People blame Steve Ballmer but I think he did great stuff. He built the huge enterprise salesforce and got Microsoft a leg in the enterprise, where margins are much higher and consumers much less fickle. He also chose a very good successor and removed all the old timers who would have made trouble for Nadella (Muglia, Sinofsky to name a few). Microsoft went from mostly an OS+ consumer software company to this enterprise gorilla which will now have an IBMesque lifetime (meaning will survive for very very long) regardless of whether their projects are very good or not.
Sure he couldn't beat the iPhone, but the iPhone is the most successful consumer electronics product of all time.
Ballmer is a good used car salesman. He sold what they had, but new products suffered under his leadership. Just like Apple stopped inventing after Jobs.
Nadella built new product categories for the company.
I think two more years with Ballmer would have made the the prophecy valid.
What new product categories did Nadella built that Ballmer didn't start?. Azure was started and then prioritized under Ballmer. Office for iOS was built under Ballmer but not announced to give Nadella a quick win on his start. Ballmer set his replacement very well on so many levels.
> Ballmer is a good used car salesman.
Ballmer was a very very good salesman. The reason Azure or all these new shiny MSFT products (e.g. teams) have a leg is because Ballmer already sold AD to almost every corp out there. Microsoft went from being 0 in enterprise to bigger than anyone else and that is now the main money printer and also the future of the company.
One thing everyone forgets is Nadella was nowhere to be found few years before becoming CEO. Ballmer made a very very good successor choice elevating Nadella quickly in few years.
> WSL, becoming again a Java vendor, adoption of Rust, FOSS culture on DevDiv, VSCode eating VS licenses...
These are all nice things for developers, but I don't think they are actually good for Microsoft in the long-term or their bottom line in the short term. At least not the way they've been executed.
If anything, the treatment of Microsoft's older cash cows under Nadella has been disastrous, essentially throwing goodwill and money away - e.g., the quality of and feature development in Windows.
Were you involved with the project? I worked at msft back then and distinctly remember the office ipad team. I think ballmer actually let them release just the OneNote standalone app in 2013 iirc.
I’ll never understand this narrative. What product category has Apple missed or failed to execute well in since Jobs died? Do you think there’s an iPhone level hardware product out there that Apple would be shipping today if only Steve were still around?
Off the top of my head, since Jobs death Apple has launched AirPods, Apple Watch, Vision Pro, Car Play, Home Play, M-series MacBooks, and they’ve greatly expanded their services business.
Windows XP thru 10, Xbox, Windows Phone and Azure are just a few of the things Ballmer oversaw. I am definitely missing a lot of things. But remember he over saw Microsoft as CEO for 14 years.
He may look and sound like a used car salesman but was anything but.
Yes, Nadella did end up removing Windows Phone but you had to give it to Ballmer for standing behind that thing even when it was, at times, very silly!
As an aside, that was something I think that is one idea Ballmer did ok on. The focus on developers as an admittance that Microsoft cannot do everything and that you need to help others work with them. Developers (x 3), may have been silly but it sure is a good stance to get behind.
By contrast, as much as Apple talks about the App store, they seem to be becoming more inward focused on a lot of things. For better or worse, we are yet to know.
Anecdotally I’ve found that I often can’t get started on a new piece of work because for every possible solution I imagine all the possible ways it could go wrong. After a glass of wine I lose my hang-ups and I can “just get started” and bang out some code.
I suspect it’s the same as the well-known “social lubricant” effect of alcohol, where it eases anxiety and uninhibits nervous people.
However, while I’ve noticed it gets me going it has the same deleterious effects as in social contexts: the code I end up writing is not as clever as I thought it was the night before.
No matter, had sex! I mean… got an MVP working that can be nurtured into a relationship… I mean product.
Sure he couldn't beat the iPhone, but the iPhone is the most successful consumer electronics product of all time.