What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer | Hacker News Reader

What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer

medium.com

141 pointsdbattaglia68 comments

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...

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

No. The stock crash was really not about Ballmer, you can't blame it on him - he basically just took over as the whole world was going under.

Also - Satya has not yet had any real such things to 'miss'.

AI and blockchain are not products, there are no household-name dollar companies coming around on that yet.

It will be some time before we can judge Satya.

Should have specified that. Other tech companies recovered better from the crash than MSFT did. Once Satya came on, it’s been a nice rise. It’s a clear cut difference. I used to work at MSFT. We all felt it. Satya thought about things very differently than Ballmer.

Ballmer massively increased MSFT's business.

Revenues grew quite substantially under him.

Under Satya ... not so much.

Have a look here: [1]

Satya is a better communicator, and he seems like a nicer guy. This is naturally going to make employees 'feel better', but really that may not be what drives the business.

The stock price was obviously trailing revenues for whatever reason, maybe analysts just didn't like Ballmer, but irrespective, he massively grew the business and the reflection in stock price would have been inevitable.

Jury is still out on Satya.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267805/microsofts-global...

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

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

If MS didn't then they would be lambasted just the same.

As it stands, at least MSFT has a presence which entails at least strategic advantage. Not trying would be worse than trying and failing.

But it doesn't matter - they're not a search company, it's such a different beast. Why on earth do people expect that MSFT should have been the king of that domain I have no idea.

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.

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.

> 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.

Yeah, wasn't there some kind of thing as "splits" which skews the stock price? Or is that it?

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.

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.

I wish this were true of programmers of average ability.

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.

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.

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).

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.

> ...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.

I did not say he was wrong for trying to attract developers. I said chanting to attract them is ridiculous.

And about compilers, Visual Studio has never been cheap. The express version was added only to counter Turbo C++ and other free tools like MingW.

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

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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

Looks like a scene from a movie.

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.

> who dragged down Microsoft

Did he?

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.

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.

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.

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

It's a huge guinea pig for .net, windows server, and azure - a perfect example of eating your own dog food.

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.

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/)

On the other hand there's not much evidence that MS could've won (or at least secured a place in) the smartphone wars with any other CEO. Many other big companies tried and failed miserably.

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).

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.

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".

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."

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.

"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.

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.

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.

A peculiar definition of "leading at the front".

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.

> 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.

Sure, it was the right thing to do. But it wasn't a difficult thing to do.

For an awful lot of people, apologizing and taking responsibility for an error is very difficult. People will go to ridiculous lengths to avoid doing so, coming up with ever more complicated explanations as to why they are blameless.

Apologizing and taking responsibility is a sign of good character, not a sign of weakness.

Case in point: antennagate and Jobs' attempt to blame the users for holding the phone wrong.

Apologizing and taking responsibility is a sign of good character, not a sign of weakness.

A lot of people disagree with you, and see it as a sign of weakness. Often those people have a lot of influence over your career.

Good luck filling your organization with people who won't take any responsibility and look for scapegoats. Me, I prefer "the buck stops here" people working for me.

Right, it's probably not a good idea from a pure performance perspective. But people aren't always rational.

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.

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'

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?

Incognito window is your friend

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

Clever ambiguity, or mere coincidence?

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com