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

https://blog.jovono.com/p/ballmer-microsoft-underrated

by ejz • 2 years ago

40 113 2 years ago

blog.jovono.com

johnloeber• 2 years ago

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.

AlexandrB• 2 years ago

I'd love to have Ballmer back. The Microsoft products I use (Windows) have become increasingly crappified under current leadership.

rbanffy5• 2 years ago

Ballmer was there when Longhorn/Vista happened.

alephnerd7• 2 years ago

Consumer Windows doesn't generate enough revenue per customer and the consumer OS space is commodified, so I'd say it's getting the treatment it deserves.

FrankWilhoit• 2 years ago

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.)

apwell234• 2 years ago

jack welch ?

ChrisMarshallNY• 2 years ago

Having worked at GE, during Neutron Jack's time, I concur.

throw0101c3• 2 years ago

jack welch ?

Perhaps when he was actually still at GE, but after his retirement, it is now know that GE did all sorts of 'sideways accounting':

* https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releas...

So he is no longer viewed as highly as he once was:

* https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/vqr30e/jack_...

rbanffy5• 2 years ago

Too soon to call on Elon Musk.

rbanffy5• 2 years ago

Leo Apotheker, Rick Belluzzo, Stephen Elop...

marban• 2 years ago

Sundar

cmrdporcupine2• 2 years ago

I can think of nobody who rates him highly. Even among Googlers when he first took the role we were all like... really?

maximus-decimus• 2 years ago

I find that Elon Musk statement funny. How can he be overrated if 99% of people think he's an idiot who's incapable of anything?

apwell234• 2 years ago

mark zuckerberg

throw0101c3• 2 years ago

"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.

ghaff5• 2 years ago

Microsoft absolutely whiffed on mobile generally and that has to be on Ballmer to a significant degree. As with Intel with x86, they relied far too heavily on Windows being their essential beachhead. That said, he put the financial and some of the business/technical foundation in place for Nadella to be able to re-establish Microsoft as an important/relevant player with Azure (and Linux) which was by no means a given.

actionfromafar4• 2 years ago

Mobile 8 was not compatible with Mobile 7. You can't go around and change interfaces when companies are betting the barn on you.

For Windows proper you can release and deprecate a GUI every 20 minutes because there is always Win32 to fall back to.

But when you are bootstrapping an entire eco-system you can't muck around like that. Also strategic blunder to buy Nokia and then do exactly nothing with it.

Linux was still toxic to Microsoft. Nokia had a Linux computer which was also a phone which sold incredibly well despite Microsoft almost denying its existance, definitely not marketing it. They had to stop making it because to stop selling it. (No not "Linux" like Android is "Linux". A real Linux PC in your pocket. Imagine a Raspberry with data connection and phone.

whaleofatw20222• 2 years ago

That sounds a bit generous to Nokia, Maemo to me seemed more screwed into bureaucratic hell with Moblin/Meego partnerships...

seanmcdirmid• 2 years ago

Windows phone 7 was not compat with windows phone 8, but the interface was similar at least. I remember using both fondly.

thaumasiotes2• 2 years ago

People on HN still remark on how much they liked their Windows Phone. Other than making a product so great that, decades later, people are still saying how much they miss it, what did you want him to do?

boredtofears• 2 years ago

They do? I used to see it used as a punchline often but it seems to have faded into complete irrelevance the past few years.

ko_pivot• 2 years ago

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.

giancarlostoro2• 2 years ago

I think the current CEO is definitely a good one. I just wish one CEO would finally focus on making Windows less awful for power users. Let us turn off all the useless garbage and have offline accounts. I'll personally pay more to do so. Give power users the OS they want.

Curious why Ballmer is coming up lately, did something happen with him?

antaviana• 2 years ago

All that comes to mind is that he is now surpassing the net worth of Bill Gates, to a large extent because when he left Microsoft he said he would keep his Microsoft stock positions.

latexr2• 2 years ago

What you’re asking is not specific to power users. I have never seen a single user, “power” or not, saying they like ads and privacy invasions embedded in their OS.

keiferski2• 2 years ago

The link: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/microsoft-volume-ii

I haven't listened to this episode specifically, but I have listened to probably 20 of their other ones. It's a solid podcast, although I wish they were a little more critical and not always so laudatory.

sk11001• 2 years ago

I got into Acquired through the Jim Simons episode which was great but the rest of their content is hit and miss.

Sometimes they get hard to listen to because they treat every company as something incredible and many of them aren't - the luxury brands episodes are completely bizarre, no idea who the target audience is for a four podcast on a handbag manufacturer.

And their SBF episode didn't age well at all - so much ass kissing. Credit to them at least for not removing it entirely.

neom2• 2 years ago

What a great show huh? Recent discovery for me and I've binged the whole thing.

For those unaware: https://www.youtube.com/@AcquiredFM

I've never wanted to be on a podcast in my life but for some reason I want to go on it and tell the story of how we built DigitalOcean, I feel like they would ask actually good questions. Really enjoying them.

scosman4• 2 years ago

Probably fair that he led the move to enterprise.

Also true it blew a very very strong lead in the B2C business.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 2 years ago

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.

Ensorceled• 2 years ago

Microsoft's ORIGINAL vision. Microsoft products are now all about the centralized services, ads and subscriptions.

manarth• 2 years ago

No.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...>

shrubble2• 2 years ago

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.

geodel• 2 years ago

Maybe 3 orders of magnitude more people have tried same techniques but couldn't succeed. So yes, it is still genius.

shrubble2• 2 years ago

Every large mafia thus is "genius" by your definition.

andrewstuart• 2 years ago

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.

anticorporate3• 2 years ago

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.

thorin• 2 years ago

Yet still most enterprises use windows, O365, teams outlook, AD/entra etc. Azure has like 30% of market share. Copilot, visual studio, Dotnet framework, Microsoft dynamics, Power Automate are massive. I prefer the current incarnation of MS to any of the previous ones TBH, experience of Xbox has been pretty good as well.

Keyframe• 2 years ago

I think the question posed is whether that's due to Ballmer or despite him.

Jean-Papoulos• 2 years ago

You don't, but companies sure do, and they're the ones with deep pockets.

ghaff5• 2 years ago

It's actually an interesting case study. As a consumer, I'm basically no longer a Microsoft customer at all. It's not an ideological position. It just is.

But they're obviously doing pretty well. And, if I were an exec at a large business, I'd at least be talking to them.

anticorporate3• 2 years ago

Hence my comment "it depends on what you measure."

Microsoft is clearly continuing to find success in an enterprise space that had its addressable market grow astronomically during Ballmer's tenure.

At the same time, they went from absolute dominance in the 90s software market to having a smaller share of a much larger enterprise market today. Is that success? Maybe. Was it due to Ballmer, or was it inevitable? Also unclear.

mentos• 2 years ago

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

maxehmookau• 2 years ago

I agree. Which is why its such a shame the current Microsoft era is hacking down the trees to the tune of thousands of layoffs.

russfink• 2 years ago

https://youtu.be/KMU0tzLwhbE?si=1df0XsriTET6OWRT

Warning - serious ear worm.

ThrowawayB73• 2 years ago

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.

mulletbum3• 2 years ago

I don't think him not doing something that makes sense is a negative. "Balmer did not invest billions in a company that would go no where" is not a negative.

scosman4• 2 years ago

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.

actionfromafar4• 2 years ago

Threw Mobile 7 developers under the bus. The most ambitious and commited.

alephnerd7• 2 years ago

Invested more in XBox and Business intelligence platforms.

Both of which turned out to be the right move long term.

Mobile is a commoditized winner takes all market, and there's no guarantee MS would have won even if they concentrated entirely on it.

Concentrating on BI platforms helped spawn M365, and the Enterprise focus helped spawn MS Azure which had very early Product-Market Fit at the Fed because they became FedRAMP authorized well before AWS.

There's way more money in Enterprise B2B than there is in B2C.

ghaff5• 2 years ago

There's way more money in Enterprise B2B than there is in B2C.

Apple would like a word--although arguably their B2C success translated into B2B in a world where corporations increasingly didn't just dictate employee gear decisions.

But to your other point, Microsoft (though I credit this more to Nadella than Ballmer) were absolutely able to parlay Microsoft's enterprise strength to Azure in government/enterprise which AWS didn't really get at first and Google was even slower to do.

rasz3• 2 years ago

Both

so why are there rumors of MS debating not releasing next generation Xbox and switching to streaming?

scosman4• 2 years ago

There's way more money in Enterprise B2B than there is in B2C.

Definitively not true by a huge margin.

ThrowawayB73• 2 years ago

That was more directly on Terry Myerson, VP of Mobile and Embedded Devices or whatever it was called at the time, than Ballmer.

paxys4• 2 years ago

Can't credit wins to the CEO and blame subordinates for the losses. If Terry Myerson was failing then it was Ballmer's job to replace him (something that Nadella finally did).

scosman4• 2 years ago

CEO of the PC company can't miss the new primary form of personal computing and blame a VP.

knighthack• 2 years ago

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).

FeloniousHam• 2 years ago

There was a recent interview with Ballmer on The Dispatch Podcast[0]. I've been longtime casual Ballmer-hater because of Microsoft's treatment of Linux, but at least for 30 minutes, found him to be a genial, thoughtful, and interesting bazillionaire.

[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/in-data-we-trust-inter...

KingOfCoders• 2 years ago

"Developers, developers, developers!"

surfingdino• 2 years ago

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.

paxys4• 2 years ago

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.

Rinzler89• 2 years ago

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.

Is there a source for this?

vanjajaja1• 2 years ago

ok it was obviously a bad move in hindsight, but at that point in time, was it not a gutsy high risk move to try give windows phone a small advantage? its obvious once you cancel winphone, but canceling winphone was a big concession

sph• 2 years ago

Meh, I don't see how Nadella's "vision" is praiseworthy either:

* their flagship OS is more and more a spyware platform

* Windows Server is pretty much a rarity these days outside of large corporate deployments. Anybody has seen MS SQL recently?

* Azure seems to have reached its peak mind share, mostly pushed by free credits

* Their gaming division mainly lives on Game Pass, while XBox is further and further away from Playstation and now there's Valve eating their lunch

* Windows on ARM, even Windows branded laptops or 2-in-1s are a niche within a niche

* What is a cell phone again?

* Edge's philosophy is "as evil and spyware as Google, but worse". In fact, Microsoft as a whole is trying to badly emulate the peak evil Google of 2015+

Ballmer made some enormous blunders and a lot of his indecision proved costly. Nadella pushed proudly forward in destroying the Microsoft name all to make a quick buck. I'll give you VSCode and Github to be good ideas, though the latter is just an acquisition, not a bonafide good product built in house.

ghaff5• 2 years ago

Not that I personally use it, but Azure seems pretty relevant and Microsoft's financials seem pretty decent. I'll give you that Microsoft on the client-side does seem like a legacy installed base--albeit a big one. But client-side growth is pretty much a niche these days outside of mobile and, yes, Microsoft lost that.

However, generally, I could name a number of companies that descended into legacy irrelevance (not a few of which were acquired by Broadcom) but I wouldn't put Microsoft into that category at this point.

apwell234• 2 years ago

“The metaverse is not just transforming how we see the world. It’s changing how all of us actively participate in it”

"The age of AI transformation"

“There isn’t a single industry that isn’t being transformed,” “We collectively have the opportunity to lead in this transformation.”

"All of these three things, web3, blockchain and the metaverse, are all going to happen."

Visionary Nadella here folks . Everything is transformative to this guy.

ivm• 2 years ago

And the fractured developer ecosystem with multiple UI frameworks (WPF, WinUI, MAUI, Blazor) all being understaffed, while actual Microsoft products are being developed in React Native.

gentleman11• 2 years ago

Stop celebrating the guy who brought spyware and ads to windows

317070• 2 years ago

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.

epups• 2 years ago

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.

_7acn• 2 years ago

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...

filoleg2• 2 years ago

Where is Skype now?

A good chunk of Teams’ backend is built on top of Skype. Not sure about the present day, but just a few years ago, you could see tons of references to Skype in the Teams’ codebase.

mulletbum3• 2 years ago

Still can, Skype was rebranded into a more successful product, but the backend has ton of legacy Skype work inside it still.

mulletbum3• 2 years ago

Skype is now the backbone of O365 and what evolved into Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Phone System, and Microsoft Team Room Systems. It's literally gobbling up the market as we speak, forcing long time AV vendors to have to build distinctly Microsoft products. Poly, Logitech, Crestron, all massive players in the space, have to bow to Microsoft's requirements and build hardware carefully sized for Microsoft Teams Room interfaces. They are basically removing almost all the software from these companies and making them only hardware, they will eventually produce the hardware themselves as well.

paxys4• 2 years ago

No, the backbone is Microsoft Office Communicator, which was rebranded to Lync, then Skype for Business, and finally embedded in Teams. The Skype consumer product, which they acquired, has very little to do with any of this.

alephnerd7• 2 years ago

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

KoolKat23• 2 years ago

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.

ssharp• 2 years ago

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.

waisbrot• 2 years ago

"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.

err4nt• 2 years ago

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

sunflowerfly• 2 years ago

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

chrismcb• 2 years ago

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

wslh• 2 years ago

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

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

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