from Hacker News

Is Steve Ballmer the Most Underrated CEO of the 21st Century?

by ejz on 7/23/24, 3:38 PM with 113 comments

  • by paxys on 7/24/24, 12:40 PM

    During Ballmer's tenure, the Office division spent a lot of resources building apps for iOS. Ballmer saw a demo, realized that they were better than the Office apps available on Microsoft's own phones and tablets, and so blocked the release. The company sat on the apps for multiple years. When Nadella came on, one of his first decisions as CEO was to release them to the public.

    This single incident perfectly demonstrates Ballmer's failures and Nadella's new vision. Had he remained at the helm Microsoft would have continued to stagnate and sink with the likes of IBM, Cisco and HP rather than stay on top of technological shifts and become the biggest company in the world.

  • by throw0101c on 7/24/24, 12:18 PM

    "Steve Ballmer played a powerful part in Microsoft’s comeback" (2019):

    * https://qz.com/1551842/steve-ballmer-played-a-powerful-part-...

    "Satya Nadella credits Steve Ballmer for pushing Microsoft into the cloud":

    * https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/16/satya-nadella-credits-ballme...

    I think the biggest knock against Ballmer was not being able to figure out a (smart)phone strategy that ended up working. Having more than just Android and iOS would probably have been a better situation for everyone to be in.

  • by surfingdino on 7/24/24, 12:40 PM

    Balmer presided over Microsoft's transition into irrelevance. He wanted developers to write software for Windows. He did not want them to write software for the world that was changing, opening (the internet, Open Source, etc.) which is why developers gave him a middle finger. Just like any large corporation Microsoft stopped leading and started chasing and could not keep up until they struck gold with the XBox.

  • by johnloeber on 7/23/24, 3:47 PM

    I've had the same thought for a long time. I think this is spot-on. Ballmer is underrated in that he put Microsoft into a profoundly well-resourced position that a better product leader was then able to make productive use of.

  • by scosman on 7/24/24, 12:34 PM

    Having worked on mobile there 2008-2011: no, I would say he’s properly rated. Had years head start on the Android model (hackable OS+vendors+wide HW support), and threw it away. Chased iPhone model briefly without the commitment to actually win. Took smartphone market share from 20-30% to 0% when it mattered most. Invested more in XBox and Business intelligence platforms.

  • by MaxGripe on 7/24/24, 12:46 PM

    During his tenure, Windows 8 was released... Just as W8, the server version also lacked the START button, which was particularly noticeable when working through RDP. Also, the whole "Metro" design was a disaster. I also remember the acquisition of Skype for an astronomical amount. Where is Skype now? Indeed, an underrated CEO...

  • by alephnerd on 7/24/24, 12:57 PM

    For most people on HN, I'd say so.

    Mobile is fun and cool and probably started a lot of HNers careers, but everyone on here seems to ignore how much more money there is to be made in the Enterprise and B2B space, and how it absolutely dwarfs B2C revenue from an effort and retention perspective.

    B2C Growth Sales is a slog with a lot of variability outside of a company's control.

    MS back then was in a weird transitional phase where it as a company needed to decide whether it wanted to prioritize B2C or B2B/Enterprise. Ballmer made the call to go for Enterprise and helped pivot MS away from being a B2C or B2B2C company to a company heavily devoted to Enterprise and B2B sales motions.

    It was Ballmer who laid the seeds for Azure, M365, and Enterprise in general by making the "Enterprise Business" and "Servers and Tools" (precursor for Azure and MS Security) divisions much more prominent internally than their "Windows" division.

    There was also no guarantee that then-resurgent Apple or new-kid-on-the-block Google wouldn't be able to eat into MS's Enterprise market share with release of the iPad+iWork and Google Apps (now Google Workspaces) respectively, and and could have tangibly done the same pivot that Amazon did in the late 2000s

  • by ThrowawayB7 on 7/24/24, 12:30 PM

    There's a case to be made that Ballmer is smarter than the ignorati give him credit for but let's not forget things like the attempted Yahoo acquisition. That would have been an absolute disaster for Microsoft.

  • by ko_pivot on 7/24/24, 12:22 PM

    The latest Acquired episode makes a pretty strong case for Ballmer, implying that he led the Microsoft move to own all enterprise software, not Gates.

  • by mentos on 7/24/24, 12:29 PM

    Developers are the seeds in your garden so I believe his laser focus on "developers, developers, developers" while now a meme is spot on.

  • by knighthack on 7/24/24, 12:37 PM

    This was such an an enjoyable read. My view of Ballmer has completely changed, in retrospect. Am also impressed that he was a mathematician by training and outscored Gates, and went quite against norms by his own business judgment (which is commendable - it means he made his own path, and didn't just chase after trends).

  • by andrewstuart on 7/24/24, 12:27 PM

    Steve Ballmer is basically the co founder of Microsoft.

    He came on a little later but Bill moved heaven and earth to bring him on to run the company with him.

    He was given and incredible deal so he could be effectively an equity partner.

    Steve Ballmer is underrated and did an incredible job and is to be credited with the success of Microsoft as much as anyone.

    He’s one of my computing heroes.

  • by epups on 7/24/24, 12:43 PM

    This article is borderline comical. The thin list of his accomplishments focus on increasing revenue ($15B to $70B) and launching or acquiring successful initiatives (Xbox, Skype, Azure). Then the rest is a recollection of his biggest embarassments, like terrible mobile products, misguided Windows strategy and trailing AWS by 7 years.

    Reporting on business issues is always muddled by a lack of proper comparisons, along with cherry picking. For example, this article makes the argument that increasing Microsoft's revenue by 4x was very impressive, even though the stock value stagnated. However, when evaluting his tenure as owner of a basketball club, he is declared successful because its value doubled. The problem is that Microsoft was eclipsed compared to its peers at the time - Google, Amazon, etc. -, and likewise the average basketball club doubled in value as well.

  • by KoolKat23 on 7/24/24, 1:05 PM

    He was entrepreneurial, in summary his strength. He convinced shareholders to part with potential dividends and invested in new things. There's little excuse for company like Microsoft generating so much cash not to be doing so.

    Mixed bag: Xbox 360 - success Vista - fail Windows 7 - success Zune - fail Windows phone - fail Azure - success

    Similar story for Zuckerberg. Lucky with Facebook. Thereafter ensured he had a finger in every pie. One minute he's a bad bet with his quixotic expenditure on AR/VR, and the next minute he's a genius with his investment in AI (Llama).

    At the end of the day, it pays to have your finger in many pies. Money makes money.

  • by waisbrot on 7/24/24, 4:12 PM

    "Maybe the memes making fun of this person are, in fact, an exaggeration."

    Sure. I don't need much convincing that Ballmer was only "bad" rather than "uniquely terrible". It seems a pretty normal thing that the negative reaction was outsized.

    But I also think it would be more interesting to look at cases where the reaction by the haters was _spot on_. Or even where it _undersold_ how bad things were.

  • by FrankWilhoit on 7/23/24, 3:55 PM

    We need to be asking who the most overrated are. They are the ones who can exploit their positions to do real harm. (Lookin' at you, Sloe Mnuk.)

  • by wslh on 7/25/24, 9:27 PM

    Is there a book recomendation about Ballmer? Can find some titles on Amazon but no idea about how serious they are.

  • by err4nt on 7/25/24, 12:42 AM

    Perhaps it was because of his top priorities, which were: "Developers, developers, developers, developers!"

  • by RcouF1uZ4gsC on 7/24/24, 12:23 PM

    Honestly we as consumers might have been better off with Microsoft’s vision of a Windows computer in each home acting as the hub of digital life and monetization through purchase of hardware and software instead of our current model where the hubs are large centralized services and monetization is through ads.

  • by ssharp on 7/24/24, 1:29 PM

    For comparison, Apple's stock about 20x'd during Ballmer's tenure and that was after atrocious AAPL performance from 2000-2003.

    Balmer's biggest failures were mirrored by Apple's enormous success. The two areas this article calls out as Balmer's missteps were the exact areas Apple flourished in -- hardware innovation and operating system.

    I don't see how you can "underrate" Ballmer as CEO given his mistakes allowed a nearly-dead rival to grow to be larger than Microsoft. The opportunity for Microsoft to capture a significant chunk of that was completed squandered.

  • by sunflowerfly on 7/25/24, 4:16 AM

    He missed the entire move to mobile. I am still mad MS gave up on Windows phone so easily.

  • by anticorporate on 7/24/24, 12:27 PM

    I guess it depends on your measure. Personally, the Ballmer era represents Microsoft going from being "the" software company to just another dying giant that wasn't relevant to me. I used fewer Microsoft products in 2014 than I did in 2000 when Ballmer took over. Sure, they expanded the product categories they competed in, but any company with that kind of capitalization could have chosen to do the same.

  • by 317070 on 7/24/24, 12:43 PM

    Steve Ballmer is worth $147 billion.

    Not by any stretch of my imagination is the man underrated. I'd say, like many American CEO's, he has vastly been overrated through a failure in capitalism.

    If I do some back of the envelope calculations, a teacher makes about 50k a year, so about 2 million in a career. In his career so far, Steve Ballmer has made as much as 75k teachers do in their career. For comparison, Arizona has about 50k teachers.

    Now, the man has achieved a lot, maybe even a lot compared to other CEOs. But by this measure, he must be overrated.

  • by KingOfCoders on 7/24/24, 12:38 PM

    "Developers, developers, developers!"

  • by chrismcb on 7/25/24, 6:39 AM

    Wait, what? You can practically see when ballmer was ceo by looking at the stock market graph.

  • by manarth on 7/24/24, 12:26 PM

  • by shrubble on 7/24/24, 12:26 PM

    It's easy to look like a genius when your company engages in sleazy, underhanded business practices and becomes a near-monopoly as a result. Stac, the paying off of Ziff-Davis publications, etc.

    Ever since Bill Gates snookered Ed Roberts , Microsoft has had 'flexible' business ethics.