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.
> 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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 .
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
"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.
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".
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.
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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.
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.
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 keep hearing praise for Nadella but all 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
Deleted Comment
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
With Satya he had much broader vision.
Very good point, but please stop using this phrase.
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.
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 .
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.
He feared it as a threath to Microsoft's business model and revenue streams.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dated 2013, a year before Nadella became CEO:
https://www.change.org/p/the-microsoft-board-of-directors-as...
> 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.
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.
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.
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-...
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.
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.
Always worth mentioning that this culturally altered America in a way that we’ll probably never unwind.
That nearly ruined Microsoft...
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft-ditches-syst...
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.
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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.
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.
Good thing that enterprise software and athletics are different things!
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".
All it does is make true talent not want to work with other true talent for fear they get screwed over.
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=DgPt6mvjr5Q
Here's a few more to add to your favorites
If you haven't seen the remix, here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gI_HGDgG7c