
What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer - dbattaglia
https://medium.com/@benbob/what-i-learned-working-for-steve-ballmer-afa677763973
======
achow
Excerpts from infamous mini-msft blog (in 2005 another msft employee venting
anonymously):

"I mean, what has he done or not done that is impacting the stock?"

\- along with Gates, made decisions that resulted in the company being found
guilty of breaking the law twice(and counting)resulting in fines,
restrictions...

\- along with Gates, invested over $10B of cash in failed telecom investments
that ended up being written off

\- failed to make any meaningful investments at the bottom of the market crash
when numerous companies were available for cheap..

\- invested $10B's in various "emerging" businesses that even years later
represent only about 10% of MSFT's revenue, aren't growing at even 10%..

\- approved the onerous Licensing 6 program when many companies were hurting
economically thereby pissing off a good portion of our customers and fueling
the move to Open Source.

\- has been at the helm as MSFT failed to take security seriously and then has
had to drop everything to play catch up, missed the paid search move and had
to play catch up, missed the move to web services and had to play catch up,
missed the portable music wave and had to play catch up, let IE stagnate and
had to play catch up, and now seemingly can't ship any major product on time
even stripped of formerly core features (can you say Longhorn, CRM, SQL, VS,
etc. etc. etc?).

Continued...

[http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2005/03/old-school-
competencies...](http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2005/03/old-school-
competencies.html#c111169237226667511)

~~~
sonnyblarney
During Ballmers tenure, the company massively increased it's revenues and
profits, and they were exceptional in other areas.

'Missed paid search' and 'missed music player' etc. etc. are all haughty
claims - MS was never an internet oriented business, it's like saying 'Oracle
missed the search business' \- well sure. Just like Google missed social? Or
Facebook missed mobile? Or missed photo-sharing?

I'm no fan of Ballmer or MSFT, but if the goal of MSFT is to make money via
decent products that work well enough in the eyes of their buyers, he did
that. Just not in the way that you might want or expect them to.

I like Satya more, but give it a few years and we can judge then.

~~~
nojvek
Satya is already wayyyy more succesful as a CEO than Steve Ballmer ever was.
MSFT stock price took a big dip after 2000 and never recovered in Ballmer from
2000 - 2014. He was a decent CEO in the sense that he didn't kill MSFT like
Marissa Mayer did to Yahoo.

He missed a ton of opportunities and messed a lot of things like Nokia and
Skype acquisitions that barely panned out. He let Apple and Google steal the
mobile show when Windows Mobile had been the smart phone king for a long time.
Microsoft used to be #1, now they are behind Apple, Amazon and Google.

Granted, he was good at milking the Windows and Office cash cows that had been
gifted to him from Gates era, but he spent an insane amount of money on things
that never panned out.

MSFT has a lot of money in the bank account so I'm sure they'll be fine even
if they put a rock in the CEO seat.

~~~
jaredklewis
> like Marissa Mayer did to Yahoo

Sorry to nitpick, but for some reason this comment irks me. Your comment seems
to imply that yahoo was healthy, they hired Mayer, and then Yahoo died as a
result.

Yahoo was a sinking ship, and it would have been a tough turn around for
anyone.

Not that I think Mayer was the world’s best CEO or anything, but the idea that
she “killed” yahoo seems absurd. It’s like accusing a surgeon of killing
someone that died in ER surgery; the reason the person was in the ER in the
first place was because they were dying.

Microsoft dying under Ballmer would have been night and day different as
Microsoft was basically the world’s most valuable company, not a clusterfuck
like 2012 yahoo.

~~~
nojvek
Yahoo was behind, agreed! They had so many opportunities to sell though.
Microsoft was willing to buy Yahoo at a huge premium and it didn’t go through.
Good for MSFT.

In ER terms, the surgeon could have cut the leg off and saved the person, but
got a bit too greedy and ended up killing the person by trying to save
everything.

~~~
cepth
Just to be clear, Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo for $45 billion in 2008, long
before Marissa Mayer was CEO.

As the parent comment notes, your previous comment seems to suggest some kind
of causation between Mayer’s tenure as CEO and the eventual breakup and sale
of Yahoo. This is the fallacy known in poker as “resulting”.

Nicholas Carlson’s “Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo” is a fair
account of her first few years at Yahoo. Keep in mind that when she joined,
there was something like a total dozen mobile engineers at Yahoo. The company
had burned through 3 CEOs in a decade, etc.

Mayer was not a perfect CEO in terms of strategic vision or her choice of
acquisition targets, but I don’t think her time as CEO was particularly bad
either.

~~~
nojvek
I believe I got my facts wrong. Thanks for changing my perspective.

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jaclaz
This strikes me as "odd":

>Then he looked up, waited for a pause in the presentation, and said in a soft
voice: “This number is wrong!”

>...

>Any other executive would have assumed his finance people could write Excel
formulas and delegated the task.

All the (successful) executives I ever dealt with have a sort of "sense" for
numbers, and surely do not really-really trust their finance people writing
Excel formulas, or - better - they trust them as long as the results are
reasonable and don't raise this "number sense" alarm.

~~~
gizmo
Yes, and the funny thing is the author even didn't get the correct take-away
from this event.

Ballmer looked at the bottom line, was surprised by the number he saw and then
started looking at the math that produced that number in detail. It has
nothing to do with being a math wizz. The lesson here is that good executives
ignore noise (the speaker) and focus on importance (numbers).

Balmer isn't a superhuman who can listen to a talk, read slides and do higher
level math simultaneously, but he can spot a bottom line number that is
surprising given his mental model of the deal. He expected to see one number
and saw something else. That's when he stopped skimming the slides and gave
100% of his attention to the math that produced that bottom line number.
That's also the point where he tuned out the speaker completely.

Math genius is not required. Superhuman ability to divide attention is not
required. The only skill Ballmer displayed here is ability to direct his
attention to a number he didn't trust, which turned out to be the right
decision.

Programmers of average ability have their spider sense tingle when they look
at code with sql injections, or at loops that don't terminate, or suspect
allocation/threading logic. Bad code looks bad. Not always, but often enough.
Finance is no different.

~~~
dsjoerg
I wish this were true of programmers of average ability.

~~~
doikor
In my experience most do. It’s just that they work on project that leave zero
time to do anything to fix the issue. Customer is paying to add feature X not
to fix Y that still worked yesterday.

~~~
JJMcJ
Often so busy it's like merging on to the expressway with someone behind you
honking, you look over your shoulder, it seems sorta alright, so you go ahead.

------
rimher
Very interesting read! He might've made some big mistakes during his tenure,
but if Microsoft's still there it's also his merit

~~~
ThrowawayR2
Yep, a lot of techies fail to appreciate the extent to which this is true. For
those who disagree and were around in 2000, where is Sun Microsystems, Compaq,
Yahoo, AOL, and Netscape today?

~~~
bigtones
They were all acquired or merged for a lot of money - and they were all highly
profitable companies. None of those businesses failed. That is just natural
business evolution for successful businesses.

~~~
1996
I disagree, but I think it is a matter of perspective, if by "successful" you
mean "do not end up in a bankrupcy sale".

But then by your metric, there are businesses that are "more than successful":
they are not acquired, but acquire others instead

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kelukelugames
I can't wait for Ballmer to become the lovable, goofy NBA owner instead of be
remembered as the guy who dragged down Microsoft.

~~~
zerr
> who dragged down Microsoft

Did he?

~~~
Fnoord
By being unable to use his warchest on a changing market. As an example:
missing the smartphone boat twice (once with Windows Mobile vs Symbian, and
once with Windows Phone vs iOS/Android). Another example: Microsoft search /
Bing.

Microsoft kept Office relevant though, made Azure relevant, and are
reinventing themselves from a proprietary to a data company (like Google,
Facebook, and Amazon) who also do a lot of open source (like the previously
mentioned companies). But I suppose Nadella takes credit for that.

~~~
CSMastermind
Bing has proved to be one of the best investments that Microsoft ever made.

Ballmer's failure as it related to Bing was trying to build an advertising
platform to compete with Google and failing.

~~~
TheWiseOne
Genuine question - how is Bing a good investment? Isn't it essentially a non-
factor in the search market?

~~~
alttab
My guess is the algorithms and infrastructure serve search functions across
all of their products. The "search market" is really the "Display advertising"
market, and sure, they suck at that because no one goes to bing. But bing
isn't worthless.

~~~
can16358p
I've lost trust on them the day they were busted copying results directly from
Google ([https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-
google/](https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/))

------
majani
He raises a good point about the law of large numbers. When your core business
is doing $75b and has 95% market share, it's near impossible to find other
lines of business to complement that core in a meaningful way. I'd go as far
as to say it's illogical to expect crazy growth or innovation at such a point.

~~~
ddebernardy
That bit had me scratching my head. To me the law of large numbers had to do
with stats. But apparently, MBAs have come up with their own completely
unrelated "law".

~~~
ghaff
I've never heard it referred to as the law of large numbers (which I also
associate with stats). But I still remember a discussion I had with an exec at
a large systems company a number of years back when I was a consultant. I
don't remember the exact context but it was around the potential for some new
initiative or other. The gist of his remark was to the effect of "If it won't
be a minimum $1 billion a year business for us, it's in the noise and
uninteresting."

------
Waterluvian
"A leader falls on his sword for his team if and when needed."

I like this. It also reminded me of a lesson I learned when reading Maj.
Richard Winters' memoirs: a good leader leads from the front. First one in,
last one out.

~~~
Fnoord
Strange comparison. If you look at the leaders in WWII (Churchill, Eisenhower,
Hitler, Stalin, etc), none of them were at the front. Generals generally
aren't either. Its direct leaders such as corporals and sergeants who are
leading from the front; not officers. As comparison: the direct leaders would
be CTO, division leaders, or direct managers.

~~~
idontpost
Political leaders don't lead troops. They lead department heads in decision
making. In that field, good ones operate the same way: leading from the front,
showing willingness to take risk on themselves, supporting their direct
reports as needed.

Similarly, Generals don't (usually) lead troops. They lead company commanders.

And so on.

~~~
Fnoord
A peculiar definition of "leading at the front".

------
Zigurd
The Nokia fiasco is a big blot on Ballmer's record. For a good reason: It
shows the consequences of great arrogance. Nokia's marching orders were to
make Windows Phone a success, and not to dilute that mission with a drop of
alternative products. Just because he could, he took one of the finest
companies on the planet and trashed it with a doomed strategy, at a cost of
tens of billions in foregone value to his own shareholders and Nokia's
employees. He took that much money, put it in a pile, lit it on fire and
blocked the fire brigades, whether for vanity or for a weakly articulated
strategy.

------
pappaSsmurf
laughed at the notion that apple would ever be able to make a serious mobile
phone

[https://bgr.com/2016/11/04/ballmer-iphone-quote-
explained/](https://bgr.com/2016/11/04/ballmer-iphone-quote-explained/)

edit: added the word 'serious'

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letientai299
I've just learned that Medium now has a paywall for free member. Are there any
other place/copy of this article that we can read without the paywall?

~~~
dbenhur
Incognito window is your friend

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theNewMicrosoft
No word that he was a psychopath and a Corporate bully, Instead we have a
hagiography for Steve.

~~~
drewmate
Clever ambiguity, or mere coincidence?

------
timc3
Interesting read but a pity that the author doesn’t understand the difference
between blog and blog post particular as one of his points was attention to
detail.

If the author is reading this blog is the medium (like magazine or newspaper)
and blog post or post is the individual what a blog is what one authors.

