first generation of smartphones (Windows Mobile, Blackberry, etc.) was email and calendar.
The killer app for iPhone and Android was the capacitative touchscreen combined with the ability to run 3rd party apps (yes, I'm aware there was an extremely brief moment in the history of the original iPhone where Apple opposed this), and 3G mobile internet (yes, again, I realize this came a year after the initial iPhone release). Mobile web browsers and Maps/GPS got the party started.
I was quoting Steve Jobs during the initial iPhone presentation. You're right it was not a good example.
> Them along absolutely everyone else. ChatGPT was an iPhone moment
Nice analogy. My sense of things is that the iPhone was a win for all of its users. While ChatGPT may make some/many of its users more productive (see Ethan Mollick's work), the driving force behind 'AI! AI! AI!' in the corporate world is an executive hope that complacent AI can replace expensive people. That's not a win for all of its users.
except the iphone delivered. we're still holding our breath for AI
Copilot works with MS office apps and is monetized by microsoft via subscription.
Of course it could be better, but of all companies it seems that Microsoft managed to monetize best - sice copilot gets integrrted to the MS Office package
Manufacturers started pivoting almost immediately when the iPhone debuted. Yes, eventually it delivered, but nobody waited for that before they started aping it.
...or it could turn out to be a 3D-TV moment - the jury is still out.
For a while, all OEMs had 3D TV models, and it seemed their ubiquity was inevitable by sheer force of manufacturers ramming the products down consumers throats (like AI). The only debate was over which solution was superior: active or passive. 3D movies are still with us, so the tech didn't completely disappear - only from the consumer space.
> ChatGPT was an iPhone moment.
A Blackberry moment, perhaps. There appears to be something there, some groups are latching onto it and deriving value from it, but we haven't yet seen the iPhone come along to transform that initial interest into something that sweeps the world.
> Lately it has definitely felt as though Microsoft is resurrecting Ballmer's old meme as "AI! AI! AI!"
You nailed it! Having spent significant time (as low-level minion) under both Ballmer and Satya, it certainly feels like the old Ballmer-time meme is coming back with the AI!
Also with it, the forced-curve ranking that Satya disbanded is being re-instituted under a different name.
Well since Nadella I have been using less Microsoft products and probably won’t be using Windows anymore once my Windows 10 LTSC stops working.
I keep hearing praise for Nadella but all he is doing is alienating a lot of customers with his terrible decisions.
With GitHub, TypeScript and VS code I'm probably using more Microsoft products than before.
They bought it. If Microsoft had developed it, we would get something like sourcesafe (was that the name?).
Sure, the investment was quite sensible, although I don't think they can change it for their ambitions too much.
Microsofts conquest against open source was of course a wrong strategy of Balmer.
> SourceSafe was originally created by a North Carolina company called One Tree Software.
Visual SourceSafe was Microsoft's source control software, terrible by the way.
this is the funny thing about microsoft
they are way better at buying and selling software than ideating and creating it.
successful microsoft products are acquisitions.
I agree but I'm not sure it's just microsoft- meta's instagram, whatsapp and quest are all acquisitions of already sucessful products. Oracle are similar.
I think, up to a point, and especially in the US where antitrust is pretty lax, it's a very safe investment to just buy other already sucessful companies.
The most glaring example in recent memory would be the amazon monopoly and the evidence i submit is diapers.com
with enough money, you can fund your investments to strategically take down every mom and pop.
amazon can’t take on every consumer vertical simultaneously, but they used their funds to drive diapers.com into the red, because as a parent you’re scrwed either way and comparing food to diapers, will buy the cheaper diapers instead of the cheaper food.
amazon wanted diapers.com
diapers.com said, we’re good this isn’t a billion dollar enterprise, but it pays the bills.
amazon bought it after making sure they couldn’t actually use it to pay the bills.
Hell, even Sql Server wasn't originally developed by Microsoft. They have taken it a long way since though.
Same story with Azure. All the good services are acquisitions, rest is low quality feature catch-up with AWS augmented by a terrible IAM system.
> With GitHub, TypeScript and VS code I'm probably using more Microsoft products than before.
cool, how much money have you paid to Microsoft to use those?
Except for Github (which they bought, by the way) probably not much. And github has some serious competitors (Gitlab which is just great and to a lesser extent, bitbucket).
GitHub is still a lot better than GitLab. Nice CLI, simple user interface that's not a pain in the eye like what GitLab has.
Of those three, the only one that drives revenue to MS is GitHub.
Not true, at least not according to MS themselves. MS have done several studies and adoption of these tools drive adoption of Azure. That's why MS invests in it.
They've been quite clear about this. The one platform/OS was Windows. The new platform/OS is Azure/Cloud. It's almost like saying Google doesn't make any revenues from search, only from selling ads.
VS Code is also low-key keeping Windows relevant as a developer OS. If something else came along which was truly very excellent but was only working well with Linux, and VS Code was not there to be the de-facto go-to solution for most new devs, it could eat away more of Windows marketshare.
So I see VS Code as a slight moat, also in its promulgation of dotnet-isms. So I think VS Code drives some revenue Microsofts way in a pretty diffuse but real way.
I'm not sure how it's improving Windows relevancy, second most popular IDE group - Jetbrains ones - are on Windows too.
That's why I wrote slight. VS Code is more of a backstop to make sure developing on Windows doesn't suck. Don't let Windows fall behind kind of thing. Every cross platform thing is biggest on Windows by default because Windows is the biggest platform.
VSCode Server and other remote dev servers are a big deal. Before we had to sync or mount a remote partition to manage the gap between Windows and the *nix server. I remember just plain using vim over ssh to avoid the hassle.
That pain existed under macos and linux as well, but to such a lower extent as you could do so much more locally.
While Jetbrains does it too, VSCode being strong guarantees it stays a viable path in the future.
How is VS Code a moat when it's platform agnostic? Plus the developer market is just a fraction of the overall market.
MS Office is the real moat, as is Windows XP/7. Everyone use MS Office because Google Slides/Docs/Sheets is a silly contender to the MS Office suite. Windows XP/7 because that's what a huge percent of the human population using computers grew up on today, so they're most familiar with it. And let's be honest, that's not going away, even as MS enshittifies Windows 11, simply because no Linux build can apparently mirror the Windows XP/7 UI (for some reason, not even Mint) while Apple is hell-bent on doing its own thing on the sidelines.
The day MS breaks Office suite is the day Microsoft goes down, but that's unlikely because the current crop of devs at MS don't even know how to get started. Microsoft could literally not do anything and still make tons in revenue.
> And let's be honest, that's not going away, even as MS enshittifies Windows 11, simply because no Linux build can apparently mirror the Windows XP/7 UI
Windows 10/11 does a really bad job at emulating XP/7 UI. It is about as foreign to XP users as Debian or whatever.
I made a XP VM the other month to run some insane software I had to run at work.
I felt so much at home. It was so nice. Everything was awesome. The control panel was awesome. The distinct buttons were awesome. The start menu was awesome. The 'My computer' at desktop root was awesome.
All in muscle memory, still.
Then I am back out to 10 and can't figure out where my app shortcuts are without knowing their name or what of the 3 or 4 different control panels I am supposed to use.
Now you just gave me the itch to learn how to make a Windows XP VM.
> he is doing is alienating a lot of customers with his terrible decisions
Windows doesn't even make up 1/5 of their income, and in contrast a bit over half of their income is Office and Cloud*
The real money is in enterprise IT and cloud services. The average consumer doesn't keep their prebuilt computer long enough to buy another version of the OS. They don't need to keep a niche within a minority (privacy-oriented customers who would buy an OS) happy with Windows to continue drowning in revenue.
It seems like he has done a fantastic job, if the goal was to decouple their fortune from Windows.
*Based on googling and a lazy reluctance to dig through their earnings calls
It's a mystery to me why they haven't made Windows free yet. Surely they make much more money from users using Windows than buying Windows
Only PC enthusiasts buy Windows. 99% of the population gets it bundled with their computers and who knows how much MS is charging those OEMs. Probably pennies.
Windows already has a de facto monopoly in desktop OS. They don't need to be nicer and give it for free to get more market share. They have all market share they every will.
It basically already is, at least for consumers. You can download an .iso of whatever the latest Windows version is and install it, and although it will prompt you to put in a product key, nothing stops you from continuing to use it if you don't. You can't customize certain cosmetic settings, and there's a small watermark in the bottom left corner, but it's hard to imagine that it being fully functional otherwise is an oversight rather than something they're fine with. The only people who will go through the effort to install it like that and keep using it are the ones who are least likely to pay for it.
This is true: my gaming PC had that watermark for nearly 10 years. You can't change the wallpaper, remote desktop doesn't work, but that's the only downside to not paying for windows (and using Microsoft's free iso, instead of pirating a key).
It's quite clear to anyone who's tried it (at least since Win10), that Microsoft does not care at all if you pay for Windows.
It comes preinstalled on most computers. The consumers don't pay, OEMs do. And they'll continue to pay because most people don't want an OS-less machine.
This is true for me as well. I do have a VR gaming machine which I don't think will linuxify soon but I would if I could. Nadella has grown Microsoft no doubt. But in the process has trashed Windows. One of the most valuable pieces of software. I wouldn't be surprised this will bite them in the long run a lot.
Our company is absolutely full of Microsoft products (all the Office 365 stuff, PowerBI, Azure, Microsoft SSO etc. etc.), yet most of our teams use Macbooks. Windows is no longer a necessity to work in a mostly-Microsoft environment, and that strategy is making Microsoft fabulous amounts of money.
> yet most of our teams use Macbooks.
Exactly this. Today I can switch from Linux to macOS to Windows and 99% of what the average users does can be done in the browser. Worse, in a smartphone.
So it was very smart of Microsoft to realize Windows was going to stop being a hard requirement for most use cases.
honestly that was the case about a decade ago. small / boutique MSP I was at cut costs by buying everyone white-label laptops, since one of the manufacturers was a client in LA and SF.
anyone who really wanted a windows license could get one, but most of the staff used Unbutu, with some AD and other stuff on the backend
Tools like PowerBI are quite good, the data pipelines are amazing, but at the end of the chain Microsoft always makes mistakes so that something good like PowerBI will only remain an advanced Power Point version. If you go a bit deeper the platform is fairly locked down behind artificial restraints.
Azure has good parts, auth with Microsoft is perfect for software in the office world and goes beyond the usual LDAP Active Directory. But on the other hand it is quite slow to a degree that it really affects productivity. The damage is probably in the billions/trillions for their many customers. That is the real price of office cloud versions.
Indeed. Conversely, Apple are the ones now forcing you to buy into their walled garden if you want to support users on their devices.
We are a mostly Windows+Linux shop, but we need Macs to build and test iPhone apps, investigate issues with Safari on iOS, do certain iPhone support tasks, etc.
So you agree or disagree with me? I'm not sure how this is a response to my comment?
Sorry, but how is that a response to what the GP said? It was not necessary to keep making Windows worse and worse to decouple it from other MS products.
Ballmer would never have put honest-to-God advertisements in Windows Solitaire.
As a 100% Linux user with good memories of that era (flying chair, Linux==cancer, etc.) I may be the best person here to actually defend Ballmer, having for sure no hidden interests in doing that. Everything changed in those years: Google was cool, Linux desktop almost non existent, cryptocurrency not even in the head of its creator, AI was a myth and the best voice recognition could offer was the hilarious "double the killer" demonstration [1]. How can we compare CEOs actions separated by two decades? Ballmer did what was perceived as useful for its company back then just as Nadella is doing that now. Perspectives have changed, hence companies and their CEOS had to adapt. I'm 100% sure that if Ballmer were MS CEO today, he would include advertisements as well, as today putting advertisements in every free corner of the known Universe is perceived as acceptable, if not necessary, which was not the case 20 years back.
[1] context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX8oYoYy2Gc
I always had the feeling MS was squeezing competitors and software vendors, not users directly.
The user hostility have made me move me to Linux systems.
Let alone ads in the start menu!
To be fair, Windows 98 came with almost-ads in the stock Active Desktop wallpaper - and promos for AOL/CompuServ/Prodigy.
AOL was stuff that people actually used however. It wasn't "random stuff".
For many people in the 90ies it was like the brand "AOL" was a synonym of "internet".
Or screw up search on the start menu
Exactly
Since Nadella took over, Microsoft stock has gone up from $30 to $400 with a market value of over $3T. Satya understood that for MS to compete, they have to get out of the "Windows Only" mentality. For example, .NET Core was a huge thing when it finally came out. I don't think that he has made any terrible decisions for the company. May be for some users like you, sure. But not for the company overall.
Except Steven Sinofsky, longtime head of the Windows division and one of the internal forces preventing Microsoft from going in alternate directions, was pushed out under Ballmer's tenure, not Nadella's.
Granted, Ballmer made the mistake of putting Terry Myerson, who headed up the failed Windows Phone effort, in charge of Windows but that's another story.
Windows phone was damn good and was growing in popularity when Nadella came in and killed it. When you are #3 in a market, you need persistence to win. One cannot expect immediate, massive profits in a saturated market. Yet, Windows phone by itself was a growth multiplier for Windows which Nadella annihilated in order to turn Microsoft into a cloud & ad services company.
Except from a project management standpoint, if you don’t have a vision for a project, the people on that team would get up and leave. And there was no short term vision for the phone in the face of android and iPhone. The long term vision did not have team buy-in.
And then further the phone was a distraction for all of the other teams who were expected in someway to provide some software that would work on there as well as android and iPhone.
I agree that the phone would have been great … at some point. But in an MBA world, it was a liability
Windows Phone is surely symptomatic of Balmer's milking the cow rather than innovating approach. A smart phone is not a small desktop computer - it needed a complete rethink of user interface as Apple had done.
It's also a bit strange that the success of Windows was based on the ubiquity of clone PCs rather than single vendor, yet Microsoft instead tried to follow Apple here and let Google become the "clone PC" (Android phone) OS supplier.
I can't fault Balmer for at least trying to get a slice of the pie by belatedly putting out me-too products like Bing and Azure, but it's precisely because of Microsoft/Balmer missing the importance of the internet that it was put in position of being follower rather than leader.
Microsoft is really a bit like Intel in having totally dominated a product category, but then having missed on most of the major industry trends they might have been expected to lead on (for Microsoft, internet, mobile and AI; for Intel mobile, gaming and AI). They are lucky to have had a second chance with Nadella who seems much more in tune with industry trends, willing to rapidly pivot, and who seems to have made a masterful move with their OpenAI partnership in buying time to recover from an early lack of focus on AI/ML.
The user interface did have a complete re-think. Windows phone popularized tiles and live tiles which was not just innovative, but an order of magnitude easier and more ergonomical compared to icons, esp for older people. The comforting common-cross-app back button, the metro UI, the smooth performance, ability to store all apps on SD card, best phone keyboard of that era, integration with windows PC - they had the bare-bones down fine. But simply gave up after a few years, instead of incrementally improving.
I thought it was a bad mistake to bow, kneel and surrender the smart-phone market space. Today, I am fully convinced it was a critical, life-threatening mistake as more folks move to the Apple ecosystem - buying both iPhones, Macbooks and Apple Watches because of a fully-integrated ecosystem. The funny thing it was Microsoft who popularized Continuity, but after they gave up due to lack of willpower, it was Apple who took over, executed better and won. Really frustrating to see the state of Windows OS and device market today.
> for Microsoft, internet, mobile and AI
I don't think they missed AI boat. Their culture would not have allowed them to create OpenAI, but they were fast to leverage their moat and push AI into their office and windows suites and azure. Hell, they are even trying to catch up with search using AI and are trying to push Azure for various AI startups and stuff.
MSFT rarely leads on anything - arguably even Windows is something they created being inspired by something else, while not going deep into hardware. Which what became the undoing of IBM. They are much better at being second. Azure - they were behind AWS, but not as late as Google.
I bet with Satya, even with mobile they would have grabbed Nokia much earlier and pushed Windows Mobile before Android took off.
AWS missed AI boat though.
Amazon have a very close relationship with Anthropic, which seems like a good match (Anthropic focus on business use), and win-win. Anthropic gets access to the compute they need, and Amazon get AI to integrate into their AWS offerings.
I don't know the contractual basis of the relationship, but it seems this has to be pretty long term and strategic. A significant part of the competitive advantage of one AI vendor over another comes down to inference cost, which in turm comes down to customizing the model architecture for the hardware it is running on, which in this case either is, or will be, Amazon's home grown Graviton processors.
The problem with Amazon is not their closeness to Anthropic, but more of the fact their moat is not big enough to integrate AI in a way MSFT can. Even their Azure services somehow feels natural with AI support.
I don't know if Satya predicted it or not, but their push into open source and Github acquisition were very helpful for AI.
I had a Windows Phone for a while. I still miss the tiles.
> you need persistence to win.
You also need a plan. How would Windows Phone displace either Apple or Android?
It wouldn't and it wouldn't need to. The decision was still very likely wrong, especially transparent after Apple proved with silicon that ARM platforms can be that competitive. Windows wasn't ready here and platform interop wasn't at all it strength.
If Windows phones would have had an emulated x86 mode, many people would have bought it instantly due to the momentum that now steadily decreases.
There can be solid business revenue if you are "just" #3 and the experience with development is very valuable. Although it is true that Microsoft and hardware has always been turbulent, with partners or without. Sometimes they simply created the best products in their class with a lot of margin, sometimes they basically sold scrap.
The entire mobile market was immature back then, people didn't expect much interoperability and Windows Mobile 7 Nokias were slick and faster than iPhone or Android. They could have become the "contrarians luxury" if you didn't want to just get an iPhone. A bunch of hardcore Microsoft fan developers were gearing up to develop for Windows Mobilet dotnet when Microsoft changed the APIs with Mobile 8 (IIRC) and this dedicated bunch of developers just dropped the platform and just embraced Android or iOS instead.
Just a spitball idea, but rather than focusing on the consumer market, they could've been the new blackberry for businesses (that give employees phones). Native active directory and group policy integration would be a good solution for the myriad of third party apps/services/devices that attempt to control the other phones.
I could also imagine organisations like the military and police paying vast amounts for phones that could be governed like corporate PCs.
Even now, Microsoft has a great advantage over Google and Apple in getting meetings with the procurement people in those organisations.
For sure. Enterprise mobile was not really a thing back then. (Laptops with VPN was state of the art.) Microsoft could have organically owned the enterprise mobile market but chose not to.
That's what Blackberry did and it didn't work, despite great technology (QNX) and good Android compatibility.
Open source has a lot of momentum in Microsoft now but it wasn't the case when Windows Phone was released.
Had they made it open source, it would have been a different story with Android and Windows Phone fighting to win the OEMs.
But that ship has sailed. Unless there's a paradigm shift in smartphones (doubtful), we're stuck with Android and iOS for the foreseeable future.
> Had they made it open source
That would have necessitated open sourcing Windows
Windows Phone was indeed damn good. I held on to my WP 10 phone a lot longer than anyone sane would have. However, the only growth for WP was in the negative direction. There were no apps for WP because of past compatibility breaks, Google was sabotaging access to their services, carriers and OEMs were unhappy because of low sales volumes of WP phones. Windows Phone was already very clearly dead before Nadella took over.
I really wanted windows phone to be a success and am still sad it wasn't. I loved the interface. The native integration between my desktop/laptop and phone would have been great. Nowadays with so many apps being PWAs and built with nativescript or ionic, maybe windowsphone has a chance again? I have no idea tbh.
I didn’t like the UI at all. A lot of unnecessary animations. It felt like a forced departure from the iPhone standard, just so that it’s different.
Feels a bit late at this point. Surface Pros run snapdragon but it still feels like too much of a lift to spin up an entire new mobile OS.
I'd be pretty intrigued but they're still struggling to nail the tablet market imo.
Not just that everything was going through windows as GP said, whatever market they entered, they acted like their product will be like windows in that sector too from day one. Zune was like that, but the best example is windows phone, version 8 more precisely which is the first proper modern smartphone version.
Google realized that if they want to stand a chance in catching up to the iPhone, they need to shove android in people's faces, and lure in devs.
Microsoft entered the game (WP8) when android already had a foothold, making it even harder. They started with a mostly empty app store, and while they were clever enough to make sure the most widely used apps would be available by effectively bribing those big companies to develop windows phone apps, they pretty much gave the middle finger to all the small indie devs. I remember when android 2 was around I just downloaded android studio and played around a bit, making a simple scrobbler app for my Samsung device. Sideloadong was king back then, but even up to this point I had to pay zero bucks and jump through no hoops to try this out. I don't remember what putting this on the Google play store would've cost me back then, but not much.
The windows phone experience was: sign up for a dev account to download visual studio with WP support. Start up VS, asked for your account again. I think in the beginning this was actually a paid account, probably because apple did it that way and again, you're Microsoft so act like you already own the place. But later in they reversed course here at least and you could log in with a free account.
So you start building a small test app and then you want to run it in the shipped emulator but surprise! Your laptop only shipped with windows 8 home which doesn't include virtualization features, so tough. So the only way to test the app was to push it to your phone, which was another overly complicated mess where your phone had to be in developer mode and you could only "sideload" one app at a time, iirc. The result was an app store with mostly tumbleweed. Whatever small utility or gimmick you wanted, when on android a search would give you dozens of results, on WP, there was maybe 4, and 3 of them almost unusable and abandoned.
I'm not blaming ballmer for having decided this specifically, but holy hell how did this pass any meetings with the higher-ups? You're uo against two tech giants who have a head-start of a few years, you try to get people to switch to your platform by being pricey, having no apps, and being hostile to smaller devs?
The same played out with all the phone makers, who had to pay license fees for WP when android was free to use. Guess which phones were cheaper in the end. And when Microsoft bought Nokia, Nokia had the unfair advantage of getting WP for free, making it even less attractive for others to compete in that sector.
And let's not get into the botched Nokia acquisition because I also don't think this can be blamed on ballmer that easily, or primarily.
> The windows phone experience was: sign up for a dev account to download visual studio with WP support. Start up VS, asked for your account again.
This is something that Microsoft still struggles with. Some things have improved, but a lot of the dev experiences on the Microsoft side are still cumbersome and not aimed at small time devs.
My experience here is with browser extensions and publishing these for both old Edge (pre chromium) and the newer Edge. The entire publishing dashboard is/was overly complex and assumes you are either a single person or a big organization with (azure) AD set up. With Mozilla AMO you can just add individual developers to your extension by mail, and with Google it is as easy as setting up a group.
With browser extensions specifically (and Edge as well) you can also clearly see where it is still a dedicated motivated internal team setting things up and where things were handed over to more general teams and support was also outsourced to somewhere else.
Anyway, my main point is that even now, many years later, Microsoft still struggles in this area making me think this is more fundamental to the company culture and way of operating.
I would argue that specific technologies changing is super relevant fact.
In 90's and 00's "everything Windows" made loads of sense for a company so being hard on any competition was the right thing. Also I don't see people saying it about MacOs you cannot do software to this day for MacOs or iOS without having actual device and operating system from Apple.
What changed for MSFT was that operating system in 2010's and forward became irrelevant. Cloud is where the money is and now MSFT is "all in Azure or nothing company", entire company is designed to promote Azure and O365.
To properly promote Azure they need to run Linux on that cloud and they need mind share of developers that will develop products using Azure - earlier they could force developers to use Windows because that was where software was running.
I don't know anything more than the next guy here, but just reading this, it seems like a really underrated and insightful comment. Thanks for explaining it so clearly.
I'm not sure that devaluating Windows is a good strategy at all...
It's not a strategy, it's a recognition that the Windows org has decayed and they apparently don't know how to turn it around. Apparently simple projects take forever, new code they launch is often filled with bugs, different parts of the org don't talk to each other and they can't explain why anyone should write an app that targets the Windows API. I support customers shipping apps to every platform and Windows is nowadays 90% of the pain, it's worse even than Linux. Microsoft just don't care either, you can tell the devs who work on it are overwhelmed by the sheer size and tech debt levels of the codebase. Decades of compounding bad decisions have well and truly caught up with them :( This is a pity in a way, the desktop OS market could use more competition.
Nadella de-prioritizing Windows was the right thing to do for the business because it had a monopoly, so after PC sales saturated the market the best they could achieve was treading water, but also because the strategy of tying everything to Windows assumed the Windows team would continue to execute well and these things would all be mutually reinforcing. In the 90s Windows did execute well but by 2010 that had stopped, and so the tying strategy also had to stop. A better CEO than Ballmer could possibly have turned the Windows situation around and avoided the need for the disconnection, but instead it was left to drift.
It is in "everything is cloud" and "most of software runs in browsers anyway" world where operating systems don't matter .
I would not say it was by any means one or the other CEO "insightful" choice but it was more of market choosing on its own. Microsoft had to make own cloud or die that was the choice and better to put loads of investment in that. Ballmer started Azure because Amazon of course was first and Google did the same so Nadella was just playing cards he was handed by the world.
Running a cloud and developping an operating system are two separare activites that don't need to be tied together. There is a lot of proprietary software in companies around the globe that rely on windows low level APIs and it will last for decades. There is a lot of things that are running outside the browser. The whole gaming industry is still tied to Windows directx.
The thing is that OS is not important these days as you can apps on thin clients now and a lot of folks are spending most of the time within apps and doing nothing else.
I think that it is not exact. OS is as important as yesterday since you need them to run your containers that provide your services used by your thin clients. This is still the backbone of everything. But you have a point windows kinda lost the servers battle.
yeah. I think they have did some refactoring in OS though, to make it more modular. Not sure what are their long term plans for Windows. They probably would have benefitted from some handheld UI for sure.
They tried a handheld UI, with Windows phone but it failed. I think mostly because their UI was too far from what people expected aka something looking like ios (Android UI is almost a copy of iOS UI) and also because they came into the market too late with too few product innovations to be appealing. With 5% of market shared, this was not worth the cost, for devs on the plateform. If they want a comeback in the smartphone industry, maybe they have something to play with copilot and AI. Like an Android with free AI agents out of the box.
Bad strategy for Microsoft but clearly a wining strategy for the World.
Selling licenses is not where the money is. Selling subscriptions to corporations so that every corporate-supplied computer (including Macs) pay Microsoft for something, be it Office or a full Windows+Office+Sharepoint license. All things considered, they can give Windows for free and they'll still profit from it as an enabler for further Microsoft lock-in.
As an end user, I lament the devaluation of Windows and the general drive to cloud-based solutions. It has made everything worse.
Yep, aside from the legacy desktop environment & gaming I don't really have any ties to MS anymore, and I was a pure MS developer for 20+ years. Now with .NET superior on non-windows platforms and the nonsense their hostile consumer & enterprise side keeps pulling why would I stay in the ecosystem? I agree that Ballmer was unfairly used as a punching bag, but MS today (both the good and bad) is all Nadella.
> The problem with Microsoft was everything went through Windows. The entire company was designed to promote Windows.
...and nowadays Windows is designed to promote their cloud subscription services while local features get axed.
If Google is not allowed to link directly to Maps, there is no way Microsoft can be allowed to advertise their paid services everywhere in their OS.
This sounds right until you realise how much market share Windows captured, held and now even solidifies from the Ballmer era.
I don't agree with you, and I believe the Ballmer era did wonders for Windows and was a turbulent period. The new era of MS now is quite stable because of this.
Yeah. It is basically a trap that every CFO who became CEO step into - tie everything to a single thing.
With Satya he had much broader vision.
> a red headed step child
Very good point, but please stop using this phrase.
Having spent some time at the Microsoft campus, I can tell you this is basically the consensus view from employees today. Ballmer was not a cool, trendy, or fun CEO who people rallied behind - but he more or less "got the job done". He was the captain of a massive ship with a turning radius the size of a continent guiding it through icebergs.
Azure's success was specifically set in motion under Ballmer. Owed to the fact that it was developed to Microsoft's strengths (enterprise support) that it didn't piss off too many of their partners and sales channels. Same with Office 365 and all of their other successful services. None are glamourous - but all are impressive with how not awful they are given their design constraints.
Even things like Surface, while considered a failure, did its intended job of getting hardware partners to get their act together and make better consumer products.
Ballmer hated Linux & open source. He would've driven their cloud division to the ground trying to sell Windows servers in the cloud. It would've taken him another 20 years to accept that Linux was key to the cloud. VSCode (Visual Studio Code) - would never have taken birth. Microsoft survived and thrived once Ballmer had no option but leave.
In this era of Python development, Microsoft Windows still feels a step or two behind as far as using a Windows laptop for coding in the cloud. Python is the language of AI - not Asp.net, not C#. Ballmer would never have seen the writing on the wall. He would've pushed something wierd, like VBA .
I have as much disdain for the monkey man as the next OSS fan. But VSCode was always closed sourced crap at the arbitrary whims of a soulless zombie corp, and they never promised otherwise in a significant way. It's not relevant and not a good foundational signal or basis for any argument.
> they never promised otherwise in a significant way
It’s commonly promoted as „open source“ and this seems to be commonly believed. Pretty much everyone I tell that the official builds of VSCode are proprietary (and how proprietary they are) is pretty surprised.
There's a working build of just the open source part of VSCode (with basically all the same functionality) called VSCodium
... https://github.com/microsoft/vscode? It's MIT licensed. Or are we here to start GPL vs MIT for the 10,000th time?
That is Code OSS, MS official binary builds of Visual Studio Code, as explained at the top of the Readme, include proprietary code. MS also has several very popular proprietary extensions. Some of those extensions, older cersions were open source.
oh please :)
the old ‘embrace-extend-extinguish’ model is what it _truly_ is, f.e. , you cannot take extensions from m$ store and use it.
there have been large number of discussions around this topic, and folks have highlighted these concerns more articulately than i could ever hope to do.
take your pick.
Idk, I use cursor which is a proprietary commercial VS code fork and it just works. So clearly the license/OSS situation is very workable.
> ‘embrace-extend-extinguish’ model is what it _truly_ is
With this mindset, what could MS possibly create that wouldn't make you say this?
This definitely seems like an unfalsifiable proposition for the MS haters.
Microsoft does something shitty? See, they're a terrible company.
Microsoft does something awesome? Well, we're currently in the "embrace" or "extend", so they're a terrible company.
I'm as (or more) pessimistic than the next guy about the state of tech and capitalism, but at least give credit when and where credit's due.
The destructive EEE strategy is replaced by a constructive poisoning the well strategy. That's arguably moral progress while there is no legal or financial incentive to do so. That's praise for Nadella, not Ballmer.
a previous discussion about something similar happened here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25719045
> He would've pushed something wierd, like VBA .
That was Bill Gates. Bill Gates founded the company on BASIC and seemed to remain a fan of the language even as the rest of the world moved on to other languages.
Ballmer wasn't technical so appeared to have no skin in the game of which language "won", so long it was Microsoft Developer Tools like Visual Studio developers used to work on it (and what would become VS Code, which as many point out did start under Ballmer's tenure). That "Developers! Developers! Developers!" meme was directly an "I want to support developers wherever they are and however they want to work". Sure he was a huge Windows cheerleader and would want those Developers working on Windows machines, but he really did seem to want to see Windows be the best platform for developers to code for anything (including/especially the cloud).
In terms of Python specifically, IronPython was active and interesting during Ballmer's tenure and Ballmer helped form a team that was actively contributing to open source projects like Python (and Node and Redis and others) to make them all run better (sometimes much better) on Windows. Ballmer may have been afraid of open source as a business model, but he also seemed to realize the usefulness of open source for bringing developers (back) to Windows and he did start efforts in that direction.
You can run Linux servers on Azure (and Hyper-V), so it’s worth taking the ‘hate’ against Linux with a grain of salt.
Ballmer didn't hate linux and open source.
He feared it as a threath to Microsoft's business model and revenue streams.
That’s a distinction without a difference
That's just why he hated it.
Actually there was a lot of open source happening under Ballmer - not because of him but in that time. VSCode’s beginnings were in an earlier similar product were from that time. He didn’t interfere or stop those projects. Attributing that to Nadella is just false.
This is hindsight bias. Because other people took some of his later initiatives and made them successful, it’s tempting to look back and grant him these as wins.
We should resist that temptation and judge him on the results he delivered. MS was the essential tech company, king of the world, and under his leadership their innovation stalled, they lost in markets where they were leading, the stock stagnated, and huge piles of money were vaporized on acquisitions that were poorly planned or executed.
He tried to buy Yahoo for $44 billion! Only Yahoo’s greater idiocy saved him from that gargantuan mistake. And that was just one of many.
Would Yahoo under different management have done better?
Yahoo.com remains the 8th most visited website on earth[1] (I had no idea until I read that on HN some months back). It sits between Wikipedia and Reddit.
[1] https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/
Well, I think the Bing search deal would have been a lot different if Microsoft had owned Yahoo.
Yahoo management was looking to reduce the cost of running web search and advertising platforms, but ended up still having a large expense to crawl the web and basically do web search in order to enhance Bing results. And then the Microsoft ad market managed to be worse in all sorts of ways (for advertisers and publishers) compared to the existing yahoo one, plus Microsoft took a cut of the revenue. Some of that should have been better if it was one company; plus, I bet Microsoft would have sent Yahoo employees an Xbox360 or something. (I worked for Yahoo Travel from 2004-2011)
> under his leadership their innovation stalled, they lost in markets where they were leading, the stock stagnated, and huge piles of money were vaporized on acquisitions that were poorly planned or executed.
A lot of this sounds like Google under Sundar's leadership, although I'm not sure if there is a parallel to the failed acquisitions, and some of the rot had set in well before.
Microsoft was under consent decrees and anti-trust / anti-monopoly scrutiny for much of Ballmer's tenure and had to tread very carefully in the marketplace. Pichal doesn't have that excuse. In fact, Google is staring down the barrel of a barrage of anti-trust / anti-monopoly lawsuits itself and the real test of Pichal is how well he is able to get Google to perform over the next decade when it's laboring under similar restraints. I would not bet money on him doing a better job than Ballmer did.
Hindsight works both ways.
Developing OSes and software was clearly an unsustainable business. It's obvious in hindsight that cloud infrastructure was the way to go. But at the time placing a lot of different bets to find a few successful product-market fits was the best you could ask for.
While it may be true that the OS itself isn't really a cash cow anymore (if it ever was), I still think Microsoft's greatest failure of the previous decade was exiting the smartphone OS space and ceding it to Google and Apple.
I think that Ballmer's management can take a lot of blame for that. I think a different CEO could have executed and possibly have kept Microsoft in that market with success.
The Apple App Store by itself is a trillion dollar ecosystem. Microsoft being able to gain even a sliver of that size would be worth quite a lot.
We might give Apple similar criticism on the other side of this coin by saying that it's somewhat insane that Apple hasn't tried entering the public cloud market, especially given the fact that they now design their own ARM processors that are essentially the market leaders in that architecture.
> While it may be true that the OS itself isn't really a cash cow anymore (if it ever was), I still think Microsoft's greatest failure of the previous decade was exiting the smartphone OS space and ceding it to Google and Apple.
I mean, Microsoft was too early and too late on smartphones. I never cared to look into the pre WP7 history.
But the more recent Windows Phone died with WM10, which I don't think is fair to blame on Balmer. WM10 came out in public beta in Feburary 2015, and Balmer was replaced in February 2014. Microsoft eliminated their legendary testing program in August 2014, and the WM10 betas and release in November 2015 had very poor quality. On my phones, I had to choose between annoying bugs in notifications in WP8 or WM10 with a subpar, laggy experience with mobile Edge that managed to be worse than mobile IE. They did manage to get a decent final release together in 2020, although mobile Edge was still crap. You can blame Balmer for not letting Firefox on their app store, I think; a browser that didn't suck would have helped me stay on WP longer anyway.
Still, I think Continuum with an x86 phone could have gotten market share, but Intel cancelled atom for phones in April 2016.
My thesis is WP8 was already the first huge misstep where they lost developers.
I tried various "weird phones" on my way to standard Android, among them a high-end WinCE phone (Xperia X1a) and a WP8 one (Lumia 520). Make no mistake about it, WP8 was a good mobile OS, even if they did stick the dreaded "Windows" name in there. Smooth, reliable, battery efficient, well-thought-out UI. But alas, too late. By then Android had captured the "not iOS" market and it would have taken a miracle to bring a third OS to the mainstream.
I very briefly tried WP10, and it actually seemed a step backwards; in their desperate attempt to somehow unify the desktop and phone thing, be it in code base or user experience or whatever, they tried too hard.
Yeah, the idea that Nadella killed Windows Phone only makes sense in the context of Windows Phone already having failed under Ballmer.
I was a Windows Phone user during 8 and 8.1. There was a short period where I felt like some traction was taking place. My bank even had a Windows Phone app, until they didn’t.
Windows 8.1 was the most competitive version against contemporaries, but then the delays and issues surrounding 10 really took the wind out of those sails.
My perspective as a consumer is that Microsoft buying Nokia seemed to have made Nokia worse and delayed their phone development process. I found myself without any upgrade path, while Apple and Samsung users could get a pretty significant upgrade in capability every year at that time.
Nokia was also better at making low-end phones and had very few flagship products that were iPhone and Galaxy competitors.
On the business side Microsoft didn’t focus on having their entire lineup available on all four US carriers. They had all these weird carrier exclusives where getting a new Windows Phone would mean switching carriers.
I have to think that the break in compatibility between Windows 7 and 8 really screwed over developer relations as well. On the Apple side they were delivering an experience very familiar to Mac developers, and on the Android side the experience was an open source free-for-all playground.
That's exactly it. There were a bunch of hardcore Windows dev shops getting ready to support Windows Phone who jumped on WP7, ready to dig down, but who felt betrayed when WP8 was a clean break. You lose that hardcore bunch, then you are just evaluated on the generics and Windows Phone had no edge.
WP7 was the first misstep with extremely limited API and no native code for apps.
Sure, then making WP8 phones incompabitle with WP7 apps was the second misstep. Developers, developers, indeed! Not wanted here.
WP8 was compatible with Silverlight (ie. WP7) apps. The problem was splitting app model into half-abandoned Silverlight and new WinRT, and not providing WP8 upgrade to any WP7 phones.
Treating his tenure as just a bunch of vague bets that didn't pan out does not give Ballmer enough credit. He was a hands-on leader responsible for how MS executed, which had a direct impact on product success or failure.
MS did not just have bad luck, they lost to competitors.
Developing OSes and software was clearly an unsustainable business. It's obvious in hindsight that cloud infrastructure was the way to go.
Cloud infrastructure has become a commodity though and you can replace your cloud provider easily (theoretically, lol). What moat can MS or anyone else build around cloud infrastructure? Compare to OS' where MS may never have had a competitor catch up if they'd kept up speed on their OS teams.
Same with video games these days. Adding in digital casinos may seem nice but now you're just the same as every other digital casino offering.
> Cloud infrastructure has become a commodity though
There are only 3 significant providers and the needed investments are a gigantic barrier to entry but sure it’s a commodity.
One of the points in the article is that he made many bets, some of them panned out really well, others didn't, but on the whole he set Microsoft on a really good path.
Buying Yahoo would have been a bet that didn't work out, probably, but I don't think it goes against the point in the article.
Memories get a bit fuzzy after 5-10 years.But this take from 2012 is a reminder of what a mess Steve Ballmer was as CEO: https://www.netnetweb.com/content/blog/blog/top-10-reasons-w...
I remember working with Microsoft as a client in 2000-s, it was awesome. We started as a startup, and enrolled in a BizSpark program. It gave us basically free access to Microsoft tools and with very responsive support.
We later transitioned into volume licensing, that also was simple and straightforward. The business side of Microsoft was a streamlined unstoppable train at that point.
The technical side, not so much. Microsoft was still trying to be the only software company in the world, and it was pushing all kinds of WPF, WCF, and other WTFs. So they completely missed hyperscalers and the growing market of Linux-based servers.
Wow. Microsoft Licensing was the stuff of nightmares.
You could literally get certifications in Microsoft licensing. There were experts whose only job was Microsoft Licensing consultants.
MS’es licensing was so bad you would get different quotes from the same person within a week of asking because almost no one understood it.
Sure. MS had tons of resellers with somewhat different markups, although not that different.
We needed only the basic stuff: Windows Server, Exchange, MSSQL, a bunch of XP licenses. And this all was straightforward. We also got MSDN subscription basically for free.
They missed the mark on mobile oses and appstores.
> The business side of Microsoft was a streamlined unstoppable train at that point.
Surprising. As a startup I just couldn’t understand how to subscribe to MS Office, seems like it required a hotmail account or something, it always bored me before completing the steps.
WPF is still unmatched.
Exactly and I'm never going to change my opinion. Nothing in this area was ever so easy and yet so powerful.
React Native is better...
do you think if azure would have even _happened_ if mr. jeffrey snover was not tenacious enough ?
Surface is selling like hotcakes.
Ha! It was a trap, they are likely talking about Surface, the big table-computer. It was such a failure that they repurposed the name for something else and you might have never heard about it. We had one at work circa 2013.
Azure happened because of Nadella (who led the project) despite Ballmer.
Azure may be successful financially, but as someone who has finally used it for the last two years after 15 years of AWS and a little bit of GCP, I can't help but think the world would be a better place if it didn't exist or if some lesser player had that market share.
Maybe it's just "what you're used to", but I'd swap Azure and AWS in that statement. Going from Azure to AWS, I found it not nearly as nice to use or easy to understand. Even basic features like "see all the resources in my account" were missing from AWS.
I use all three regularly. AWS has a horrible, inconsistent UI, and the Azure portal is mostly ok (although I think GCP is the best of the three)
But OTOH AWS generally works and usually does what you think, whereas I'm never surprised when Azure breaks or some random Azure API works nothing like we expect.
I feel your pain, also being on all three.
The biggest difference IMO is in how they're handled by large organizations and how prod permissions are provisioned by them. In Azure you have one user account and one org, with subscriptions for your user account to activate to get permissions. You can have multiple subscriptions but they're under the same login/user account and you can have multiple active at the same time. In AWS, you get access to an account or accounts that have different logins, so you get to juggle those with login/logout, even if there's SSO. In GCP, there are multiple projects, under a single login, but you may have to juggle projects.
The other aspect is how regions are dealt with. AWS global resource index/search thing is useful, but it totally feels like I spend more time juggling regions with AWS. Azure's regions themselves are, let's just say, interesting. GCP is better at it than AWS, and less interesting than Azure (which is a good thing).
> GCP is the best of the three
Until you have to call Google. Google business services are awful.
> GCP is the best of the three
I must have very different needs. In my perception, AWS is the best of the three, Azure is second, and Google would be #3. Depending on your unique news, you might choose different CSP's, from Digital Ocean to Oracle or IBM (the only place you can get AIX, IBMi, and z/OS)
Interesting.
Do you do cross-region work in AWS? For me that is just bad. I usually want to work at a service level and see across all regions, where as AWS wants me to work at a region level and see everything I have running there.
The web UI makes that easier with GCP, but the main "UI" for me is Terraform, with only occasional usage of the "human-rated" interfaces.
BTW, I hate Terraform with a passion, but I don't have the energy to write something that can describe infrastructure in Lisp.
Why do you find GCP 3rd then? They have Terraform templates for all (?) their services includes in the docs.
I think it's a bit the services - I am very impressed with Aurora on AWS for instance, and there isn't really anything equivalent to it anywhere else. Also, some of the services elsewhere seem easier to deploy or more convenient to use.
In any case, all three big ones are pretty good for almost anything, and I don't think there is anything that's doable on one that's impossible to do in the others (IBM is the exception here - if you need AIX, IBMi or Z, they are the only ones who can offer that).
AWS feels fundamentally better engineered than Azure but Azure's GUI and API feels more consistent. AWS has never had the kind of global outage that Azure has had.
I disagree, I find Azure much easier to set up and use.
For most stuff Azure is pretty meh, but it seems to have the best features for running Windows servers and integrates well with Active Directory (or MS Entra or whatever they currently call it). Features that I don't need as a startup founder, but that would be very interesting for many places I worked at.
Basically the cloud for everyone but the tech companies
> Basically the cloud for everyone but the tech companies
And most companies are not tech companies. This is something that tends to be lost in HN discussions (not saying that applies to you, specifically).
I've spent a lot of time in the Microsoft world. I worked for AWS as well. In general, Microsoft executes on platform and ecosystem in a way that works very well for a lot of customers. In general, AWS executes on products better, which tends to appeal more to those who are focused on technology, specifically.
As Azure SRE for a tech company, what feature is missing? We are using AKS with Linux, Blob storage and ServiceBus. Database is MySQL Flexible Server.
I'm even using some Azure Tables for backend services just because it was easier to deal with.
I think
> Basically the cloud for everyone but the tech companies
is referring to the idea that tech companies are competent enough to run their own computers, not that Azure is missing something specific.
Scott Guthrie is the one who drove Azure.
Dated 2013, a year before Nadella became CEO:
https://www.change.org/p/the-microsoft-board-of-directors-as...
Azure existed long before ScottGu took over. It started with dueling projects from Ray Ozzie’s world and Bob Muglia’s world. Ray had great ideas but no idea how to run something like Azure at scale. Bob brought the enterprise mindset and retooled it, and of course Scott owns the lion’s share of the credit for its growth and technical qualities.
I began recruiting for what became Azure in Jan 2006. I was chief software architect / cto at the company. Amitabh Srivastava and the legendary Dave Cutler were the leads, with Dave focused on the hypervisor. (I'd met Dave in the 80's when he was at DEC and I was at DG.)
The project was in my team (CSA labs) but was cross-funded behind the scenes by Kevin Johnson, the president of Server & Tools. KJ & I did this because there was passive-aggressive resistance to a 'cloud first' design/architecture philosophy from within his org, where there was a deeply-rooted belief that enterprise servers and ops management tools would adequately scale-up.
KJ bought in and was all-in, as was the 'tools' part of his org (Soma & ScottGu). SteveB initially didn't quite know what to make of my desire and myriad efforts to fundamentally transform the company from packaged products toward services, and he had to cope with some of the wake I was leaving. It wasn't all smooth. But he believed in me and helped me to recruit internally, which was essential.
My explicit cross-funding agreement with KJ, my peer, was that when I decided it was the 'right time', I'd hand off my Azure org and it would be re-merged into S&T in more-or-less a 'reverse merger', with cloud leadership taking over server.
I launched Azure at PDC 2008 with what today we'd call lambda's (functions-as-a-service based on .net) & blobs & cloud database as the core services. Why no linux or windows VMs? They were absolutely part of day 1 plans, but a major political ploy from within KJ's team ('this will kill the server business') resulted in an active decision (mine) to defer until post-launch. It wasn't a technology issue, nor was it an OSS issue; the team believed in OSS & Linux. But shipping was top priority, and we shipped.
When I ultimately left the company in 2011, it was time to do the reverse merger that KJ and I had planned. A proven, super-talented manager from Bing that everyone loved, Satya, was chosen to lead the org as it was moved into S&T upon my departure. James Hamilton, the architect of Azure's relational DB, left for AWS. Ultimately, under Satya, ScottGU & co ended up re-plumbing much of the original code with a by-then-ready Windows hypervisor, VMs & Linux, and all that you see today. By then the org finally was aligned and 'believed', and SteveB was genuinely 'all in'.
Getting products from 0 to 1 is sometimes a challenging process involving incredible people and stamina from believers at every level. In this case I'd say it was worth the effort.
BobMu left Microsoft because he was not sold on cloud, he was an advocate for 'on-prem' solutions (and for its time it made sense since enterprise customers were against cloud).
Azure, AWS and CPQ are all platforms that are good enough. If you need a cloud which is standing out and will be the best place for you workload over the next decade or more you have to look to OCI.
Would love some sources cited for both your take and the parent's take.
A rare miss by Mr. Luu.
> Ballmer wins... 2010: Microsoft creates Azure
The Azure project was run by Nadella before he became CEO. And it succeeded despite Ballmer. Azure was seen as the Microsoft cloud, where people ran Windows Servers. But Microsoft had long lost the battle for the server space to Linux.
When Ballmer stepped aside, only then could Nadella drop the limiters and push the Microsoft <3 Linux perspective to get the message out that Azure is a home for Linux workloads too.
Yep, people forget, but Azure launched as Windows Azure in 2010 - they dropped Windows from the name a few years later, but it was obvious what it was trying to be at launch.
I’m guessing you don’t know any Microsoft employees who were from that era and sufficiently senior to know. Azure was not run by Nadella. Its predecessor was Bing and much of Azure then was just a reselling of Bing services. Bing was something Ballmer invested in and pushed for. Nadella didn’t drop any limiters or push the Azure perspective - that was people closer to Azure.
Almost instinctive disagree -- this guy doesn't miss much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Azure#Key_people
Also elsewhere in this post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41978577
That said, have never been a Microsoft watcher and basically will never run it in the server context so... Happy to be corrected.
I do agree that the current phase of Microsoft is remarkable -- the turn around in strategy/sentiment is huge.
Agree .Balmer was a disaster. Microsoft stock basically languished from 2003-2013 as everything else went up.
Which only means he was a 'disaster' from the speculative trader's perspective.
Stock trading has no benefit to a company unless they need to go to the markets for another round of funding, which Microsoft didn't.
This is not true when your employees’ compensation depends on the stock. They all implicitly become speculative traders and watching the employees at Amazon/Google become millionaires in a couple of years caused a lot of brain drain at Microsoft.
I was looking at the candles for all of Microsoft the other day and was surprised (and kind of pissed) that Microsoft didn't really take off until 2015. You could have gotten Microsoft dirt cheap for decades compared to the current issue price.
Azure launched as (and still is) a complete dumpster fire. Unless your company has business ties to MS (e.g. your usage is heavily subsidized, which is most of their large clients from what I understand), I would never in a million years use it over GCP or AWS.
I worked at Microsoft from 2003-2007, and left a couple months after the iPhone launched (for totally unrelated reasons, but I wanted to situate the timeline).
Steve was a terrible leader. He helped the company grow moribund, lazy, and self-absorbed. Stack ranking was a cancer[1]. Employees were far more interested in stabbing each other in the back than building world-class products.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/12/5094864/microsoft-kills-...
Kind of unrelated, but stack ranking is very much back now across the board now in big tech.
That’s appalling.
Its cyclical, a lot of companies over hired and are trying hard to cut down
Cyclical processes and appallingness aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact they may well be related.
I disagree with Dan due to my experience as an low level employee under Ballmer. He encouraged political infighting and backstabbing and dog eat dog internal competition, while praising and desiring tight integration between teams.
He wanted "cloud first, moblie first" - two firsts! The culture at the time was built around RAID - the internal bug datadbase and that there should be clear prioritization for everything.
The inability to decide between enterprise cloud and consumer client devices held Microsoft back.
Ballmer had customers asking for enterprise cloud in 2000 but he kept listening to people talking about lifting windows sales by 10 percent with search integrated to the desktop.
And then they chose the bloated SQL server for that and wondered why that couldn't run on normal consumer hardware in Longhorn.
The fundamental tradeoffs between something that sacrifices generalization for specialization and efficiency meant that what is good for running server rack NASDAQ didn't work for low powered laptops.
From a low level employee perspective Ballmer was the ruthless guy that wanted people to hate each other at work as they fought for survival lord of the flies style but was pikachu surprised that we could never deliver integrated experiences that worked together.
Satya's two key abilites to me were the ability to actually prioritize in a coherent way and the decision to bring the rank and file infighting down because integrated experiences are hard to build when you want your brother and sister departments to fail so yours gets more budget because thats how Ballmer worked.
So Ballmer-era Microsoft was the inspiration for Amazon's current culture, I see.
This one’s on Jack Welch - a pioneer in short term gain over long term building. You absolutely can juice a company’s performance by going dog-eat-dog, but inevitably when the smoke clears you’re left with jackals and hyenas stretched too thin.
Always worth mentioning that this culturally altered America in a way that we’ll probably never unwind.
> Always worth mentioning that this culturally altered America in a way that we’ll probably never unwind.
I think this about a lot of things, such as certain events in politics or generative AI. I'm curious how you apply this to ruthless cutthroat policies at a handful of (admittedly quite large) tech companies?
Culturally unwinds corporate america.
Go to any family business that scales a niche and you find golf course dealmaking and nepotism humming along with good ole fashion quiet cartel work.
Combined with the massive popularity of private equity in so many business areas now we're unlikely to see 100-year companies again.
I worked a long time ago in the same company that Steve Ballmer worked, both as juniors. Same culture. I think I know where he got it from.
off-topic: Love the username :)
I'm not informed enough to rebut this, and don't want to be quoted in the follow-up article that suggests HN is still too dumb to get the genius of Ballmer, but here's my take.
It's only the footnote of the article that mentions Ballmer's "stage persona". I think that's the important point, and I would add that his "interview persona" might have been even worse. Back then, he was quoted as saying insanely dumb shit all the time. Like when he literally publicly laughed about the iPhone. Or when he called a Zune feature to share files between devices "squirting".
Maybe he did make all kinds of brilliant decisions internally. I wouldn't know, but neither would the stock market. If the CEO comes across as not understanding tech, it's likely the market will price that in.
I think a better way of understanding Ballmer is that he really struggled to relate to end consumers, but he understood their business partners very well.
He was very much an '80s/'90s exec. Back then, execs were not "visionaire rockstars"; they were wisecracking boomers in suits. Microsoft walked a very thin line between very different worlds, and Ballmer was closer to the old-world type than the new.
Brief data transmissions being called "squirts" is common, and was more common at the time.
I've been involved with computer networking since approximately 1982, and I've never once heard someone use "squirts" outside talking about Zunes. I don't doubt that it was jargon inside very specific niches, but it has never been common elsewhere.
Before the Ballmer/Zune use of the term I remember my father talking about data being squirted to A2A missiles (he was military) prior to launch, so perhaps that is one of the niches.
I take that back. An old issue of Wired had a jargon watch mention of “squirt the bird” as bouncing something off a satellite, which I remembered only because they misspelled it and I wondered what “quirt” meant.
So yeah, maybe that’s a military or adjacent thing.
I squirt all the time on Twitter.
Everyone forgetting about Lisa Brummel and "stack ranking"?
That nearly ruined Microsoft...
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft-ditches-syst...
What does Microsoft do now? Most every major tech company I’ve seen uses stack ranking - even if they don’t use that name. Hell, a lot of startups I’ve been at even use that. The founders and executives love it as far as I can tell - why else would they do it?
At Microsoft in particular, stack ranking has always been used in the sense of trying to put together a rough ordering of employees at similar levels.
But "stack ranking" in scare quotes at Microsoft referred to the specific practice of the 20/70/10 rule -- the top 20% were the standouts, 70% was fine, and 10% was "this person needs to be eased out". This was applied for any org with more than a certain minimum number of people, and led to a very very toxic review process.
This is pretty much what I see at almost every company I’ve been at in the last decade though… The review process is always toxic and has always lead to my peers in the industry being more likely to sabotage than help me since that’s the best way to look good in reviews. That with 80% of my peers being permanent H1B means they will do whatever it takes to stay employed.
I would be happy to know big tech companies that aren’t doing this but I don’t know any?
I would argue that Microsoft's original practice (without the 20/70/10) is actually pretty good. Have managers make subjective evaluations, merge them together at higher level meetings, and then work out compensation from there.
There's a big cottage industry of trying to back everything up with data, to provide actionable feedback, etc., and these end up being giant time-wasting cover-your-ass exercises, which always end in an uncomfortable non-working system for everyone -- "I did the thing you asked but my review is the same as last year, why aren't I getting promoted". Mentorship and growth has to be more than just "here are your goals". Peer reviews can be okay, but only if you force people to make judgments -- "rank these three people against each other" rather than "give these people a rating 1-10 in each of these five areas".
The subjective evaluation process doesn't work unless you trust your managers, though. And that invariable means that it doesn't scale.
I was going to mention this. It was such an awful system and management method.
"grading on a curve" is a good idea, and if athletics wasn't run that way, nobody would watch.
that doesn't mean it's easy to implement, manage, or impossible to game, or that it plays nice wrt human factors, but to attack the core idea as essentially wrong is anti math, science, and rationality.
Microsoft always suffered from rewarding egotists and political animals over people who did actual work.
> but to attack the core idea as essentially wrong is anti math, science, and rationality
The way Microsoft implemented stack ranking was anti math. You're supposed to measure the data then calculate the level of fit to a distribution, not artificially shoehorn the data into buckets to create the curve. If you analyze the data honestly you may find you have a bimodal distribution, or a heavily skewed distribution, who knows.
Stack ranking just clumsily says, I'm gonna give x% a bad score, y% a middle score, and z% the top score.
>Stack ranking just clumsily says, I'm gonna give x% a bad score, y% a middle score, and z% the top score.
as long as the ordering top/middle/bad is preserved, I don't see a problem. there are entire respected statistic methods based on rank ordering, not raw metrics.
People don't have a right to fall on a normal distribution. Employers do have a right to grow or trim the workforce, and those numbers are driven by factors that are not necessarily normally distributed.
the people who downvote me simply want participation trophys, and "no" is the answer.
You absolutely can argue that Microsoft pursued a system that hurt both Microsoft and its employees, but not by attacking rank ordering.
Ah, "participation trophies" and "if you disagree you're a snowflake."
Took this long down the thread for the thought-terminating cliches to start flying around.
>Ah, "participation trophies" and "if you disagree you're a snowflake."
actually, my comments have all been about math, and i gave an explanation as to why some people don't like the math. It's your comment that talks about snowflakes.
> "grading on a curve" is a good idea, and if athletics wasn't run that way, nobody would watch.
Good thing that enterprise software and athletics are different things!
Athletics is an actual competition where the expectation is that "you win".
When you hire 12 baristas are they competing to make the most coffees or is their job to handle customer's orders? If their job isn't to compete with each other then don't stack rank them. Use other metrics like #of incorrect orders or w/e and decide what you think they should've done and if they did more than that give them a bonus. If they do less then maybe you need a new employee.
> Microsoft always suffered from rewarding egotists and political animals over people who did actual work.
That has nothing to do with grading on a curve. You can assign people to the top of a curve based on "egotist" criteria or based on "work". Nothing about a curve or stack ranking requires it to be based on "real work".
> When you hire 12 baristas are they competing to make the most coffees or is their job to handle customer's orders?
Both? Handling customer orders is how the sport is played, but at the same time they are competing for the most points (money) in that gameplay.
That's great. If you regularly fire the barista who brings in the least amount of money then you will find that nobody sane will take the slower shifts.
Because how much money a barista brings in is mostly a factor of how busy the coffeeshop is. Which is largely a factor of what time the clock shows, and that's not something a barista will be able to influence. (baring circumstances where a barista is so incompetent that costumers walk out of the shop.)
So, all your baristas working a graveyard shift are going to be at the bottom of the stack ranking in terms of revenue/time. What do you now do?
What do you do in athletics? Do you tell the kids (graveyard shift) they aren't allowed to participate in sports anymore because they can't compete with the big leagues (peak hours)?
Probably not. More likely you would look at the different leagues individually. I'm surprised this idea is novel to you.
> What do you do in athletics?
Why do you talk about athletics? Baristas are not athletes. Coffee shops are not the olympics. You are stretching this analogy beyond its usefullness.
> I'm surprised this idea is novel to you.
Could you possibly express your thoughts without putting down others? Thank you.
To address the meat of your comment. It sounds like you are proposing to grade the baristas working the bad shifts and the good shifts separately in different "leagues". The problem with that is that assumes that you are aware of all the factors which form the different leagues. If there are clear "night time" vs "daytime" barista groups that works. but if you just assign baristas as scheduling works out then you will realise that some people (randomly, and through no fault of their own) will be assigned to the slower shifts. Will you fire a perfectly good barista who is meeting the expectations of your establishment just because scheduling worked against them in that evaluation period? That is what stack ranking did in the case of microsoft.
> Why do you talk about athletics?
Because that's what the discussion is about...? Did you forget to read the thread?
> Could you possibly express your thoughts without putting down others?
If words shown on a computer screen are putting you down, it's time to go outside. You've lost your sense of reality.
> Because that's what the discussion is about...?
The thread seems to be about how one would manage baristas. It spawned off where lesuorac pointed out that baristas working for a coffe shop are different from athletes in that they are not competing with each other.
> Did you forget to read the thread?
> You've lost your sense of reality.
I guess that’s a no then. I hope you have a good day.
> The thread seems to be about how one would manage baristas.
What gives you that impression? It isn't not about baristas, but namely about a parallel between baristas and athletics. That was the context that was setup at the head of this particular thread branch, and we haven't change the subject (aside from that irrational attempt related to being "put down", whatever that was).
> I guess that’s a no then.
Correct. There is no logical place for pointless emotions here. Save it for human interactions.
> It isn't not about baristas, but namely about a parallel between baristas and athletics.
And what is the paralel? That is what i was asking and that is what you are dodging to answer. Why do you feel that the management of baristas can be usefully inspired by lessons from the management of athletes?
> Save it for human interactions.
Thank you for your candor. It is good to know that you don’t characterise our conversation as a human interaction. Puts it into perspective, and explains a lot.
I mean you do tell the kids they can't participate (in that league). There are woman playing ice hockey but none of them have survived an interview (professional try out with an NHL team and so they've all been told no.
---
It's novel because it's not how its done.
It's a big part of the stack rank hate is that people just blindly rank everybody and then adjust compensation that way. Taking more granular detail into account just isn't done.
But also because you're hired to do a job. If you do the criteria of the job then you should get a satisfactory rating. Similar to test taking, if you demonstrate knowledge of the material then you should pass. If you got 99/100 questions right and everybody else got 100/100 then you shouldn't get an F despite you being the worse of the group.
> Taking more granular detail into account just isn't done.
Where'd you dream up that idea? I operate a restaurant, so I at least have first-hand experience in overseeing barista-like workers, and I don't know how you could possibly ignore such details?
I'm sure I'm not perfect at it. I'm certainly not accurately capturing the butterfly flapping its wings in Africa. But you'd never flat-out ignore the blatantly obvious like shift times.
Perhaps we've gone so deep into the thread that you've forgotten how we got here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41983561
Perhaps with a statement like "But you'd never flat-out ignore the blatantly obvious like shift times." then you understand why people don't like stack ranking because yes people do ignore blatantly obvious things.
Not forgotten, but not particularly relevant. The context we followed only inherited the athletics analogy and how it parallels with baristas.
Sometimes it is necessary to ignore the blatantly obvious. You can't meaningfully alter the ranking of a sports team because their star player was out with a broken leg. You have to accept the circumstances for what they are.
But I'm not sure that translates to something like shift times which are fundamental to the game.
Why the hell are your baristas competing? Why are you not just measuring whether or not they are acceptably good at their jobs? If they are superior, promote them. If they are acceptably OK, keep them. If they suck, fire them. You shouldn't have to arbitrarily put someone at the bottom of the curve; that's ridiculous.
> Why the hell are your baristas competing?
Because that's what is necessary in a market economy? If they don't put in effort to compete, the customer will find another team of baristas that will. It is not like it is hard to find another coffeeshop.
> you shouldn't have to arbitrarily put someone at the bottom of the curve
What is arbitrary about it? The reality is that more coffeeshops open than can actually be supported by coffee drinkers, so it is an economic necessity that some end up shuttering due to being at the "bottom of the curve".
You compete with your competitors, not with your fellow employees. That's some dog-eat-dog toxic crap.
This is ridiculous. You grade people to a standard, not against each other. Stack ranking Jack Welch-style is basically operating under the assumption that if you had Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Satya Nadella, and Jeff Bezos on a team, that one of them would have to get a shitty grade and be fired.
All it does is make true talent not want to work with other true talent for fear they get screwed over.
>Stack ranking Jack Welch-style is basically operating under the assumption that if you had Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Satya Nadella, and Jeff Bezos on a team, that one of them would have to get a shitty grade and be fired.
no, it's not, you are wrong. It is based on the probability that you will not have all those outliers on one team, a probability that is very very high.
also, it's not used for teams of a dozen people where you can easily know everybody personally, it's used for teams of 1000 people, and Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Satya Nadella, and Jeff Bezos 'S jobs would all be safe (if they could get along with each other, which they couldn't, there'd be so much backstabbing productivity would grind to a halt :)
Nadella didnt build anything though. He is there to outsource. Microsoft products start to feel cheap and buggy. But hey, they are probably made by people who are earn less.
Bill Gates: can jump over an office chair - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxaCOHT0pmI
Steve Ballmer: developers developers developers developers developers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs
Two of my favorite videos haha
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GM4Lt5k24s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgPt6mvjr5Q
Here's a few more to add to your favorites
this basketball one is glorious!
> Steve Ballmer: developers developers developers developers developers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs
If you haven't seen the remix, here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gI_HGDgG7c
That chair jump is actually kinda impressive...
Steve Ballmer: REVERSI! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgJS2tQPGKQ
> Much like Gary Bernhardt's talk, which was panned because he made the problem statement and solution so obvious that people didn't realize they'd learned something non-trivial
I really want to see this video, but I cannot find it anywhere. I checked https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcGKfGEEONaDvuLDFFKRf... but I believe Gary asks that his videos not be shown (which I am fine with). I also checked https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks but I do not see it there either.
Should I be looking somewhere else?
I found it here: https://archive.org/details/usetypes
Thank you for the link but I was looking for the reproducibility talk.
I cannot edit anymore, but this is the talk descrption: https://www.thestrangeloop.com/2016/reproducibility.html
His "using you're types good" talk being censored is my go-to example for how "cancel culture" and "wokeness" has gone too far, a good useful talk not meant to be harmful to anybody, with no evidence that anybody was hurt by it, is removed from the world for the far reaching fear that one day some person might not be happy about it.
The fact that years later people still want to learn from it and nobody has every talked about it being an issue shows we have gone too far as a society on the side of caution and never doing anything that wouldn't stand up to a fortune 10 HR exec panel.
I must have missed this drama. Who was offended by it? When was Gary "cancelled?"
What was "wrong" about the talk exactly?
He effectively pretended to be dumb. And that included using the wrong "you're" and very simple dialects of English and mannerisms which he thought could potentially be seen as disparaging some groups.
I think it was so generic and so clearly a joke it would be insane to pretend it was making fun of a group that existed in real life.
For reference in the talk he also listed strongly typed languages as "weekly typed", static as dynamic, and had a MacBook on stage display a BSOD.
The talk was comedic genius and a fun tongue in cheek commentary on the industry in 8 minutes. But it has been deemed to dangerous to society to be allowed to exist.
Is this a real thing that happened? It's framed as a young child making a lot of misconceptions, you'd have to be pretty darn sensitive to get offended by that.
Look, I don't know the video but how do we know - or why do we assume - that it was taken down out of fear of future weaponized wokeness? Maybe Gary took it down for Gary's reasons.
Edit: from the couple of descriptions in this thread I could totally envision an empathetic individual waking up one day and deciding that talk felt too much like punching down and taking it down because they felt like they could do better.
It’s funny how all the comments here are falling in the trap described in the beginning of the article of disliking Ballmer because he comes from the sales side and they can’t fathom someone not coming from the tech side leading a tech company.
What’s undeniable in the article is that Ballmer literally built what remains Microsoft best asset even before being a CEO there: it’s incredibly good relationship with its corporate customers. Honestly, it’s really what sets Microsoft apart for me. When you do deal with them as a corporate customer, you really get the feeling that they understand the way things work in a big corp IT department and will be reliable and predictable.
When you do deal with them as a corporate customer, you really get the feeling that they understand the way things work in a big corp IT department and will be reliable and predictable.
Just got done negotiating our E5 license last year and omfg is this laugh-out-loud untrue. Don't even get me started on how we have to check the Azure websites before every meeting with our M$ counterparts to figure out what Azure services they've changed the name of since the last call.
But yes, completely agree it's the corporate customers that are the wind beneath their sales. But it's because they understand that for almost any large corp IT department on the planet, telling the 85% of their employees who don't give a steaming crap what the nerds think about Windows or Ballmer, "you have to dump Excel & Word and learn something else"[1] is not a hill any of them are willing to die on. We have people that won't use Excel on a Mac because once they found a place where it didn't work exactly like the Windows version.
[1] No. LibreOffice is not the answer.
> We have people that won't use Excel on a Mac because once they found a place where it didn't work exactly like the Windows version.
Then again, Excel on a Mac is significantly inferior to the Windows version to be honest.
> Don't even get me started on how we have to check the Azure websites before every meeting with our M$ counterparts to figure out what Azure services they've changed the name of since the last call.
Not my experience at all and we spend millions of dollars a year with them.
Not my experience at all
Really? You mean you missed Azure AD renamed to Entra ID? How about Microsoft Azure Security Center + Azure Defender combined into Azure Defender for Cloud? All the products that were "Azure Defender something" that became "Microsoft Defender something"? Yammer -> Viva? MyAnalytics -> Viva Insight? How about the 20-something products that changed to the "Microsoft Purview" branding.
By our count, Microsoft renamed something like Azure 60 products in the last 5 years. And you didn't "experience" any of that?
we spend millions of dollars a year with them
Oh my...I sure hope you don't think spending "millions" of dollars a year with Microsoft makes you special; our mid-8-figure USD yearly spend sure doesn't move us to the front of too many lines. But they do let us know when they change product names...
I wouldn’t use that language exactly. I think they’ve set up a very effectively profitable relationship with the industry - part carrot and part stick. But I don’t think AWS usage would’ve exploded as it did if their clients truly felt both respected and understood.
AWS was the first mover, and they execute very well on products. Despite this, AWS market share has been pretty flat for a while.
Azure was a second mover. Microsoft executes on platform and partner ecosystem very well. Azure is still growing market share pretty quickly.
Yeah so you're basically saying Microsoft is a perfect company for sales focussed companies that need some technical stack.
Fair enough
What Dan doesn't mention is that Steve was given the reins to a sinking ship if I recall.
The US Govt was just finishing it's trial on Microsoft & was watching them closely.
Tech bubble just burst.
On day 1 of the transition after Steve, the stock jumped like crazy & continued that momentum. The stock was, as Dan mentions, at an unfairly low p/e ratio too.
Idk if Steve was great but seems he was given the role of transition CEO. Plus did Bill ever really leave?
It'll be interesting to see how Satya finishes his career & the first few years after. Microsoft was making really good software the first few years after Satya took over & a lot of people were wanting to work there. Since Covid though, their software quality & updates have crashed imo.
> On day 1 of the transition after Steve, the stock jumped like crazy & continued that momentum.
Many people would interpret that as "investors had no faith in Steve Ballmer and were delighted to see his back." Do you have a different interpretation?
Also, you seem to be implying that the trial was some external event, and not directly the fault of Bill and Steve. That is not how most people felt at the time.
> Many people would interpret that as "investors had no faith in Steve Ballmer and were delighted to see his back." Do you have a different interpretation?
You're 100% right. Starbucks just did something similar. I personally don't believe these jumps are warranted until the new CEO proves their ability to change the ship. It would be really interesting to hear from Microsoft insiders what changes were being made before the CEO changeover & what ones were heavily done by Satya.
> Also, you seem to be implying that the trial was some external event, and not directly the fault of Bill and Steve. That is not how most people felt at the time.
While many people may have felt they were being very anti-competitive at the time, the same standard has not been held to other companies or Microsoft much over the past 20 years in the United States.
> implying that the trial was some external event
In many ways, it was. The political stars aligned "just so", in a way we've not really seen before or since. Many, many other companies got away with much more egregious behaviour (hello, Apple).
Apple does not have the percentage ownership of the market that Microsoft had with both Windows and Office. And to my knowledge Apple operates out in the open, i.e. they do not lie to everyone, and do not bundle shitty products with monopoly products in the way that Microsoft habitually did - and may still do.
He's underrated in the sense that a lot of CEOs of his era completely destroyed their companies, see Intel, GE, GM, Yahoo, etc and he didn't. So that's already a win, he set up the company in a decent position so that when someone with more vision takes over they'll have something to work with, even if he didn't have the talent to pull things off himself. He had a couple of wins (Azure, Office 365) along with many many losses, and they're good enough to secure him a 6/10 on my ratings.
If you trust the article, then Azure and O365 are each, independently, easily Fortune 100 companies if separated. These "couple of wins along with many many losses" are some of the most valuable products in the world.
Imagine a VC fund that invested in a few dozen product companies, two of which were Azure and O365. Is that a 6/10 VC company? Why is the logic different for a CEO making bets for a company's next several decades?
Because the company has more strategic resources than a VC, and has need to defend existing businesses.
MS should've been able to simply just extend their OS monopoly into all platforms and all architectures, but they didn't, and to a vast swath of the world have become irrelevant, and worse, have lost their ability to become relevant.
It's a decline from being the monopolist to simply a player, sure they executed well in enterprise sales and was fast in picking up OpenAI, but they have lost the ability to use their strategic resources to save xbox, help azure overcome competition, or push a mixer or Surface or whatever.
Edit: For people who don't understand the last sentence think about the way that O365 was able to help MS push Teams to stave off Zoom and others despite being objectively trash. MS should've been able to keep control of the internet, but they lost their moat to Google (Chrome), and the same story for various consumer products. Bing was a decent win but with a better consumer story they should've also been able to threaten social and youtube and so on. But now they're completely irrelevant there.
> MS should've been able to simply just extend their OS monopoly into all platforms and all architectures, but they didn't, and to a vast swath of the world have become irrelevant, and worse, have lost their ability to become relevant.
Microsoft is, pretty famously, on the receiving end of one of the most significant antitrust judgments in modern history. Choosing to further a monopoly seems that it would be a phenomenally bad decision for the company.
Despite that, Windows remains the dominant operating system for businesses worldwide. So I would argue that the OS is far from "irrelevant".
Beyond the OS, they are comfortably #2 in the public cloud market, with little threat from #3. Indeed, #1 has been relatively stagnant in market share, while Azure has been steadily growing.[0] It seems that a consistently growing market share in such a large industry shows that not only are they relevant, but they are becoming more so, and have not "lost their ability to become relevant". Additionally, it seems that they are "overcoming competition".
> It's a decline from being the monopolist to simply a player ....
> MS should've been able to keep control of the internet, but they lost their moat to Google (Chrome),
They legally could not maintain that monopoly. Again, see the antitrust ruling. The antitrust case was about the impact on Netscape, and was too late to save Netscape. But it is a pretty straight line from a case about bundling IE with the OS.
To be clear, the finding in this case originally held that Microsoft needed to be broken up.[1] Microsoft won on appeal, because of impropriety by the original judge in the case, but the appeals court upheld all findings of fact.[2]
Much of what you are saying Microsoft should have been able to do on the basis of their OS monopoly would have been begging for further antitrust action.
> Bing was a decent win
Bing, on its own, would be the 12th largest tech company in the world, per the original article.
And Microsoft is worth $3T today, largely on the basis of investment under Ballmer (and continued strong execution under Satya). Is the argument that Microsoft should instead be a $10T or $100T market cap company today if you graded Ballmer better than a D?
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/967365/worldwide-cloud-i...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...
I don't buy the "MS purposefully let IE die to avoid anti-trust" story. Ballmer was an enterprise sales guy, no wonder his enterprise software business did great, IE lacked focus and died. Just keeping IE around, they didn't have to kill Google, but just keeping it around would've been interesting in 2020 as they can conceivably use it to move onto rivals. Similarly, windows phone didn't die because of anti-trust but because of Ballmer failure. Windows server is a fail because of Ballmer. Yes MS should've been a ~6T company today. Operating systems were their territory and Ballmer lost ground. There are 6ish other major battlefields: search, e-commerce, social, consumer devices, enterprise software, cloud. Ballmer lost 4/6 despite major advantages going into the last 4 of these.
I'll give credit to Ballmer for being early enough on supporting Azure where it's ahead of GCP, but for how well Azure is doing now that's on Nadella.
Am I supposed to give Ballmer credit for Bing? I'm not going to do so. With enough money any CEO would've been able to crank out a Bing (Same way I'm not impressed by Tim Cook's Apple Watch).
Was there ever a world where a proprietary OS could win out against Linux? Or for that matter, a proprietary DB as opposed to MySQL/Postgres.
If it's better, by tying it in with your other products, by making it compatible with the market, and by building an ecosystem moat on top of it. You can also lower the price to capture marketshare. Plenty of proprietary systems won despite being late and the open source system had become incumbent. See discord/slack, MATLAB, Spotify.
If Windows Server had a better DX, had supported everything Linux did, AND had proprietary features on top of that, it would've done well I reckon.
See my sibling comment. Windows Server dominates server OS revenue share at ~70%. They get most of the money that people are willing to spend on server OSes.
In addition on-prem Windows Server share is 70%+ as of 2023 of all Server usage.
> I don't buy the "MS purposefully let IE die to avoid anti-trust" story
I don't know who you'd buy it from, certainly not me. If that's what you've read into my comment, that is reflective of your perspective, not mine. IE was never that good. It was bundled with the predominant operating system, so had massive market share. As soon as Microsoft had to open the OS more and draw a line between OS and IE, it was pretty much inevitable that there would be other browsers. And too-aggressive positioning of IE would be highly legible to regulators.
I agree that, absent regulatory scrutiny, Microsoft could have flexed muscle here to effect different outcomes in the general internet space. I disagree that such a decision would be a good idea for Microsoft in the climate of the aughts.
Server market share is tougher to find, but it appears that Microsoft captures a large majority of revenue in the server OS space. I know the install base proportion is smaller than the revenue proportion, but it seems to me that they are capturing most of the market willing to pay for a server OS.[0]
As to your 7 major battlefields and Microsoft's major advantages:
1. Operating systems. Most other major OS vendors collapsed or were collapsing in the 90s. It seems naive to expect that there would continue to be no pressure on the OS front. Part of their dominance was circumstantial. Nevertheless, they continued to dominate desktop market share and server market share (both by revenue). Losing install share to OSes that people don't pay for is expected, especially as those options improve.
Apple came over to x86, making MacOS (again, an OS that people don't pay directly for) much more viable, because application developers no longer had to target two ISAs.
And mobile came to the fore. Consumer devices is a separate category, though.
Overall, I'd consider this a win for Microsoft and a continuing area of dominance, in the face of many new entrants and threats: ChromeOS; tablets becoming a viable option; Linux becoming usable for laypeople; and much of computing moving to the browser such that the OS doesn't matter as much, yet Windows still dominates when OS doesn't matter.
2. Search. Google was already positioned for market dominance in the early 2000s. Microsoft began their indexing project in the early 2000s. Other players entered and left the market. Amazon had a search engine, and they are all about the consumer market (especially before AWS). That folded in the mid aughts. Yahoo collapsed. AOL, Excite, Lycos, and many others failed. Yahoo now uses Bing's index. DuckDuckGo uses Bing's index.
Bing is a solid #2 in search, earning $10Bs annually. That is an entire business.
Microsoft started from a disadvantage on search and is #2. #2 is not a loss. Also definitely not an overwhelming victory, but the world is not binary. Writing off a business with $10Bs of revenue as a loss seems absurd ... may we all be so blessed as to lose like this.
3. E-commerce. Amazon was already positioned for dominance and was solely focused on this for the early aughts, and primarily focused on this for the duration of the aughts. Microsoft had no major presence here.
To make significant headway, Microsoft would have had to go against one of the most single-minded and aggressive companies that was out there. (Amazon is less single-minded today). And we know what Amazon's successful strategy is in retail, and that is essentially no profit. Microsoft, both in terms of its corporate culture and in terms of its major shareholders, would never have been able to compete with Amazon in that way.
Microsoft had no major advantage here. This is certainly not a win, but they didn't want a piece of it anyway.
4. Social. Do we count messengers as social media? If yes, then yeah Microsoft had MSN messenger. If we don't count messaging, then they had no specific expertise or advantage here. In fact, many of their attempts at more lighthearted computing were panned: clippy, Microsoft Bob, Comic Sans. Microsoft has always been nerdy and never cool until others made nerds cool.
Regardless, they purchased Skype and LinkedIn and have a combined MAU of ~1.2B, putting them comfortably in the top 10 of social media companies.[1] I'll note that this list includes Teams, but I'm going to count that as enterprise software, because it is included with almost every O365 SKU.
LinkedIn was a Satya purchase, so Ballmer can't get credit there. Nevertheless, I wouldn't argue that Microsoft had a major advantage for social media. I'd agree that they lost in this space.
Arguably you could put github in here, too, but also a Satya acquisition.
5. Consumer devices. Microsoft is a software company to its bones. Windows was a definite advantage here. But Microsoft does not have a strong history of device manufacture to lean on. They tried to acquire for this with Nokia. And yeah, they failed here.
Again, though, they were against one of the most single-minded and aggressive companies out there, this time Apple. And Apple already had the pedigree for prestige consumer devices. Apple was defining hip and cool with regard to technology through the aughts. Again, Microsoft is neither.
Additionally, they were up against another competitor for whom smart phone market share was an existential concern, Google. Google does not have the single-minded focus of Apple, but when it comes to threats to their core business (selling ads), they can execute well enough.
Microsoft does not have the single-minded focus of Apple, nor did they have the fundamental imperative to make something work on mobile that Google had. Still, Microsoft should have done better here, and in fact Windows Phone OS and devices were largely well reviewed. Nevertheless, they couldn't make headway against their rivals.
Microsoft had an advantage here and lost.
6. Enterprise software. Microsoft was the dominant player and remains the dominant player in this space. O365 is undisputed. You will pry Excel from many people's cold, dead hands. Microsoft may not be cool, but no other tech company has a product on ESPN. The Excel championship is something else.
And I will note, specifically, that O365 began under Ballmer.
Microsoft is also a huge player in data platforms. They have specific product wins and losses, but as a whole, they do very well in this space. Data is a specific niche of mine, and I can tell you that there is no other vendor than Microsoft that companies will routinely go all-in on for their data platform. Don't get me wrong, this is not the norm, but I only ever see it happen on Microsoft, never for another vendor's platform all-in.
I covered Windows Server above, but again I will note that they capture a large majority of server OS revenue share (which I argue is the category to measure this in).
Microsoft is a dominant player in this space, and I would count this as a win. It was part of their core business, and that business tripled sales and doubled profit under Ballmer.
7. Cloud. Amazon moved first. Microsoft followed quickly. They are #2 in the market and growing fast. Google is no threat to either Azure or AWS. Alibaba probably will be in the next 10 years.
Azure would not exist in the way it does today without significant investment under Ballmer.
#2 for a second mover (using "second" as "non-first", here) is not at all a loss. And threatening to overtake the first mover is a powerful position to be in.
I expect you'll disagree that any #2 position is worthwhile, or at least that seems to be your stance.
Regardless, I'd put the counts as:
Advantage: 4: OS, Enterprise software, cloud, consumer devices
Disadvantage: Search, E-commerce, Social
Competed: 6: OS, Enterprise software, cloud, consumer devices, search, social (questionable)
Success: 4/5: OS, Enterprise software, Cloud, Search, Social (social only by acquisition, mostly post-Ballmer, but they were in a position to make multi-billion dollar acquisitions, so Ballmer can't have ruined things)
Failure: 1/2: Consumer devices, Social (if you want to argue that only Satya's acquisitions count, and no credit toward Ballmer).
Did not compete: E-commerce
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/915085/global-server-sha...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_...
> I don't know who you'd buy it from, certainly not me. If that's what you've read into my comment, that is reflective of your perspective, not mine. IE was never that good. It was bundled with the predominant operating system, so had massive market share. As soon as Microsoft had to open the OS more and draw a line between OS and IE, it was pretty much inevitable that there would be other browsers. And too-aggressive positioning of IE would be highly legible to regulators.
I was not thinking about being more aggressive with bundling, but was commenting on the quality of IE. Not sure why you're giving a pass on IE sucking. It's not a coincidence that Ballmer, the Enterprise sales guy, developed an excellent enterprise sales machine at Microsoft. If he were a good tech guy he would've developed good tech there too. So yes, that Microsoft's tech sucked is on him.
There's a certain inertia to a huge company, if we're talking about executive wins I expect something above what I consider the bare minimum. For example everyone agrees that Intel is a failed company, but if you actually look at them they still have majority marketshare of x86 CPUs in both client and server. So would you say that they successfully defended their traditional business or would you call them a failure? I think it's pretty clear that if you strip away everything else about MS, and just look at Windows by its lonesome, it would be considered a loss today. It's only bigger by dint of the entire market being larger. But in the market it has lost a lot of power vs the day Ballmer started.
So
1. OS - Loss IMO.
2. Search - Loss, similarly to above Bing is a bare minimum for what I expect a company of this size to do. Look at Sogou vs Baidu in China for example for what other companies are able to achieve. But all in all I'm knocking Ballmer less for Bing than for how late Bing was. For 9 years of his time as CEO we had trash MSN as MS's search engine and the default through IE. Gave away all that time to Google to build incumbency, develop an ecosystem around gmail, etc, and grow their cash position. IE was a huge advantage for a long time... but by the time Bing came out it had eroded and Google Chrome was released. Microsoft was in a great advantageous position due to their Windows monopoly but acted too late to serve relevant products.
3. E-commerce - Loss, I wasn't thinking about competing with Amazon but more the Windows Store, bookings.com, airbnb, and steam. Why did the windows store take until the app store to come out to copy them? Why did steam come out in 2003 and Microsoft did nothing? It's because Ballmer isn't smart enough to understand how these things work. By the time windows store came out it was very late, and once again the software sucked. Owning the operating system was an advantage that a good CEO could've made something of, and he didn't.
4. Social - Loss, yeah MSN was a huge deal, along with windows to push it and later acquisition of skype, MS certainly did try. You can also consider something like Steam or xbox Live to be a social network. Regardless went nowhere and loss of opportunity. Certainly he made acquisitions too late and failed to make much of the social networks he had. Also anyone could've bought Instagram, anyone could've bought Youtube, he just didn't. Bought Skype instead. Sure after him there's more acquisitions but it has nothing to do with this discussion really.
5. Consumer devices - Loss, this one I'm most willing to give him a pass on actually. MS is mostly a software company, and partnerships are hard. But Zune was an alright product, and here is mostly a marketing fail. But wouldn't you place blame for bad marketing on the CEO? You can also imagine there's a lot more you can do with Zune. Microsoft had xbox too but never tried to get these parts together, letting Nintendo DS take the handheld market. Today zune is dead and xbox is not successful.
6. Enterprise Software - Unequivocal win, probably the best thing Ballmer did and most of his score.
7. Cloud - Win, acted not too late and was okay with it, Nadella fixed it though.
So definitely I would put E-commerce and social up into "advantaged but loss" and I tried to explain why I count search and OS as loss.
> For example everyone agrees that Intel is a failed company...
You are literally the first person I've ever seen say this. It is definitely not true that everyone agrees with you on that.
> For example everyone agrees that Intel is a failed company, but if you actually look at them they still have majority marketshare of x86 CPUs in both client and server. So would you say that they successfully defended their traditional business or would you call them a failure?
I do not think we live in the same world. As one data point, the majority of analysts still list Intel as a buy or a hold.[0] In the very same industry, AMD showed us that it can take more than a decade to turn around a poor architectural turn in semiconductor manufacturing. Their stock price peaked at the beginning of 2006 and then were in the doldrums until 2017-2018 (depending when you want to count their return). It may well turn out that we are witnessing Intel's death spiral, but to claim that with certainty, and further to ascribe that belief to "everyone" tells me that we see the world incredibly differently.
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/INTC/analysis/
What does analyst have to do with anything? Intel can still be a buy even if it's failed because it's either very cheap or there's the possibility of geopolitics or acquisitions. In fact being failed sometimes makes it even easier to buy.
It's obviously failed even beyond the massive share loss in the semi industry. It's stock price is down 60% since 2018 (not even a particularly interesting year), and its value is now literally lower than its book price. That's when you know everyone agrees it's a piece of junk.
> > MS should've been able to simply just extend their OS monopoly into all platforms and all architectures, but they didn't, and to a vast swath of the world have become irrelevant, and worse, have lost their ability to become relevant.
> Microsoft is, pretty famously, on the receiving end of one of the most significant antitrust judgments in modern history. Choosing to further a monopoly seems that it would be a phenomenally bad decision for the company.
They tried and failed to extend their OS to other platforms and architectures many times. That they weren't successful wasn't due to some big brained decision to avoid antitrust issues. They just couldn't execute.
Windows runs in more places than it probably should. And the OS is just fine on other platforms. Windows on ARM works quite well. As I understand it, it worked just fine on Itanium. NT launched with support for PowerPC. I'm sure RISC-V support will be there pretty quickly. NT was designed for this sort of portability.
Most user software is not ready for the transition. Microsoft doesn't impose the same kind of control over its application ecosystem as Apple does. This prevents Microsoft from being able to make architectural shifts like Apple has. Arguably, this more open and flexible ecosystem (and bending over backward compatibility) has been one of the driving factors in Windows's popularity over MacOS. I have no strong opinion about which is a better business strategy.
Irrelevant unless you happen to use LinkedIn, Github, or vscode, or own an xbox. Or you use openai’s products
I said operating system, and all those things except xbox are after ballmer...
Stagnating your company into a "lost decade" while not technically going bankrupt barely counts as a "win."
I was at Microsoft under both Ballmer and Nadella leadership.
Ballmer was stuck on the old ways. I was connected to a team that had made iOS office apps but Ballmer blocked because MSFT jewel apps on Apple meant Apple would gain marketshare over Windows Mobile. That team was fairly pissed and some folks quit.
Nadella was leading cloud division at that time, but they were not getting the firepower to go against AWS. Azure succeeded despite Ballmer. Nadella clearly saw Cloud was going to be the next big revenue firehose.
Ballmer closely held onto Windows walled garden. His bet on acquiring Nokia and Skype had spectacularly failed. Android and iOS had won, they entirely lost on Windows Mobile.
VSCode had just started but it was seen as an experiment and the sentiment was it could absolutely not jeopardize actual Visual Studio. Linux was seen a competitor to Windows.
Under Nadella, he saw an entirely different Microsoft. He was playing bets on the future, while Ballmer held onto the past. The game had changed.
Nadella didn't care about Windows walled garden. He wanted Microsoft on every platform where developers and Enterprises were. VSCode wanted to cannibalize VS go for it. MSFT apps on iOS go for it. Linux on Windows, go for it. All of MSFT switches to git, to for it. Acquire github and cannibalize Azure pipelines, go for it. Use chromium base for Edge instead of mshtml, go for it. Nadella made good bets over and over again. Ballmer doesn't have the same record.
Nadella + Scott Guthrie went all out on Azure to be #2. The infra spend alone was in billions. Remains to be seen how OpenAI bet pans out.
Ah, rose colored glasses never get old :)
He was a CEO, that much can be said. The rest is up for debate.
> Even Bing, widely considered a failure, on last reported revenue and current P/E ratio, would be 12th most valuable tech company in the world, between Tencent and ASML.
A tiny slice of the search market (4% IIRC) is worth this much? Incredible. Everyone knows Google is swimming in money, but I guess it never really computed for me that managing to grab a tiny slice of the search market would be so valuable. If I was making a guess prior to reading this, my intuition would have been that Bing was some kind of loss leader. Shows what I know! Hah
There are a lot of services that just repackage and resell Bing! DuckDuckGo being probably the most successful example.
Which, to OP's point, is a testament to the particular style of business that Ballmer was good at - building enterprise and partner channels.
Bing Ads is big business. Digital marketing is enormous. Google and Facebook have larger portions of the pie, but a sliver of a huge pie is still a lot of pie.
"To sum it up, for the past twenty years, people having been dunking on Ballmer for being a buffoon who doesn't understand tech and who was, at best, some kind of bean counter who knew how to keep the lights on but didn't know how to foster innovation and caused Microsoft to fall behind in every important market."
It's important to keep the lights on while waiting for the next new development to take off. I think it's an undervalued skill.
He didn’t keep the lights on while waiting for new development to take off. He actively lost 40+ billion dollars on horrible acquisitions, and actively stifled internal innovation to ensure existing product lines weren’t threatened.
On the sales side he streamlined Microsoft into a single monolithic sales motion that killed dozens of products before they started because the target customer/market didn’t fit the EA model.
This included Azure that took nearly a decade after his departure to unwind so the sales force could actually sell consumption based products and services.
I honestly can’t think of anything substantially positive he achieved in his tenure other than promoting Satya and Scott G and a handful of others.
All of the contemporary media reports don’t know about the laundry list of near sighted, anti competitive, anti innovation shit he put on the company.
> I honestly can’t think of anything substantially positive he achieved in his tenure other than promoting Satya and Scott G and a handful of others.
Ok, but apart from fostering a great generation of new executives, investing in currently extremely profitable products and business lines, streamlining our sales operations and getting us out of these life threatening antitrust cases, what did Steve Ballmer ever do for us?
Underrated? He is properly rated in the sense that he owns 10s of billions even though he singlehandedly killed the windows smartphone and tablet business and also killed Nokia. Granted that apple killed them but with Microsoft’s resources there was no reason to just give up like they did. Buying Nokia was a historic bad decision that screams he didn’t understand the business at all. There was a huge opportunity to just emulate apple and just suck in all of the corporate market in one swoop and add them to their recurring revenue office service but Ballmer didn’t see it. He just saw them as phones and hardware.
I read the entire article, and I love how virtually every comment here is what Dan wrote about.
Also, I agree with the gist of the article, in that a lot of Nadella's success is stuff that takes more than 3-4 years to execute.
Ballmer, or Microsoft under Ballmer, had to have been laying the groundwork for Azure, TypeScript and VS code before they took off under Nadella.
> Ballmer, or Microsoft under Ballmer, had to have been laying the groundwork for Azure, TypeScript and VS code before they took off under Nadella.
More specifically: Nadella under Ballmer laid the groundwork for those things.
Dan lists three big wins for Ballmer: Bing, Azure, Office365.
Nadella led Bing and Azure. Not sure where Office365 sat in the org chart, but even if he wasn't managing it a _lot_ of services at Microsoft at that time relied on technology that was developed in Bing and Azure.
He was promoted for good reason.
Good point. I wasn't aware of that, and I think it should have been mentioned in the blog post.
But weren't those the areas Nadella was over before becoming CEO? One could argue that Nadella was laying his own groundwork.
Baller was the right CEO for 90s Microsoft up through about 2002. He was the wrong CEO for 2010-onward Microsoft but it took a chunk of years for the board to realize that.
Gates was CEO during the 90s.
WSJ had a great write-up that was very interesting about the plans Ballmer was trying to get rolling. I really gained additional respect for him after reading this.
He wanted to overhaul the company, but realized people would struggle doing so while he was in charge. He realized sometimes you have to let someone else do it.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303460004579194... [archive here](https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pdfiles/cfovhds/weekly...)
No he wasn’t haha. The only thing he did was slide the company sideways via pre existing illegal monopoly. In fact, they lost most of their monopoly under his supervision . At no point did the quality of their products improve, and that’s evidenced with this year’s massive massive Windows outage, or Garmins mega ransomware, out a hundred other people who’ve been hacked via Windows.
If you’re running Windows for anything, it’s only a matter of when, not if.
Agreed. He was the "put windows everywhere" guy because he forgot that Microsoft and Windows weren't the same thing and thus he failed Microsoft AND Windows.
Microsoft is a software company, they sell software (and now software services). Steve thought that because their main product was Windows, that Windows was the only product that mattered and everything else had to depend on being run on Windows. Office sells very well on Macs. Office in the browser is really improving every year. XBox 360 was a huge hit while not really running "Windows" at all, just a related kernel and DirectX APIs; it wasn't even x86!
Steve made MS a Windows First company, and the entire company stagnated for years. He may have been a great number two to BillG but that doesn't mean he was suited to being CEO. Being the XO is a very different job from being the Captain, and a lot of times they take two very different types of people.
I'm assuming that "this years massive Windows outage" refers to the Crowdstrike thing, which wouldn't have happened if Microsoft had been able to lock down the kernel, which antitrust regulators prohibited. (The essay extensively deals with antitrust, I'm sure you have thoughts on this.)
Only if you believe that executing in the kernel is necessary and that there could not be another way to do this, with public interfaces.
At this point I wonder if half the commenters have read the article.
I wonder if Windows is even their flagship app any more. I think people will give up Windows before they give up Excel. And they might not even notice a different OS, so long as it had the same file manager. In fact Excel is the last non-FOSS app that I still use, even if sporadically.
Don't forget gaming. Gaming on Linux is possible but Windows still has the advantage in both software and hardware support.
I particularly like the video series from LinusTechTips where they try to use Linux as their daily driver because it is very telling. They manage to do stuff, but it isn't great. I find it interesting because it is done from the point of view of computer enthusiasts but not IT professionals or programmers. The kind who know about the command line, but are not very comfortable with it and would rather do without.
I don't think calling gaming on linux "possible" gives it the justice it deserves, with the arrival of the Steam Deck and all the improvements Valve contributed to the upstream. The experience is practically _seamless_.
I agree though that linux _on desktop_ is pretty janky, or at least it always was for me, having tried daily driving numerous distros.
>The experience is practically _seamless_.
IF you buy through Steam. IF you have an AMD GPU. IF by seamless you mean that regardless of the aforementioned BIG assumptions you still have to go and play with winetricks or whatever to get some stuff working and it can take you hours of tinkering.
Okay, that's fair enough. Though even if you have a game that you bought outside of Steam, you can add it as a non-Steam game to benefit from the compatibility layer and all the bells and whistles.
It's only seamless if you buy everything through Steam. Third-party stores need not apply.
So, steamless is not seamless.
http://www.gnumeric.org
I still use it, it seems a little stagnant in development nowadays. No ssl on the website etc.
The free software distros really lost something going all in on open/libre office which is just not nearly as good as a replacement for excel. I think if it was still the free software goto, installed by default first choice etc there would be more development. The feature list and quality is impressive and has been for many years.
For better or worse, my last Excel use case involves a VB macro that I don't want to re-write, and printing to a Dymo label printer, for putting serial number labels in my product. For anything else, I now use Python.
In some ways Office is actually superior on macOS. The fact that it still has a menu bar being my favorite thing it does better.
It used to have much funkier icons as well! Sadly not anymore.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_for_Mac_201...
Indeed, MacOS was where I first experienced Excel with VB macros, which is when it came alive.
Give them LibreOffice - Calc and most won't care.
My mom is happy with LibreOffice. For myself, I try it every few years (usually when there's some big announcement) to see if it's improved. There's some kind of latency in the UI that makes it laborious, if not painful, to use. And recalculating a large spreadsheet, or reformatting a graph, takes an eon. I found that out when trying to graph data sets with thousands of rows. Now I use Python.
This may be a place where the major paid apps still have an advantage. I think that MS sweats the details of Office the way that Apple sweats the details of the iPhone, and it's laborious work that can only be done by hiring a huge army of programmers and paying them a lot.
Default UI configuration in LibreCalc is such that until recently it always resulted in enraged searching of the MS Office support status in Wine.
Funnily enough recently I found out the UI style switch and lo and behold, when you switch from default to emulating Excel 2007 ribbon, the critical "cell data type" button is front and center just like it was in every version of excel since 1997 that I have used.
Windows Desktop still feels very important to them. Windows Server on the other hand feels very "Fine, since you are willing to pay for it." Thud "Is there any features?" "More money and your welcome I'm even giving this to you."
Ballmer's tenure started with XP and eventually gave us Windows 7. Nadella gave us 10 and 11. Though 10 was largely developed under Ballmer before its initial launch, it's been under Nadella's stewardship ever since. I'll take Ballmer, thanks.
Ballmer also gave us the maligned Windows Vista and Windows 8. Microsoft has also been way more open source friendly during Nadella's tenure, whereas Ballmer was openly hostile to FOSS. I'll take Nadella, thanks (although he should fix his user-hostile spyware).
Windows 8 was misguided but not user-hostile. I miss not being repeatedly asked by my OS to create an account or share my data. If it was a human doing it rather than software I am not sure it would be legal.
These are both valid takes really. I'll take neither Ballmer nor Nadella thanks.
WinXP was developed mostly during Gates' tenure. Ballmer is responsible for the disastrous Windows Vista, Microsoft phone operating systems, and Windows 8.
You mean the best mobile phone OS that we ever had? Unfortunately disastrously managed and then squandered, but still.
Also, Vista was a mess, but it was ambitious and it laid the foundation for 7 and it was only around for a few years before being replaced. Unlike 10, where Nadella has doubled down on the worst choices and even worse ones were made going into 11 (HOW THE FUCK DO YOU SET DEFAULT APPLICATIONS NOW, THIS IS FUCKING NONSENSE).
> that’s evidenced with this year’s massive massive Windows outage, or Garmins mega ransomware, out a hundred other people who’ve been hacked via Windows
Window's massive install base is not really a testament to their failure.
Steve Ballmer has not been CEO for a decade. At 10 years later it is very much Nadella's ship.
Still Bill Gates: "Bill Gates never left - Insiders say he's still pulling the strings at Microsoft" - https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-still-pulling-str...
I remember when he retired and the MSFT jumped. Satya is underrated.
Satya's tenure has seen the fall of Xbox, the lost relevance of Windows. While moving to a services model is going to be very lucrative for them, they risk competitors offering swap-out models.
The fall of Xbox started with the Xbox One, which was developed and released while Ballmer was CEO. They put an enormous amount of investment into that console, but made some bad calls in both its development and marketing that put them in a deep hole that they've been unable to get out of since. The increasing backwards compatibility of modern consoles means that the current 4th generation Xbox is paying for the sins of the 3rd generation in addition to dealing with its own struggles. Really the only thing that can fix the situation is money, but the business is probably under pressure to show profits after two decades of heavy investment with minimal return.
I don't necessarily think you can blame Ballmer for the missteps the Xbox team made, but I definitely think you can't blame Nadella.
Yes, one can't blame Ballmer for the missteps of the Xbox team directly (that honor goes to Don Mattrick, VP in charge of IEB at the time of the Xbox One launch). Divisional VPs get a lot of latitude in how they run their org. However, Ballmer does have to accept ultimate responsibility for allowing Mattrick to head up IEB and how long he allowed him to stay there.
I agree with this. And it wasn't just Don Mattrick. Late in Ballmer's tenure there were a lot of VPs with poor track records who weren't being held accountable (or, in some cases, were being given more responsibility). Microsoft is still feeling the impact of those people today.
Out of curiosity, what do you see as the fall of Xbox? It seems to work fine to play games, even if they had missteps with certain things (eg. Kinect being deprecated after being mandatory, some hardware issues).
> Out of curiosity, what do you see as the fall of Xbox?
The ever-declining hardware revenue and market share. If the decline that started in 2013 continues long enough it will stop making sense for Microsoft to sell consoles at all. They seem to be planning for this, as they're clearly pivoting the Xbox business towards "content and services".
This is a stark contrast to how Xbox was positioned prior to the 3rd gen. Xbox One. They had taken significant market share away from PlayStation and they were expecting to continue to do so, particularly outside the USA. They were also trying to get a foothold in the household computing market (this market was in its infancy then, now: Alexa/Fire TV, Nest/Chromecast, Apple TV/HomePod). Those ambitions are gone.
Windows was already losing relevance in the data center when Nadya took over -because of Linux. At AWS in 2008 / 2009 adoption was all about LAMP stack - AWS's tools were all geared for LAMP. AWS offered some Windows + SQL Server licenses on their cloud, however it was a struggle to get a deal (any deal) with Microsoft.
On the mobile side Windows was losing relevance to iPhone - which Ballmer so famously derided.
Satya figured out that with cloud computing Microsoft would still interpose between hardware makers and the customer - and the results show. (Why hardware makers do not figure this out for themselves is a different topic..)
Valve figured it out when making the Steam Deck. But they're a brilliant exception that makes your point.
> Why hardware makers do not figure this out for themselves is a different topic
Have you _seen_ the typical software produced by hardware makers?
> the lost relevance of Windows.
Yes but this doesn't matter. The market has evolved.
macOS has also lost a lot of relevance in Apple's world, but it doesn't matter. Because they are raking it in by the billions on the iPhone.
In Apple's case, the lost relevance of one platform lead to the increase in relevance of another one - that they controlled. Microsoft has no such "luck".
Also, it does matter, because there's over a billion Windows PCs in active use. It's still relevant, but it's getting eroded. That's a huge issue.
Gamepass and the lack of first party exclusives both seem like moves to kill the console in the long term, but as of now it's still a serious competitor to playstation and switch no?
Nintendo's always been on its own for these sorts of things, but even the folks I know with an XBox just use their Playstation these days if they have both. XBox just isn't really in the conversation any more. That could totally change in another generation of consoles, but their position wasn't great coming into this generation and it doesn't feel like it's gotten any better.
Basic numbers I've been seeing on a quick search has PS5 almost doubling the Series X sales.
Not really. The only generation of Xbox that was competitive was the 360, which still came in third in sales, just not as distantly.
Having Halo as an exclusive was huge.
In which region? It's basically irrelevant outside the US.
XBox's irrelevance is thanks to Don Mattrick for ruining the XBox One release.
It is fair to point out that XBox continues to stagnate and despite many billions of dollars that Microsoft has pumped into gaming and acquiring numerous studios and publishers, they still have yet to succeed in that area.
Recall Recall??
The SDET role at Microsoft was eliminated under Satya and it shows in their products.
Satya’s success is built on stuff that began under Ballmer. Azure’s core services are all from Bing, which was something Ballmer pushed for.
Same culture at Azure: "Azure’s Security Vulnerabilities Are Out of Control" - https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/azures_vulnerabilities_ar...
Vista was released under his watch too.
Vista was underrated, too.
there was no windows outage
My understanding is that Azure became an incredibly profitable cloud platform once it became open to Linux, which was something done after Ballmer had stepped down and Nadella became CEO.
I'm still somewhat bitter about the failure of Windows Phone and can't believe it even happened. The iPhone wasn't even that good at the time and Android was a total mess. Microsoft dropped the ball on their first party app dev, and several flagship phones had great hardware but terrible driver support.
Microsoft clearly wasn't interested in the consumer market anymore and it shows through to today.
I worked at Nokia Maps at the time the Microsoft acquisition of the phone business was being negotiated. I never met Ballmer but I heard some stories of people that did. Intense guy apparently. I was at two joint meetings with MS to discuss some of the details of things related to the thing I was working on. Ultimately that wasn't transferred to MS.
MS made a big mess of the whole windows phone project. First it royally screwed Nokia over by deciding to do a big overhaul of Windows Phone OS internals and effectively leaving Nokia dead in the water with now obsolete products that they just launched. I'm sure this was intentional on Ballmer's side: weaken Nokia and acquire their phone business. But he threw out the baby with the bathwater. The first generation of windows phone was basically windows CE repackaged. The second one was a whole new kernel (windows NT based, I guess). The transition took crazy long. MS announced early and this made the old generation of Lumia phones a really hard sell. There was a vague promise of upgrades that of course never happened. And then the acquisition rumors destroyed the OEM ecosystem because they'd be competing with MS on phones.
Then MS bought what remained of Nokia's phone division and it got busy demolishing it right away (including an actual Nokia Android phone that existed). When Nadella inherited this train wreck, he unceremoniously put an end to the whole thing and fired pretty much the whole team. At that point it very little hope of catching up because the OEMs and users had left. As much as I loved Nokia, it was the right decision at that point. All the good stuff had long been killed/cancelled already.
It was Ballmer's fixation on Windows that led to this. Nokia had a bonafide Android competitor in the form of Meego. Backing Linux would have been the right move. Nadella might have approached this differently.
The Acquired podcast also supports this claim in a 2-part episode on Microsoft I’ll link below.
Their evidence is from interviews with current and former Microsoft employees who worked with Ballmer IIRC including Ballmer himself. They basically describe him as being the rock that cheerlead, navigated, and held the company together through a decade of legal troubles. He also started many important businesses like enterprise, gaming, and cloud.
https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/microsoft
> One part of the plan to kill Google was to redirect users who typed google.com into their address bar to MSN search.
Crazy they were ever considering this.
It's Microsoft
Folks have forgotten how truly aggressive Microsoft was pre-antitrust days.
I guess I'm getting old :P
The amazing thing about the internet is that it’s always just a matter of time before something negative gets completely reversed by someone. For every “best, coolest thing ever,” there will inevitably be an article arguing that it was all hype and actually the opposite.
And the same thing happens with a bad product / action eventually, there’s always an article attempting to redeem it.
Why is that? Is it just human nature driving our need to be heard and seen as visionaries?
Or maybe because there is many things that are vastly misunderstood because people prefer simple explainations and theories
In general people are scared of complexity
For politics: its bots setting a narrative. For temu dropshipping: its bots to make money.
I don't think Ballmer was underrated as CEO personally (windows phone lol) but goddamn he's the platonic ideal of a hype guy. The amount of energy and enthusiasm emanating from him is always incredible. I'd at least say theres a good chance he was instrumental in Microsoft being as successful as it was.
I disagree. Tech companies need tech leadership, and Ballmer didn't have the chops for that, or imagination either. He got some deals done, I'm sure.
How so? Missed mobile after working on it for a decade+ previously. Despite developers⁴ they didn't implement a decent terminal until a few years ago, thirty years late. Enough said.
It's probably better for the industry Ballmer was mediocre or worse. I'm often forced to do business with Microsoft already. His horrible deal to buy Yahoo would have improved the playing field further.
> Microsoft under Ballmer made deep, long-term bets that set up Microsoft for success in the decades after his reign
This is no doubt true.
Under Ballmer, Nadella "led a transformation of the company's business and technology culture from client services to cloud infrastructure and services." [0]
But the number of failed mobile (phone, small PC) initiatives and products, from long before the iPhone to multiple waves of multi-billion dollar write downs afterward, (phones, music players, ...) despite Ballmer clearly wanting Windows "everywhere", and no limit on his spending, was just as large of an opportunity, cyclically bungled for a couple decades.
I had one of the earlier generations/extinct-species of Windows phone. At the time I had given up on Palm following through on their great start, but found the Windows phone was just frustrating in other ways.
(I did have friends with Microsoft's last phone, and they really liked it. Just too late.)
Apples market cap today, approximately its iOS market cap, is a good proxy for the ball Ballmer couldn't stop dropping. Even when only his team was on the court.
So I give Ballmer a 5/10. :)
But any massive hypergrowth business, is still a massive hypergrowth business. Microsoft gets 10/10.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Nadella
There were a lot of mistakes by the Windows Phone division but ultimately WP had zero chance of succeeding with Google sabotaging access to YouTube and their other services.
Are you remembering Windows Mobile? That sucked, but Windows Phone did not (and was famously built by a totally different team). But it was too little, too late.
>Are you remembering Windows Mobile? That sucked, but Windows Phone did not (and was famously built by a totally different team)
This seems to show another of MS's big problems in those days: too many different products doing the same thing, and a lack of focus. IIRC, they went from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone (version x) and then to Windows Phone (version y, totally incompatible with version x). Each time, this alienated 3rd-party developers because all the apps they wrote wouldn't work on the all-new platform.
> (I did have friends with Microsoft's last phone, and they really liked it. Just too late.)
For me it was more his personality that made me dislike him. He acted like a baboon on stage. Nadella is much more composed and seems more intelligent as a result. I don't like that kind of extreme expression and this is important because I wouldn't respect such a leader at work. See also other stuff like the chair-throwing incident of course.
Also something I didn't see covered, this was also the dark age where Microsoft hated linux. Now they say they love Linux and there is certainly some affection going around (though I remain sceptical).
One thing I don't really like about Satya Nadella by the way, his AI strategy is a mess. They're slamming stuff on the market way too quickly (see the recall fiasco), they call everything 'copilot' so even their own people get confused which product does what because there are literally over 30 separate copilot products now. Stuff is changing by the day (until 2 weeks ago the copilot button controlled both consumer and corporate copilots, now it only works with consumer). It's the kind of overeager rush that makes it feel like nobody has a clue what they're doing anymore.
> One thing I don't really like about Satya Nadella by the way, his AI strategy is a mess. They're slamming stuff on the market way too quickly (see the recall fiasco)
Google did an even worse job in that regard, Gemini's reputation is still greatly tainted in the tech world despite now being competitive with the other frontier models.
I don't really agree. Google is great at AI development, they're just not so good at marketing.
And I think they're right not to push it too hard like MS is doing. Because the tech still needs work.
Personally I use neither, but I use llama locally which is amazingly good considering the limited resources it has to work with here.
What I'm getting is that Google did push too hard, they gave Bard/early Gemini demos when the product was still miles from ready and compared awfully to GPT, and they're still suffering from it.
Gemini is currently atrocious compared to Chatgpt, they cant even do a good integration with the data they have on other google products like search, maps, youtube, gmail, calendar.
The frontend of the B2C product, on desktop, sure. I was talking about the LLM itself, i.e. API-based usage. And there's a good number of tasks it's better at than any other model. Same goes for GPT and Claude FWIW, each have tasks they beat the competition on.
Even on the consumer side though, the overwhelming majority of usage will be through mobile apps, and I find the Gemini app significantly better than e.g. the Claude app - one of their two main competitors.
Is there a name for this phenomenon when past leaders are viewed in a better light than they objectively deserved? I see this in politics a lot (eg Dubya) but in business too.
I think this is a facet of human memory - eg thinking childhood was better than it was because the bad/boring parts aren’t memorable. I also get this with anxious/stressful periods of time, which are overwhelmingly bad at the time but very quickly forgotten.
Rosy retrospection? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection
Hagiography?
His biggest success was the failure to acquire Yahoo for 44 bn in 2008
He made Microsoft an insane amount of money when they were at their "least" coolest.
That takes some doing.
This is what I always said. Nadella ruined Microsoft for consumers. Ballmer literally saved the Xbox business during the RROD fiasco and he made sure Windows Phone could thrive - it was an established 3rd operating system in Europe with over 10% market share and it could've been more but Nadella killed it because it wasn't popular in the US. Also, Windows was definitely better under Ballmer.
We did get the Developers music video:
https://youtu.be/rRm0NDo1CiY
and for that I'm thankful.
And Domokun Developers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7ZDH45OAt8
The biggest problem with Ballmer's tenure was stack ranking, which led to the famous org chart where every org in MSFT points a gun at every org in MSFT.
Things like LINQ and VScode are very nice but they weren't created by Ballmer. Ballmer's org allowed them to flourish to the point where they needed serious capital, then the org gave them that capital. Sun was like that too, but ultimately the management at Sun failed in so many ways. It's not just the technologies you choose to invest in -- there's something more needed, and the nicest thing to say about Ballmer is that he didn't ruin MSFT. The nicest thing to say about Satya is that he made it a nice place to work at while also greatly growing MSFT's cloud business.
Intel also had the stack ranking. I think this management technique originated with Jack Welsh at GE. It does pit groups against each other. Even for individuals on the same team, it pays to sabotage each other's work. I heard of managers hiring people so that they could be offered up when layoffs came around. It was kind of like how the Celt's had human sacrifice. Families would adopt people so that they could be offered up if they were chosen to give a family member for sacrifice at a later date.
Amazon is famous for hiring to fire.
I wonder when the business schools will teach that stack ranking was a failed experiment?
Wow, gotta love the recent MS fanfic.
Ballmer was just an average sales jock along for the ride.
Edit: Seems like I was proven wrong. Assumptions are... assumptions :).
I don't have a strong opinion on his tenure at MSFT, but I don't know many sales jocks with a 1600 SAT score and a degree in applied math from Harvard.
Effective sales and marketing is more dependent on math than most people realize.
...how?
I get that it correlates with intelligence, but with math, specifically?
Lots of metrics to analyze and statistics to crunch. Knowing where to focus the schmoozing is as important as the schmoozing itself.
:-)
Good point.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2002/6/4/personable-ballm...
> In high school, Ballmer scored a 1600 on his SATs and was a National Merit Scholar.
Would the Crimson verify this or just trust the claim?
He's listed on their page:
https://www.nationalmerit.org/s/1758/interior.aspx?sid=1758&...
Thumbs up.
>Ballmer was just an average sales jock along for the ride.
Classic "nerd" prejudice; Ballmer was not dumb.
Two small anecdotes about Ballmer from my internship there:
At an intern event an intern asked some question along the lines of "What's one quality of a competitor you wish Microsoft had?" They were clearly asking about cultural qualities but Ballmer's response was "I'd take Google's search engine because that thing prints money". Then he did this super exaggerated gesture and noise imitating a money machine printing money.
At the time that was a super disappointing answer to me because as an intern within the Bing division I really felt like there was this culture of "Bing is better and it's not our fault Google is beating us". To see Ballmer not use the question as an opportunity to talk about ways Microsoft could improve felt like seeing the source of that cultural problem.
The other was from an intern event with Phil Spencer. Phil Spencer at the time was the head of Xbox's Games Division, but not yet the head of Xbox. Spencer said he was in Ballmer's office one day and Ballmer asked him "Why don't you just make the games that sell?"
Nadella has been horrible and a huge mistake for Microsoft. They will continue to suffer under his leadership. At least ballmer had goals and pretended to care what customers want. Windows is an unmitigated disaster under nadella and it doesn’t need to be. No new innovation is happening and hardware is more performant than ever. Windows had issues under ballmer because the hardware wasn’t there yet and they were trying new things. Nadella only wants spyware and bloatware and everything as a subscription / service. The leadership can’t change soon enough, hopefully his back room deals with OpenAI come to light and blow up sooner than later.
There's no evidence Ballmer would have avoided spyware. Especially for money. Who was the first boot-licking corp in the NSA Prism slides? That's right—MS 2007.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM#/media/File:Prism_slide_...
So azure was a hit and Office moving to a saas model was a hit.
Balmer lost: the most popular consumer operating system, the most popular web browser, the most popular media player, the most popular instant messaging platform.
The guy that laughed at the iPhone when it was first announced.
To the list of misses he forgot to add Skype and Nokia purchases, IE market share decreasing from something like 90% to less than 20%, Windows losing the battle in the data center, deriding iPhone and open source. Ballmer blocked Office on iPhone even though it was ready to go: Office on iPhone was released on Sep 2014; Satya became CEO on Feb 2014. Never-mind stack ranking (which he copied from Jack Welch) and the cut-throat culture it inspired (seeing Somasegar bicker with the head of Excel over porting Excel code base to VS .Net in 2003 at a DevDiv 'morale' event was something) So yeah, good riddance!
"When Ballmer became CEO in January 2000, Microsoft's stock was around $53. When he stepped down in February 2014, it was around $38."
By that metric, no he wasn't underrated.
Msft had a stock split during that time.
Unfair thing to measure him by in my opinion. Steve Ballmer inherited Microsoft when the stock traded at a P/E of 60. When he left it was 14, in line with many other tech stocks during that time. (Even Apple was lower)
He took earnings per share from $0.70 to $2.63 during his tenure. A CAGR of 10.5% across 13 years in one of the world's biggest companies. He couldn't control multiple compression following the dotcom bust.
$100B does not seem underrated to me. Microsoft made lots of money with Ballmer, and continued to make even more money after he left.
Mostly agree, but curious about the claim that Bing is profitable: how does that account for being the default search engine in the windows start menu and microsoft edge?
I hate to say this but I’ve been using Bing for two years now on my corporate notebook and it’s pretty good. I could change it to Google if I want to, but quite honestly since Google’s search results have gone so spammy, I haven’t seen the need to switch.
Weird how few people who worked under him feel that way.
I’m really looking forward to his autobiography, not just another Isaacson-style biography, but something from the man himself, even if he has some help writing it. Reading Paul Allen’s autobiography gave me a deep understanding of his and Bill Gates’ journey long before Microsoft. Their story started much earlier than the usual DOS narrative!
Culturally everyone I've spoken to who has seen both Ballmer era and later Nadella complains how terrible the company was to work for back then
I guess Steve Ballmer deserves to be richer than Bill Gates today because he held onto his MSFT stock while Gates sold the majority of his :)
Also, the Acquired podcast also makes the strong argument that Ballmer lay a lot of the foundation of what powered MSFT’s growth under Nadella e.g. Azure.
Too bad there is no mention of Nokia at all: that was one big blunder, but maybe if Ballmer did not step down a year after finalizing take-over, it wouldn't be as much of a bust.
Developers, developers, developers, developers.
Scrolled through all the comments to find this and upvote.
YARRRRGGHHHHH!!!!!!
Isn't it pretty well documented that he made several decisions that turned out to not pan out and then were nearly immediately reversed by the current CEO that turned out to be massive successes? That doesn't scream "underrated".
It’s so well documented you can’t even come with an actual one while writing your comment.
I thought I saw article with similar title
And yea
https://blog.jovono.com/p/ballmer-microsoft-underrated
If anyone is an authority on who is and isn't an underrated CEO, it's world famous titan of industry Dan Luu. Who hasn't heard of Dan Luu?
He should have said developers 37 times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMcuxW6QzBM
Balmer launched Get the facts smearing campaign. It says all about who Balmer is.
having worked there for a long time (left in 2013), i'd say the best thing that happened under ballmer was getting rid of sinofsky. sinofsky was the worst - windows8 had some great low level bits, but the shell and app models were total crap. and wait until the jeffrey epstien connections comes out...
I think that a lot of people are commenting here without actually reading the article. The article lays out a concrete (and imo pretty persuasive) argument as to why the author thinks that Ballmer was a decent CEO. You should really read it, but the TLDR is:
* Some of the big feathers in Microsoft's cap today (O365 and Azure) started during Ballmer's tenure
* While the company had plenty of failed initiatives during his time, what matters in the end is that the hits made up for the misses in terms of profit, and they did
* Metrics like revenue and so on were all positive during his tenure
Frankly, unless the author is factually incorrect on these points (which I don't have the knowledge to assert either way), I think it's a good argument.
He was a good CFO type of a leader. Unlike a lot of other companies like Intel or Boeing, that were run by CFOs, he did not last long enough to run MSFT into the ground due to being too late to modern trends.
Sure he build the foundation, but he was not smart enough to lead the path forward. With him MSFT would have never reached top 3 most valuable companies - I would say it would be at 500-600b maybe at best.
Even with Azure and Office, he was too much into "bundle with Windows" type of guy. Similar to how he was saying that touchscreen would never work as businesses needed buttons to type. I think with Satya, they would have tried multi touch screen at least for sure.
By and large, Ballmer was not the very open minded person. And his attempt to buy Yahoo...Oof.
> Unlike a lot of other companies like Intel or Boeing, that were run by CFOs, he did not last long enough to run MSFT into the ground due to being too late to modern trends.
How can you right this in good faith while replying to a comment laying out to you that Microsoft most successful investments a decade later were all started by Ballmer and that he took a lot of risks with R&D?
> Even with Azure and Office, he was too much into "bundle with Windows" type of guy.
Seriously? Ballmer started Office365 you know. Also the Microsoft Phone with, you know, touch screens. The sheer amount of historical revionism in this thread even in the face of hard facts is mind numbing.
Honestly, even discarding all the rest, Ballmer would deserve more respect than he gets there for getting Microsoft out of the antitrust lawsuits alone.
> How can you right this in good faith while replying to a comment laying out to you that Microsoft most successful investments a decade later were all started by Ballmer and that he took a lot of risks with R&D?
Investment in R&D means nothing if you can't deliver. Intel has enormous R&D budget. Boeing too. Did it help them? No.
> Also the Microsoft Phone with, you know, touch screens
With Windows Phone he was too late to the market. It does not matter if he thought of it later - he famously disregarded iPhone saying that it did not have keyboard. They had Windows Mobile, but they were busy competing with Blackberry instead of going after innovation.
> Investment in R&D means nothing if you can't deliver. Intel has enormous R&D budget. Boeing too. Did it help them? No.
The most profitable current divisions at Microsoft were started under Ballmer. That’s literally stated in the original comment in the thread you are replying to.
We cannot tell if the currently most profitable divisions would become that profitable under Ballmer.
That's the whole point - Satya somehow was able to develop the platforms through acquisitions and business vendor lock much better than Ballmer ever could. And we saw what happened with Windows division under Ballmer - it was profitable but it had no future. MSFT could become another IBM.
With Ballmer we could get some Windows hubris like "Azure only with Windows OS license" or something.
My only issue with Satya is that he is not "a cult of personality" type of person like Jensen Huang or Phil Spencer. He is basically a guy who "walks softly and wields a big stick".
> And we saw what happened with Windows division under Ballmer - it was profitable but it had no future.
Microsoft under Ballmer was insanely profitable, more than its competitors and far more than before he took the helm. And despite that Ballmer launched Azure, started the push towards Entreprise software and at no point stopped investing.
I don’t think Ballmer was the best CEO ever but his poor reputation is very much undeserved.
> Microsoft under Ballmer was insanely profitable, more than its competitors and far more than before he took the helm.
Yeah, that's the thing - he was a good CFO. He was able to maximize profit and stuff. But people remember CEOs by their achievements - "a founder", "made MSFT into top three world companies"...With Ballmer people remember the lost decade and that's it.
He was good at sales but their products were and are still inferior. Only Excel and SQL Server are two products I would personally buy.
I enjoy those fact videos he has been making. I was impressed that he cared enough to do them and actually take the time to run point.
MSFT is up more today than it was during Steve Ballmer's 14 year tenure. It's up 1%.
On the other hand it took a complete moron to fuck up windows phone. And somehow it happened under his tenure.
Agree, he just had bad public relations.
If you want to learn more about MSFT during Ballmer era, i highly recommend the acquired podcast:
https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/microsoft-volume-ii
They come to the same conclusion as Dan - that Ballmer did a ton of things right and he was actually a much better CEO than the credit he's given today.
Part 1 of the podcast focuses on Bill Gates' era - both episodes are super engaging, the research and preparation they do is remarkably good.
Second this podcast. Ballmer basically setup Microsoft as the enterprise software company. From the first episode it seemed that Bill was actually more interested in the consumer side of things and wasn't that interested in the enterprise, but it was Ballmer that basically setup that entire business line in the first place especially with him managing the OS/2 with IBM and later NT.
I think a lot of fails for MS during the Ballmer era was them toeing the line post their anti-trust.
Great podcast and I really enjoyed their MSFT episodes.
I thought their pro-Ballmer angle was interesting at the time too (it was the first long-form defense of his tenure that I had heard), but I wasn't sure how much of that was due to him being a primary source for the podcast's material.
tangential: anyone has the link to Gary Bernhardt talk on reproducibility mentioned in the post?
When I judge someone I compare them to what they ought to have been able to do. Bing, Azure, and Office 365 were mid and it's the person in charge's responsibility to do better than that. The world would be a better place if he had done a better job.
But maybe he was a fine CEO, dunno about that. I guess that's measured in profits.
"$500? Fully Subsidized? That is the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine."
The only thing missing from the article was to say that Ballmer loved Linux and open source but that he was misunderstood lol. Ballmer was a fucking despot and a piece of shit. That article is an ode to the disgusting despotism that Microsoft had.
Ballmer was a gorilla in an expensive suit.
I'm not going to give it up for him.
If Microsoft had just tracked the market while he was CEO: what is the delta in market cap? His vision destroyed multiple Enrons of shareholder value.
sure, we know that now after having a wider range of examples across the industry!
The problem with Ballmer is that he missed a lot of opportunities.
Satya is much better in that regard.
Is he? What did he start? Most of MS current successes were launched under Ballmer most notably Azure.
Satya has been good with acquisitions but what else?
But here is the thing - launching the initiative means nothing. Satya is able to expand and develop it.
Like with Ballmer we certainly would not have got O365 to iOS for example. It would be 100% bundled one way or another to Windows services or something or browser or whatever.
Even with Azure we would not have got such aggressive expansion and attempts to push services across Windows and Linux or playing with Open Source platforms like K8S. I think Ballmer was closer to the modern Google who is hell-bent on not using anything Windows.
Ballmer's attempt to buy Yahoo and disregard for touch screen phones is what defined his legacy. He was a good CFO who knew how to run business, but not a great CEO.
> Satya has been good with acquisitions but what else?
Ability to buy right things is important too. Like Ballmer wanted to buy Yahoo, while Satya bought Github. One cost 80b, while another created a whole foundation for Copilot push. Linkedin purchase was great and with OpenAI I am 100% sure that Ballmer would have missed AI train (like AWS did).
> Ballmer's attempt to buy Yahoo and disregard for touch screen phones is what defined his legacy.
You are weirdly obsessed with that but Ballmer actually started Bing and bought Nokia to make touchscreen phones. I think you are extremely biased to the point of being entirely disconnected from the facts at hand.
> Ability to buy right things is important too.
Ballmer bought Skype and launched the foundation of what would become Teams - you know - arguably the most important corporate piece of software after Covid.
Not OP, but Ballmer's attempt to reinvent Windows Mobile to compete with modern smartphones was too little too late.
Microsoft during that era was one bad call after another. When Apple saw multitouch they made a phone; Microsoft made a giant table[0] (very little imagination beyond the Jeff Han demo[1]). When Microsoft saw the iPhone reception, they sunk 2 years an $1B into the Kin line of phones[2], which lasted all of 2 months before being pulled from shelves. It was several years later when they bought Nokia, when then iPhone was already 6-7 generations in. By this time the world was already moving to "mobile first", and Microsoft was being left behind without a platform.
For a couple decades Microsoft worked to convince the world that Windows, Office, and Microsoft as a whole was needed to get real work done. It was during Ballmer's time at the helm that this belief eroded. People saw they didn't need Microsoft to make a good smart phone. They found they could get work done with Google Docs and didn't always need MS Office. They found macOS could be used to get work done just as well as Windows... and in fact, a desktop OS might not be needed at all. Ballmer's biggest failure was giving his competitors time to show the world that Microsoft wasn't as necessary as the world was led to believe.
As far as Teams goes... it is used a lot by companies that are all-in on O365, but Slack and Zoom were the two household names in the space during the pandemic. Once again, the world was shown that work could be done without Microsoft.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PixelSense
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_the_radical_promise_of_th...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin
> As far as Teams goes... it is used a lot by companies that are all-in on O365, but Slack and Zoom were the two household names in the space during the pandemic.
Tell me you have no idea of what’s happening in the real world outside your small tech bubble in one sentence.
Nobody uses Slack outside of tech. They are virtually unknown in Europe.
I don’t use Slack personally, but it’s always what I hear mentioned online. It’s also what I hear friends mention (who don’t work in tech) who aren’t working at big cooperations.
I’ve also heard many people use the phrase, “it’s like Slack”, when trying to explain what MS Teams is to a non-technical friend. It was all over the news during the pandemic, so people learned what it was. Same with Zoom.
"Microsoft made a giant table[0] (very little imagination beyond the Jeff Han demo[1])"
This is a wild take. Both the original Surface 1.0 table and the second SUR40 had some really amazing, highly-imaginative multi-user compute paradigms (a multi-user interface with no concept of “up”? Come on now.).
Commercially successful? No. But calling them "very little imagination" is a real head-scratcher.
What’s also interesting about this comment is that, in this very same Ballmer era, Microsoft later acquired Jeff Han’s Perceptive Pixel to create the Surface Hub product.
I am biased but I am not disconnected from the facts. I am still pissed at Ballmer with how they missed search and mobile market. They were late with Search and they were late with mobile.
With Teams it was just luck, but even then Team's growth happened years years after Ballmer and can be attributed to the multiplatform push of O365 by Satya.
Bing is insanely profitable. I fail to see how they missed search.
You are not disconnected from the facts but you happily discount Ballmer wins when they don’t suit your narrative.
> Microsoft under Ballmer was insanely profitable, more than its competitors and far more than before he took the helm.
Being profitable means nothing if your marketshare in low 10%. You are leaning too much on "profit". Ballmer was a good CFO (finance guy), but not CEO.
Azure Search is still broken FWIW. A lot of Azure is still vapor ware; it works in the tutorial but not in real life. Every time my company signs/re-up a contract with Microsoft, I die a little.
Ballmer was a successful CEO for the simple reason that he discovered Satya.
This is a bunch of revisionist history bs.
Windows me, windows vista, explorer, windows media player, zune, ms retail store.
He brought the worst products to the market and we hated him for it.
I think the fact that Steve Ballmer could be considered a good CEO by anyone today is just another reminder of the fact that our society has lost all understanding of what a sustainable business model is and our modern conception of capitalism is really just feudalism, i.e. private owners with significant political influence eliminating all competition with the help of the state and wielding monopolistic control over essential resources and earning their profits by charging rent rather than actually producing anything of real value.
We've been locked in this cycle for centuries now - technological progress opens up some new uncharted territory that is up for grabs and there is the brief period of booming growth and diverse competition in this new thriving industry, then the boom is over and the system no longer encourages competition or innovation or intelligent decisionmaking, instead it encourages overreach and incompetence and cancerous uninhibited growth and parasitic behavior - stealing ideas and flooding the market with cheap inferior imitations, aggressive anti-competitive practices, increased lobbying and increased dependence on state funding. The industry becomes dominated by these bloated behemoths that add nothing of value to the world and are an enormous burden on society and eventually they become so unsustainably huge that even the combined wealth of every sovereign nation cannot keep them afloat and then they collapse.
I mean, seriously, everyone knows Windows has always been shit and people have never had anything but negative things to say about it, everyone knows that every product Microsoft has ever produced has been absolute trash and that they have never had any interest in doing anything innovative or original or contributing anything useful to the world. Microsoft isn't a company and people like Steve Ballmer are not CEOs or businessmen of any kind, they're just landlords.
Came here to trash Microsoft, learned more about tipping than I ever thought possible
Ballmer was a fucking moron.
Yikes. The hottest of takes there. Wow. I know he's super-rich now and I'm not, so whatever.
Funny story. I used to see Steve almost every weekday for a couple of years.
I can't speak to his business skills, but I can attest that he never once offered a tip for his daily black iced tea. We'd even have it ready for him before he showed up so he never had to wait! He would pay with cash, and I'd hand him his change and drink, and that was that.
It's funny to me now: one of the richest men in the world and he never once offered a tip.
Frugality aside, he was always very polite and warm so I can't be mad. Makes for a good ice breaker story.
Edit: holy moly, this is a sensitive subject. Please remember this was from a time before tipflation. Tipping meant you left your change behind once in a while only if you felt the desire to show appreciation. It wasn't an obligation. Yes, I still do think it's a funny story. Roast me for being entitled lol
Reminds me of his visit to my undergrad. He had a niece or nephew or something (I never met them) who went there, and he was going to visit them. The university planned what amounted to a large science fair to showcase all the projects around and everyone was required to put something together. The day came, he walked in, made a beeline for his relative's project, talked to them for a minute, then hurried right out. My mentor ran after him trying to get him to take some merchandise.
In retrospect it's pretty obvious there was a big miscommunication, and he didn't really seem rude about it (supposedly he did talk to a project they put outside the hall because it used a Kinect IIRC). It really wouldn't surprise me to find out the university told him we just so happened to have this research fair going on the day he'd be visiting.
Maybe what he really wanted was a super duper whipped cream topped pumpkin spiced coffee and sprinkles but thought he'd save you guys the hassle and just order something that can be poured out of a jug
Poor misunderstood Ballmer :(
Now I feel bad.
> the richest man in the world (at the time) and he never once offered a tip.
Ballmer was never the richest man in the world, not even for a moment.
Right now is about the closest he has ever come to that marker (#8, $148 billion).
You're absolutely right. Bill Gates was the richest back then. My memory failed me on that part. (It's been over 20 years...)
Fixed my comment to reflect this correction. Thanks!
First, I love this story. I'm on your side. For me personally, the most charming detail is that he paid in cash. I guess it was a while ago! Your story makes me think of the scene from the film "Casino" when the mafia guys spit into the "free" sandwiches that they give to the police. (Ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPufB6oaJFE)
It is weird to me that a guy like that even bothers to pick up his own daily black iced tea. Once you are making a few million dollars per year (and you have a net worth > 1B USD), I would assume that everything would be brought to you. Literally, have an assistant who does all of this stuff and brings it to your office. The most highly paid people that I have ever observed up close were in non-stop meetings all day long -- talkin' money! They had no time to buy their own daily coffee or lunch. There was an assistant who would bring everything to their office. That said, maybe he did it to "feel normal". For any human being, having a net worth > 1B USD must really screw with your world view.
Servers make minimum wage in WA, but you weren't a server. I also don't tip if I order at a register.
> Servers make minimum wage in WA, but you weren't a server. I also don't tip if I order at a register.
And I assume you do not expect any non-required service from those transactions. Which is understandable, yet different from:
>> We'd even have it ready for him before he showed up so he never had to wait!
If this additional service were provided during your patronage, would that warrant a tip even though interaction was at a register?
>If this additional service were provided during your patronage, would that warrant a tip even though interaction was at a register?
Sounds like a convenience for everyone involved. Maybe they should have tipped him?
That's why I think these premium additional services must not be offered gratis.
My grandma already said: "With the rich, one learns to save." The greedy rich man is so common, its not even a prejudice anymore :-)
If you want more money per drink put it on the menu price. Don't passive-aggressively await each customer's random generosity.
"Price discrimination"
Interesting that he would pay by cash
He’d be CEO during the early aughts, most places were still cash based
Cash was often the fastest way to pay back then.
[flagged]
Please don't post nationalistic flamebait to HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I apologize, dang. I thought that was an appropriate response.
We allow wages you can't live on but then expect customers to randomly make up the difference but only for some jobs.
Make too little to afford an apartment, healthcare and food and you work in the food service industry? You deserve a tip. You work in a meatpacking plant? Oh, get screwed.
Waiters in the US make more than their peers in: Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan, Canada, New Zealand, etc.
That's thanks entirely to the tip system.
This ignores how feast-and-famine tipping is; there's a high ceiling for potential earning, but it's not always a reliable income; and this also ignores how only those working in front-line service roles benefit.
Are you the kitchen hand washing dishes? Are you the chef or cook who makes the meals and food that the customers eat? Are you a cleaner mopping the floors after business hours? Nope - none of you get a tip, unless the restaurant has a policy of collecting all tips and redistributing them to all employees. But how often does that happen? It's really easy to just pocket the tip and keep it for yourself.
Britain has tips. Every restaurant adds 12.5% as an 'optional' charge but they know full well that Brits are allergic to causing a fuss and will never ask it to be removed.
Do US waiters really get paid more than UK with PPP/forex? You seem to have the data to hand.
> Britain has tips. Every restaurant adds 12.5% as an 'optional' charge but they know full well that Brits are allergic to causing a fuss and will never ask it to be removed.
That "service charge" is usually (mandated?) listed on the menu, so it would lead to quite an awkward conversation if you then complained after sitting and eating the meal. It's quite often specified for groups over a certain size and it makes more sense than getting into a "tipping" argument after the meal.
Seattle is allegedly about on par with London CoL wise.
Min wage for tipped workers is $17.25 per hour. London is ~$18. So with exorbitant tipping it should be considerably higher?
Also taxes might be lower.
> Waiters in the US make more than their peers in: Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan, Canada, New Zealand, etc.
That seems unlikely - do you have any figures to back that up?
Got a citation for that? Lots of waiters in the US make $2/hour or something before tips (can anyone correct me here?) where the expectation is that tips will bring them up to $7-8/hour, more in line with other minimum wage jobs.
Back in 2008 my sister would easily make $200 a night working at Red Lobster in a town of 80,000. That was just the tips, not wages. Prices have probably doubled now, along with the tips.
Very few waiters are making as little as you say. Just think of what you pay as a tip for one table for 2-4 people and remember they’re handling quite a few tables at a time. Quite often if they get a bachelors degree and the attached salaried job they take a significant pay cut, but the hours are better for having a family.
In California (the most populous state), there is no “tipped minimum wage”. Everyone earns at least $20/hr. In fact, about 1/3 of states don’t allow employers to pay less for tipped employees.
Oh wow really, 2/3 of states let employers pay below minimum wage for tipped employees?
If they get insufficient tips to meet the minimum, the employer makes up the difference. Nobody makes $2/hour.
Right. Are waiters in other countries listed above making less than US federal minimum wage?
Do costumers in Washington, California, New York etc. tip less, the same or even more than in those other states?
> will bring them up to $7-8/hour
Maybe 20 years ago? Almost nobody in the US is making that little these days regardless of the Federal minimum wage.
And in nicer states you get $15-20 + tips.
I'm going to the US in a couple of weeks and I'm already abhorring the prospect of spending some time looking at the specific tipping requirements of the state I'm going to, to then spend a week awkwardly guessing if I'm tipping enough, too much, or offending someone in the process; while having uncomfortable feelings about the people serving me food, drink, tour guidance, etc. (on the one hand because they all seem to be hunting for my money and being a foreigner, they might be hoping that I will tip too much, on the other hand because they might be underpaid and I might be an asshole to them if I tip too little).
I suppose people who have lived there all their life just don't notice it, but for me as an outsider the amount of stress and awkwardness that the tipping culture produces in daily life is ludicrous.
If you don't want to think about it, just consistently tip 20%. It's generous and no one will complain.
Absolutely. I hope the tip screen on tablets goes away soon.
Not even close. They are showing up anywhere a person might open their wallet. I have seen tip screens in gas stations, fast food restaurants (where you order at a kiosk), vendor booths, etc.
I think they are just getting started. Soon there will announcement on speakers for non-tippers "Congratulations! You won cheap ass of the day award"
Being part way through the third Dungeon Crawler Carl book, this really amuses me.
Yes it's weird. It's basically charity re-framed as capitalism. As if it's the waiter's performance which determines their tip as opposed to just blind luck.
If each waiter could provide their own menu on which they could set their own prices individually and take their own hidden cut, then that would be fair capitalism.
They'd make a lot more money because consumers would be too lazy or too embarrassed to ask a different waiter for their version of the menu...
That would be a much better culture for workers.
Unfortunately the current system is set up to make every form of payment for labor into a charity. So workers are always in the position of begging their boss or customers and they are never in the position of intermediating transactions.
Seems a bit more like price segmentation. Basically everyone is socially forced to pay as much as they can regardless of the actual price.
Lick the hand.
Rich people are the most oddly tight people I've ever met. They'll buy a £5m house one day then the next spend 30 minutes arguing with the gardener that the broken 10 year old mower should just work and most definitely doesn't need replacing
Boris Johnson (ex-Prime Minister) is the classic example here in the UK. Fantastically wealthy, yet infamous for stiffing other people with the bill and never paying them back.
They probably bought an expensive one that should be working longer than that. You don't get rich by buying cheap shit that breaks often.
You don't get poor from that level of rich replacing a lawnmower
The mower was £500 (my Dad was the gardener)
It's the mindset, not the specific action.
Tipping is a fundamentally flawed and exploitative system
> exploitative
I worked in restaurants, and let me tell you, I never felt exploited in tipped positions. If anything, I felt like lucky at least compared everyone else in the restaurant industry. The real exploitation happens in the back of the house…
I believe GP meant exploitative towards consumers.
The customer was presented a deal. That the deal includes non-written, ever increasing additional charges unilaterally imposed by other side is exploitative.
It exploits customers
The parent comment did not specify the exploitative system as limited to tipees.
I guess if you are talking about the customers then you technically might have a point…
tipped workers would probably be making considerably less on average than now if tipping just disappeared. Especially in states like WA, CA, NY etc. which don’t even have a tipped minimum wage
Tipping for a convenience item at the till really really sucks. Am I the only one sane on this? Best regards Norway
It does suck.
But in this culture that Steve exists within, those positions are paid mostly by tips. He certainly could afford to help out the people that prepared his iced tea ritual for him in a timely manner, but he did not.
> But in this culture that Steve exists within, those positions are paid mostly by tips.
False. Presumably this was in WA, employers have to pay full wages. there is no carve out "tipped" wage (most) of the rest of the USA has. Currently, min wage in Redmond (King County) is $20.29/hr.
Many businesses in King County do not allow tipping.
Even in states with a lower tip worker's minimum wage, they are still guaranteed to make the standard minimum wage if the tips don't make up the difference.
Serving up food you didn't even cook isn't an intensely difficult or skilled job. Nobody should expect a 20% cut for doing that. It is not a customers responsibility to ensure unskilled service workers are rolling in largesse. Just making minimum wage is fair for that kind of work provided the minimum is livable.
> Serving up food you didn't even cook isn't an intensely difficult or skilled job.
So how long did you spend doing it, to be able to asser that?
You can tell based on the hiring criteria. There aren’t any
>Serving up food you didn't even cook isn't an intensely difficult or skilled job.
Then it should be easy to automate, but the best I've seen is a conveyor belt or a box on top of a roomba. In reality it's a very skilled job, it's just that most everyone is capable of doing it. And "fair" is any wage were you can live and increase the quality of your life over time as much as your work has increased the quality of others.
lol forreal? its not skilled work i dont know what to say. your definition everything is skilled but thats not how people use it in this context and it becomes a useless term. also have you seen a vending machine? its already automated.. its literally what this person is doing: taking order, giving correct drink. yes they have ones that pour it and everything. even give the correct change.
and i dont even know where to start of your ideology of fair either. i feel like its flexible enough to use it however fits your idea why denying any other
Can you share a couple examples of non-skilled labor?
As recently as 10 years ago in 2014, at the tail end of Ballmer's CEO tenure, Washington state minimum wage was still ~$8.60.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_S...
If you make more than 1x your wage in tips, then you are mostly paid in tips - regardless of whether your state has a tipped minimum wage law.
Minimum wage != Prevailing wage in that occupation
>Currently, min wage in Redmond (King County) is $20.29/hr.
I'd love to know if that is a livable wage in King County.
My gripe with "living wage" is the term (to me) is too subjective.
MIT's living wage [0] seems to include car ownership (despite King county having a decent public transit system and I know several people that don't have cars working in tech). My first place in a great part of town was $1,400/mo in a roomshare. The podments are as low as $750/mo, but MIT says you need at least $2k/mo.
[0] - https://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/53033
>My gripe with "living wage" is the term (to me) is too subjective.
Yes, what is considered "livable" varies wildly from person to person.
I live in Redmond. A decent house is 1.2 million dollars here.
do you know how expensive it is to live in Redmond? Very expensive
Should not matter how rich the person is. Tipping at the register is a shame.
No you are not. The tipping culture in the US is insane (along with the idea that employers want their stuff to be paid via tips). Good for Ballmer for sticking to his values.
I am also Norwegian and I also dislike tipping culture, but when they have your daily ice tea ready for you before you come in I would say it would be strange to not say "ah, just keep the change" now and then to show that you appreciate (and essentially pay for) the extra service.
Baristas in Norway get paid far more than here in the USA except in the fanciest of coffee shops. Tip culture is simply a part of the restaurant scene here, while I don’t agree with it, I don’t see hurting the baristas/waitstaff as an option either. I may not give exorbitant tips, but I give a reasonable 10-15%
> Baristas in Norway get paid far more than here
Are they? Google claims the average is about NOK 200 per hours? That’s barely above the tipped minimum wage in Washington or California. So it would be considerably less with tips?
You're keeping the system in place by contributing to it. I don't see how people don't understand that. You should act how you want everyone to act.
this isnt expected. not for most ppl at least. you can if you want but its nothing like sitting down getting served or delivery driver, etc.
Hi Norway, The Netherlands here. I feel you ;-)
Everyone, chill
Regardless of how you feel about tipping culture we're not talking about the average person nor are we talking about the average *experience*. The dude is worth north of $100bn, and is making nearly $10k per minute![0]. Someone who cannot spend his wealth. Someone who'd have to spend tens of millions of dollars every single day just to stop his wealth from growing. Someone who makes money faster than he can throw hundred dollar bills handfuls at a time.
We're not talking about anything normal here because no one here *literally* makes thousands of dollars in the time it takes to wipe their ass. You can become poor, he would need an act of god to do so.
We can have a conversation about tipping and how much everyone hates it, but to ignore the fact that we're talking about someone with this kind of money is... ludicrous[1]. Throwing down a hundred bucks means literally nothing to the man. It is not even what a penny is worth to most of you. He's not you and framing the discussion this way is obtuse. Rage on tipping, I don't give a fuck and I'll probably join you. He's not "sticking it to the man" or "standing up for his values" he *is*" the man. He's playing an important role in creating this machine you're raging against. I just don't understand any of you
> Still, if I'm a regular somewhere and they are giving me special service, I'm gonna throw a few dollars into the tip jar.
There are some philosophical problems there. The business/servers can't renegotiate the menu like that - if they aren't getting paid for a service and the customer didn't ask for it then there is no reason they should get more money for it.
Also, an observation about how the economics of regulars work - if you are a regular the business is probably already making a lot of money off you. Someone who goes back even a single time earns them 2x as much as a one-time walk in. Being a regular is already a favour to a business even if all you do is order something cheap off the menu. In my experience, when a business identifies that I am a regular they try to make me pay less to keep me coming back.
Actually, there is a restaurant where I go sometimes that when I pay cash instead of with a credit card, the owner gets so elated that rounds down the amount to pay in some 3-7%. The countertip I guess.
Restaurants and bars especially in my city love tax evasion - that's why they are so enthusiastic about cash payments.
Yes thats normally the main drive, cash is usually just annoyance and additional risk to business.
I wouldnt be too harsh judging that business though, quite a few restaurants are barely cutting it so this may help them stay afloat. Its this or generally higher prices in restaurants.
This is eye-opening. I make a fraction of what Steve does and am still dumb enough to be hitting 20% at the machine every time I go out.
If 0% is good enough for Mr. Ballmer, it's good enough for me.
There's a difference between being frugal and being an asshole.
If you have enough money that tips are a rounding error for you -- not tipping just makes you an asshole.
It's none of your business to ever tip anywhere UNLESS you explicitly want to thank somebody for their service. How hard is that to understand?
It is the workplace's responsibility to pay their staff adequately. NOT YOURS.
0% tip all the way everywhere. No matter if I have $10 or $10k on the bill.
> It is the workplace's responsibility to pay their staff adequately. NOT YOURS.
I don't get this argument, because at the end of the day you're paying both ways.
Either you're paying higher menu prices (because labor costs have increased) or you're paying tips (because labor costs are artificially low and you're supplementing them).
There is no magical "the business pays its employees more, but everything you buy stays the same price."
Especially not with food service margins.
There are lots of instances in which it is in fact your responsibility to pay the staff and if you choose to ignore that fact and stiff them that's on you
I do tip, but is this perspective really helping the people that live off their tips?
You don’t feel the need to tip the people stacking shelves at Walmart or the Amazon driver.
In almost any other job we reasonably expect that someone’s compensation is between them and their employer and that the state should be making sure they’re protected from exploitatively low income.
Why are waiting staff a special case? People have worse jobs that come without tips and it doesn’t seem to bother anybody.
Those tips are expected now and irrelevant to service so it’s also just helping employers get away with paying those staff members less, so it’s really just subsidizing restaurants and cafes at this point.
> There are lots of instances in which it is in fact your responsibility to pay the staff
I'm not aware of this, but then the U.S. has a different tipping culture to elsewhere. Have you got any examples?
Also, if it's your responsibility to pay the staff, do you also get the right to dictate how they do their job (within reason)?
> There are lots of instances in which it is in fact your responsibility to pay the staff
For example?
If you didn't employ them you don't have to pay their salary, or even know how to start to evaluate what that would be.
>There are lots of instances in which it is in fact your responsibility to pay the staff
Name one (let alone "lots").
This is a pretty heartless reply. I will be downvoted for expressing my view here.
Yeah, except that most of these (low income/low skill) service workers don't have the negotiation power to change this power dynamic. Thus, you, someone with enough means to eat out, can offset that gap, just a little bit, by tipping.Interestingly, I have never seen tips being demanded by restaurant staff almost as an entitlement in any other country other than the US - even in far poorer nations.
And you work to keep the system the same way. You work to earn, and then spend your money sponsoring the system when it's optional for you to sponsor it.
I don't think you're wrong, but I can't help thinking that the tip money would be better off funnelled towards political change.
And keep this twisted system in place. The only way for it to finally collapse is if people stop always tipping. To me that's truly heartless.
>Yeah, except that most of these (low income/low skill) service workers don't have the negotiation power to change this power dynamic
This has no bearing in reality. Most of these places can't staff their stores because no one will work for prevailing wages.
>Thus, you, someone with enough means to eat out
Oh yeah, the people grabbing coffee at Starbucks are all rich.
Raise your prices and pay your staff.
The funny thing is when people reasonably say raise the price to actual costs, the answers is "Customer may stop coming..". As if the whole point to scam customer with fake low prices.
> Oh yeah, the people grabbing coffee at Starbucks are all rich.
Relatively speaking? Yes.
Someone spending $4+ on one coffee mean they can easily tip.
And if your argument is that they can't afford that?
Then those same customers won't be able to afford the price increase if Starbucks simply raised labor costs and passed it on.
Thats exactly the point. Raise the price then customer can decide if they can afford it or not. With fake low prices customers may not know what they are getting into.
> Yeah, except that most of these (low income/low skill) service workers don't have the negotiation power to change this power dynamic.
And by tipping you are keeping it so they can just afford to keep making ends meet, thus enabling the status quo.
It could be argued you are continuing the problem.
> It's none of your business to ever tip anywhere UNLESS you explicitly want to thank somebody for their service. How hard is that to understand?
That's exactly the point? Buying iced tea everyday for some time means that he liked it. Not showing appreciation to something he clearly appreciates
I also use that one park garage all the time and my streets are snow plowed and I appreciate that. Still I don't know anyone who tips those workers. Do they provide less service than the person making me a drink?
I personally only tip if service was extraordinary and I appreciated it. Which is once a full moon at best
>Not showing appreciation to something he clearly appreciates
He shows appreciation by showing up and buying tea every day.
How much do you tip Apple or Microsoft as appreciation for their software every time you show up to use it?
> How much do you tip Apple or Microsoft as appreciation for their software every time you show up to use it?
I don't use their products which for me are all garbage and I tip often free and open source software.
Now the important thing, comparing "tipping" Apple and Microsoft to giving a tip to a minimum wage worker is quite evil.
Judging by the number of ads in Windows, maybe $1/day.
It really rubs me the wrong way that you tell everyone to chill and then go on to levy your own value judgement of the situation. If you want to larp as the ref or moderator you don't get to pick a side.
Like you say, at his level of wealth, the actual dollars and cents become almost meaningless. Setting aside whether somebody in that position should be leaving a tip, how could you not want to? I would love to have the experience of just dropping a $1k tip to see what it's like. Maybe he did that once so never felt the need to again.
>I would love to have the experience of just dropping a $1k tip to see what it's like.
What exactly are your expectations here?
I'm not sure, that's exactly why I'd like to experience it and find out! I guess the server would be very grateful, but who knows. They might tell me it will change their life in some way, the restaurant might name a dish after me, countless things could happen.
Or maybe he does tip generously, and maybe he does throw of dollars, but only does it to actual waiting staff? After all, that's the issue most people seem to have here.
It makes no sense to psychoanalyze a Ballmer's mind from this short episode.
"Everyone, chill"
then proceeds to drop emphasis, F words and other strong words.
Maybe take a page of your own book.
I read “everyone chill” to mean “there’s a lot of bad takes here”, not literally “remain calm”. In that context, I think the comment makes sense — they’re illustrating just how wrong the common take is
I've literally never heard that expression before
I have, now what do we do? Which of us controls the language?
Whoever is able to use it to communicate ideas.
Alas, we are no further. Remember how we got here: you opened with what barely qualifies as an anecdote. Not remotely an idea. I'm trying to be fair.
How about we go with the rock-paper-scissors suggestion?
Rock paper scissors for it
I really don't like this medium for it, when/where? :)
Someone learns something new everyday!
The substance of his comment is still well-intentioned though. I agree with him.
Random person writes completely unsourced negative comment about someone HN dislikes for no reason. HN cheers before launching in a pointless and already rehashed a thousands times discussion about tipping culture.
I don’t know if it’s well intentioned but it’s peak HN.
Chill because you all are giving me anxiety that I don't need.
Idk how to tell you this, but this is a pretty common pattern for human speech. You see it in plenty of countries, plenty of cultures. Welcome to Earth. Words mean more than the literal dictionary interpretation of them.
Edit:
I only have sass in me tonight.
The workweek just started, you gotta save some sass for the rest of the week too.
I'm a grad student and ABD (all but dissertation). My work week has no beginning nor end. But don't worry, I still got plenty in me.
Why should he give money to someone over literally any other person in the same establishment or outside of it? What does that have to do with "the man"?
That's not the point, though. It's not how generous he is with his money. It's how he sees money, its purpose in his life. People who see wealth as a force multiplier don't gorm habits of being careless with it. Just like you see people who have no money live pay check to pay check, take on debt just to assume a class they don't exist in. Yet you used to see Bezos in a camry and Buffet in some equally run of the mill car. It's because these people place value on everything, a car to themis just depreciating numbers. They formed a habit of critically assessing the "why".
Back to the topic at hand: Tipping is a ridiculous notion that the wealthy can see through, while the rest of us are too brainwashed to objectively analyze
> Back to the topic at hand: Tipping is a ridiculous notion that the wealthy can see through, while the rest of us are too brainwashed to objectively analyze
Oh yes, the wealthy are superior to us unwashed masses in every way. How I wish I could see through and objectively analyse, but my bank account won't allow that.
The phrase, penny wise and pound foolish comes to mind, though probably doesn't strictly apply. I don't spend my life reading. I read then live.
I don't see this hyper-optimization as a good thing. Externalities and so on. Of course dragons hoard coins. They look nice, bring good things, and who is going to stop them? "Game theory" is broadly applicable
All this to say: if tipping is a life altering decision for you, I have news. You're closer to the townsperson than the dragon, outlook is grim. Now the cycle may continue!
> Tipping is a ridiculous notion that the wealthy can see through, while the rest of us are too brainwashed to objectively analyze
Tipping culture is quite different in the Americas than it is in e.g. the UK. I don't think it takes much effort to analyse that the winners of tipping culture are the restaurant/bar owners as they don't have to pay their staff properly and can avoid tax.
Whilst I don't like tipping culture, I think there's a different reason as to why billionaires might not tip - greed. Normal people would never get to be a billionaire as it takes a particular kind of greed to have millions of dollars and to be determined to hoard even more money when you know full well that it's often made by exploiting the employees that made you all those millions. It's a very nasty, selfish form of hoarding that hurts society, so don't be surprised when billionaires demonstrate that they don't care about anyone else.
I take it you meant form habits?
That just means that it wasn't about money for him.
Maybe. Or maybe he still lives like he is poor. If he does, or if he lives in any way where he is considering money as meaningful, then he is delusional. The man has so much money he can buy a mega yacht with less than a week's passive income. If money means anything to him, he is does not understand. If he also doesn't see how he can fundamentally change people's lives in a single act that means nothing to him, what does that say? After all, this is a man who could dump a pile of hundred dollar bills on the table every day, at every restaurant and coffee shop he visits and the act is less of a burden to him than it is for us to hold a door open for someone who's an awkward distance away.
Money is a proxy. Did we forget what it was for?
So what's your point, should he have tipped?
What’s the saying? Everyone is acting like they are a multi-millionaire that is in a temporary financial bind?
I like how in this case 1e11 almost reads as "hell" :)
One problem with unbounded capitalism is that people can’t understand how big big numbers are. They think of themselves but slightly richer. So of course people should be able to accumulate the wealth of a city or a country, and there’s no negative aspect to that at all. They just worked like we do. And they should get gains on their wealth just like we do for our retirement. There’s no difference except a couple of zeros.
I'm not against "unbounded" capitalism, but certainly there should be things in place that ensure adequate competition is taking place. So I prefer "unfettered". I think this is of special concern given that the Silicon Valley Model is to literally become a monopoly. That's not good for anyone, including the company.
That said, obviously I have some concerns on the billionaire class, especially the hundred billionaires.
It isn't just this (though it is true[0]), but that money works extremely differently at this scale. Interest is not a rounding error, or something you think about being influential down the line. Passive income is so great that it gets difficult to imagine. There's those sites[1] that have you try to spend a large fortune and they don't even get to the different part. That being that for people like Elon, anything on that list can be bought by a week's worth of... doing nothing. That the passive income is so high that the problem isn't even that you couldn't spend the money if it was not growing, but that it grows so fast that you can't even spend it if you tried really hard. Spending a static billion dollars is incredibly difficult and you have to get creative. But in the real world with interest, it is exponentially more difficult.I think the best example of this is MacKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos's ex-wife. She's been spending her money as fast as she can and she "hasn't lost a dime". Forbes had her starting at $36bn and currently has her at $35.6B[2]. In the time since she has divorced Bezos she's given away nearly $17bn. We're talking less than 5 years.... In <5 years she's "spent" half of her static wealth and still has what she started with. Money at this level simply does not work the same way and a lot of people do not fundamentally understand this.
But there's also a psychological issue I don't get. What is the point of having so much "fuck you money" if you are not going to tell people to fuck off. Certainly they do at times, but often they don't. To have the wealth to do whatever you want, to be unconstrained, unburdened, and to still have anxiety and concern? To be stressed? I can understand that old habits die hard, but they do die.
[0] I started my academic life in physics. We do giant numbers and tiny numbers. I can with great certainty assert that our brains are not made to actualize these numbers. It is amazing that we have the math to work with them but when you stop to compare and it blows your mind. This is not done enough.
[1] https://www.spend-elon-fortune.com/ or articles like this https://youngfinances.com/spend-1-billion-dollars-you-cant-h...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/profile/mackenzie-scott/
That's crazy, i didn't know that. That is a guy who is 2 orders of magnitude above a 'mere' billionaire. And for what? Because he was friends with bill gates at Harvard, and employee#30 at microsoft. Talk about capitalism's greatest mistakes.
Developers, developers, developers. I'm no fan of the guy but he definitely had a bigger role than proximity.
My distaste is exactly because of how he spent his time working. I believe we'd be further along without them, considering efforts against free/libre software.
What frugality? He was paying the full price that it was being sold at.
> What frugality? He was paying the full price that it was being sold at.
By that logic, most reading these comments should expect to hear from their employer:
Annual bonus is either performance based or as a retainer to make up for differences in the wages since the person was hired.
Stock options are because you could be paid more or you are taking risks for future rewards.
A mandatory tip is because your employer doesn't want to pay you full wage and instead of increasing the price and pay you more, they pass it over to the customers. So they get the same profits without having to bother.
Quite different reasons.
A mandatory fixed/clearly defined tip is effectively a service tax. Nothing wrong about that if it’s clearly advertised (e.g. you don’t have to pay it if you take out). Quite a few countries in Europe have stuff like that.
Variable, pseudo-optional tips seem like a much bigger problem.
>A mandatory tip
evidently the tips under discussion were not mandatory.
Employees are paid for the work they are expected to perform during the hours they are at the office. The company doesn’t expect them to do more than that, however if they do, they get a nice bonus for it.
Baristas are paid to make iced tea. The customer doesn’t expect them to do more than that, but they can be nice, learn your name, prepare your tea ahead of time, change the tea recipe to something you enjoy more. Don’t you think they should get a nice bonus too?
Sure. From their employer, not from their customer.
> Sure. From their employer, not from their customer.
In the scenario I set forth, an employer assumes the role of customer during annual reviews of their employees.
> Annual bonus is either performance based or as a retainer to make up for differences in the wages since the person was hired.
Sounds like a tip to me.
> Stock options are because you could be paid more or you are taking risks for future rewards.
Sounds to me like the allure of a job in which tipping is expected.
> A mandatory tip is because your employer doesn't want to pay you full wage ...
Tips are not mandatory by definition.
Bonus/Options are to be paid by the employer. Essentially, what you are asking for is that you go to Netflix subscription page and there is a dropdown saying "how much bonus to pay our employees this year?"
Yeah no. Your annual bonus and stock options is between you and your employer. Your end customers don't pay for it directly, they are paid for within the cost of whatever product your employer is selling.
When tipping is no longer customary to receive good service and seeps into other aspects of lives it leads to all sorts of problems and situations.
This[1] is an extreme example of that situation in a different country but are we really ready to accept similar consequences and say they should've just paid the poor nurse ?
1. https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/up-mainpuri-infant-die...
>Your annual bonus and stock options is between you and your employer. Your end customers don't pay for it directly
In the service industry, you wouldn't need to say end customer, because the person you're delivering to is already the end customer. Either way is still a results based cash reward paid by the entity receiving the direct output of your work.
The “full price” often includes a bonus and stock options.
Employer or customer?
Since tipping is done by customers. It is like employers tell employees you can let customers know good service is for good tippers. Maybe car repair mechanic can pour sweet tea in instead of engine oil since customer is known to be bad tipper.
I am sure that will go very well with that business.
> Employer or customer?
In the scenario I set forth, an employer assumes the role of customer during annual reviews of their employees.
> It is like employers tell employees you can let customers know good service is for good tippers.
This is non sequitur as clarified above.
A lot of the times your contract will actually include bonus and stock options, so those are part of the price. And if not, then the employer absolutely does not have to pay bonus or offer stock options. The employee, ofcourse, has the right to move jobs if they desire.
Seattle coffee culture is different than what you may be used to.
You think you should have received a tip for working behind the counter?
Or were you actually waiting tables and he'd be at a table?
If it's the latter I apologise for the brusqueness.
This was a coffeehouse in Redmond. Tipping baristas has been a common thing for the past 50-60 years or so on the west coast of the US.
And no, I don't think we "should" have received a tip. Most regular customers did tip occasionally. He was an outlier but only notable because of his wealth.
Other customers who do never tipped were treated the exact same.
So you seem to think that simply because of his wealth he should have been tipping you? The corollary would be the notion that regardless of where you were working at the time, you would have expected a tip from him simply on account of his wealth? There's a huge difference between tips being a thing certain patrons do every once in awhile, and something being an established norm - are you trying to say that in Seattle at the time tipping baristas was literally a well-established norm (ie., not just that it was common but that it was actually the predominant behaviour if not outright expected)?
I'm American but have lived in Australia for nearly 20 years, and in Melbourne for the past 15. There's a huge coffee culture here and almost all cafes have a tipping jar. But I can't imagine any baristas finding it odd to the point of mentioning if a patron, even a repeat patron, never put money in the jars.
I've never been a Ballmer fan myself although he's gotten more likeable post-Microsoft IMO, but to me it says a lot about his character that he both got his own coffee/tea (as opposed to having a PA do it for him), and if you're saying he was always polite then I have no clue why you'd feel the need to cast aspersions on him by suggesting he should have tipped but didn't.
> So you seem to think that simply because of his wealth he should have been tipping you?
No. But it's funny that he, of all people, didn't. It's the juxtaposition of wealth and frugality that are amusing.
> are you trying to say that in Seattle at the time tipping baristas was literally a well-established norm?
Yes. Without a doubt. But the norm was to tip infrequently, and not everyone did it. Those that did tipped once a week or 1x/2x a month. And it was usually just their change, significantly less than 10%.
> I can't imagine any baristas finding it odd to the point of mentioning if a patron, even a repeat patron, never put money in the jars
No one blinked an eye at the regulars who didn't tip. It wasn't a concern. The only exception is when it was a famous billionaire. It's notable.
> why you'd feel the need to cast aspersions on him
How so? I shared an objective observation. And I made clear that there was no ill will. Not even the slightest bit upset.
I feel like a lot of commenters are working through their own issues with tipping that surfaced with this light hearted story. Tipflation sucks, I get it. But this story isn't that.
Well, I guess what I’d say is this: if you told the story but left out the part about the tips, but then people asked if ever tipped and you said no, that would be a very different story from one where the fact he didn’t tip looms large because of how you tell it. I think the story is notable just because a billionaire both ordered his own drinks personally and was a nice guy. Aside from Buffett going to McDonald’s in Omaha I don’t think the super rich ordering their own fast food is especially common these days.
I do agree though in general about tipping culture and how most people feel about it. I’m not necessarily trying to white knight for a billionaire here, either.
Hope that makes sense and I do appreciate your responses.
> one of the richest men in the world and he never once offered a tip.... he was always very polite and warm so I can't be mad
I bet Mr. Ballmer saved a lot of money from his "polite and warm".
I once watched one of TED business talk videos. In the video the businessman proudly claimed that from a very young age, he learned to take advantage of people's empathy towards him as a kid to get a better business term (or something like that, it was long ago I can't fully remember).
From that video, I've learned to reduce my empathy/emotional reaction when making decisions. Because you just don't know if the other side is manipulating you into making mistakes. Money is money, you pay what you should've, we'll discuss extra things after that.
If Mr. Ballmer never pay the tips that he should've, then he needs to pay more for the product (in the form of added on convenience fee, for example). Of course, if you failed in charging such fee, then that's your fault, for falling into the "polite and warm" trap.
BTW: "sensitive" not. But comments on Hacker News are often trended to demand stuff for free, including kindness which is independent of the original stuff. That's very foolish.
Today at least you have 15% 20% 25% choice to punish or reward people who directly serve you. If everything is 20% included in the price (oh, it will be like this, it always goes like this), then you just have to sit there and take in whoever got the altitude that day. That's not even how capitalism let alone democracy works.