What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer

https://medium.com/@benbob/what-i-learned-working-for-steve-ballmer-afa677763973

by dbattaglia • 8 years ago

141 66 8 years ago

achow• 8 years ago

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...

Adrock• 8 years ago

I'll add one more: https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/09/06/microsoft-stock-hi...

Take a look at the chart. Ballmer was CEO from January 2000 to February 2014.

Delmania2• 8 years ago

In the words of John Gruber of Daring Fireball, Ballmer knows how to make money. People will disagree with his decisions but the results don’t lie.

justin66• 8 years ago

Take a look at the chart.

...and keep in mind that it doesn't capture the money paid out in dividends for over a decade.

sonnyblarney4• 8 years ago

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.

mgkimsal• 8 years ago

it's like saying 'Oracle missed the search business'

did Oracle spend lots of $ and resources trying to get in to search?

nojvek4• 8 years ago

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.

rimher• 8 years ago

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

ThrowawayR22• 8 years ago

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?

bigtones2• 8 years ago

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.

jaclaz• 8 years ago

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.

bigtones2• 8 years ago

Also, if the math was that wrong that it made the entire deal not make sense financially given it was a very large deal in monetary terms (which he stated) what were those 30 people doing? Most M&A deals make sense strategically first and then at a price second - rather than for a price first (especially if that price was very high).

scriptproof2• 8 years ago

I am not impressed by this exploit, because there are some chance he had studied the document before the presentation, or even asked someone to verify it. He was flawed on many aspects, for example trying to attract developers by dancing and chanting "developers, dev...". His successors put Linux in Windows, open sourced .NET and this seems more efficient... without even harming Windows market share.

ThrowawayR22• 8 years ago

...trying to attract developers by dancing and chanting "developers, dev..."

That video was from Microsoft's _internal_ company-wide meeting held annually to rally their staff, so your assertion is invalid.

Moreover, it's a bad example to begin with; Ballmer was and still is absolutely correct. What makes the FOSS software ecosystem so successful? That's right: developers, developers, developers. Somebody has to write all that code and it isn't going to be the end-users. When developers get pissed off at a platform, they abandon or fork it, which is why it makes sense to keep developers happy.

Those of us who were around in the '80s-'90s remember that Microsoft's rise to dominance was partly powered by the fact that they offered relatively cheap and good compilers and dev tools and solid documentation to make it easy to develop software for their platform. Contrast that with the workstation vendors back then that charged much more than MS did just to get a compiler.

gizmo• 8 years ago

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• 8 years ago

I wish this were true of programmers of average ability.

kelukelugames• 8 years ago

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

brewrwe• 8 years ago

Looking back, the whole "Developers, Developers, Developers..." bit was just what we saw publicly, I hope he was on fewer drugs when doing day to day management, but perhaps that is part of why Microsoft found itself in a dying segment of an industry it once monopolized.

Fnoord5• 8 years ago

Yeah, that's one of those memorable moments.

Here's another one, the chair throw incident:

"At some point in the conversation Mr. Ballmer said: "Just tell me it's not Google." I told him it was Google. At that point, Mr. Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office. Mr. Ballmer then said: "Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill Google."" [1]

If you scroll up on there, you can read how very wrong he was on the iPhone, Linux, and FOSS.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ballmer#Google

zerr• 8 years ago

who dragged down Microsoft

Did he?

Fnoord5• 8 years ago

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.

traskjd• 8 years ago

My opinion, fwiw:

Financially, no.

Optically, yes.

(and, in fairness to the latter, in a manner which was diminishing longer term value creation also. However he totally does not deserve the reputation he generally has with developers. Like a lot of things, folks love to view them in black in white, when in reality it's a rainbow).

ddebernardy2• 8 years ago

As one who can recollect the old days where one had to pick up the phone and read catalogs to source a supplier, I'd suggest he didn't do that bad - MS is still around and generating billions, after all. But he botched a few potential growth vectors along the way - think mobile or SaaS.

Delmania2• 8 years ago

Depends on your point of view, doesn’t it? Under his watch MSFT grew in revenue, profit, and stock. If the point of a business is to make money, he did well.

majani• 8 years ago

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.

ddebernardy2• 8 years ago

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• 8 years ago

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."

idontpost2• 8 years ago

I think the connection is that when you're 100% of the pie, you're, by definition, average. You cannot be exceptional when you so dominate the market segment.

Waterluvian• 8 years ago

"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.

mjw10072• 8 years ago

But Ballmer didn't fall on his sword; he just apologised, to people who had no ability to punish him for the mistake which he claimed as his.

If you receive an apology from someone several levels above where the mistake was made, I don't think it means much. You end up with no reassurance that anything is being done to stop it happening again.

skookumchuck3• 8 years ago

no ability

The bank could have abandoned Microsoft products. They could have sued Microsoft. Blaming one's underlings is a sign of weakness. Blaming the customer would be a disaster.

Fnoord5• 8 years ago

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.

idontpost2• 8 years ago

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.

theNewMicrosoft• 8 years ago

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

drewmate• 8 years ago

Clever ambiguity, or mere coincidence?

Zigurd• 8 years ago

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.

letientai299• 8 years ago

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• 8 years ago

Incognito window is your friend

timc3• 8 years ago

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.

pappaSsmurf• 8 years ago

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/

edit: added the word 'serious'

What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer

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