Hacker News Reader

Comment by tyu1000 | Hacker News Reader

I'm a NBA fan, it's been funny to see Steve Ballmer portrayed as a business titan using his know-how to turn around the Clippers rather than as a college buddy of Bill Gates who might have been the worst tech CEO of the late 1990's.

View on HN

The stock price remained stagnant, but under Ballmer, both revenue and net income doubled. He may have sucked at the PR game, but he was far from the worst CEO of the 90s.

Did he really do that bad or was he stymied by anti-trust concerns. Major miss in terms of executing on Windows Phone a few years too late but in other ways he really could not use the strength of Windows too much for fear of the government.

Ballmer wasn’t CEO in the 90’s. He also essentially created their enterprise dominance which is why they are where they are today.

Ballmer was a great CEO. The company made record profits, completely dominated the enterprise market, started getting into cloud services before anyone else, and managed to break into the living room and the giant gaming market with the Xbox. He even invested in Facebook. He fumbled the mobile phone fight with Nokia against Apple and got pushed out for it, but overall the company did incredibly well through his tenure.

Well, as a Clippers fan, Ballmer is such a step up (albeit such a low bar from Sterling). Being an NBA owner is a lot easier than running one of the world's largest companies: Be willing to pay for a few smart/modern execs, splurge on a few players, and the rest kind of runs itself.

Oh, and be in the second largest media market in the country.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com