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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> > 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 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 p...
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 355 ms ] threadBallmer was just an average sales jock along for the ride.
Edit: Seems like I was proven wrong. Assumptions are... assumptions :).
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?
https://www.nationalmerit.org/s/1758/interior.aspx?sid=1758&...
I get that it correlates with intelligence, but with math, specifically?
Classic "nerd" prejudice; Ballmer was not dumb.
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.
He was a CEO, that much can be said. The rest is up for debate.
If you’re running Windows for anything, it’s only a matter of when, not if.
Basic numbers I've been seeing on a quick search has PS5 almost doubling the Series X sales.
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.
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.
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..)
Have you _seen_ the typical software produced by hardware makers?
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.
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.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_for_Mac_201...
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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).
Window's massive install base is not really a testament to their failure.
https://youtu.be/rRm0NDo1CiY
and for that I'm thankful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7ZDH45OAt8
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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
Which, to OP's point, is a testament to the particular style of business that Ballmer was good at - building enterprise and partner channels.
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?
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 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.
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.
Steve Ballmer: developers developers developers developers developers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs
Two of my favorite videos haha
If you haven't seen the remix, here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gI_HGDgG7c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgPt6mvjr5Q
Here's a few more to add to your favorites
Satya is much better in that regard.
Satya has been good with acquisitions but what else?
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).
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.
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.
You are not disconnected from the facts but you happily discount Ballmer wins when they don’t suit your narrative.
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.
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
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’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.
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.
Crazy they were ever considering this.
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.
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.
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...
Azure was a second mover. Microsoft executes on platform and partner ecosystem very well. Azure is still growing market share pretty quickly.
Fair enough
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?
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.
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...
> 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.
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'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 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.
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 p...
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. Enterp...
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/
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.
You are literally the first person I've ever seen say this. It is definitely not true that everyone agrees with you on that.