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Comment by vezycash | Hacker News Reader

>The Microsoft of the 2000s, under Steve Ballmer, was almost exactly the opposite (of gates).

>Bruised and battered by the consent decree handed down by the DoJ for the very same ambition that brought it to dominance, Ballmer’s Microsoft was sales-forward and CAUTIOUS.

>It was... nervously clutching its pearls at the approach of Google in its rearview mirror

People bash Steve Ballmer for missing Search, Social Networking, Smart phones, Tablets and one other thing. They claim he had his head far up his rear end to see the competiton. He's called a buffoon and other names but ignore the fact that...

Microsoft was Caged. Had it's wings clipped. Had a huge target on its back. In case you did't know, any complaint by say Google in its early days and Microsoft would have been broken up!

This is the real reason behind's Ballmer's failure.

Gates hated politics, kept Washington at arms length and that cost them. In fact, if Gates had lobbied just a little bit, there would have been no case at all.

And that's why Google's lobbying like crazy cos it's life actually depends on it.

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> Microsoft was Caged. Had it's wings clipped. Had a huge target on its back. In case you did't know, any complaint by say Google in its early days and Microsoft would have been broken up!

So much this. During orientation on my first day a representative from legal came in and told us, among other things, what types of metaphors we were allowed to use in emails. "No football metaphors, no explicit or implied violence, we do not 'crush the competition', we 'work hard to show customers how good our products are'."

Hard to get a team amped up about working in an exciting new space when you are literally not allowed to get a team amped up.

Then again, right before the iPhone launched, a market research report went around the mobile division that showed "consumers in the US will never pay for their phones, they are too addicted to free subsidized cell phone deals."

Long ago when I was just a couple years in, I was "corrected" when I said we should stop shipping bad keyboards and relying on OEMs to make the keyboard not bad. Someone rather senior told me that wasn't the reason at all as to why we were shipping a sub-par keyboard. I never was told exactly why Windows Mobile 6.x shipped poor quality on screen keyboards.

You can amp up a team by challenging them to give the very best possible user experience, so that your customers loves your product.

Exhorting the team to "crush the competition" or "dominate the market" is not necessarily the best way to amp up a team. In fact, I'd argue it's the worst possible way, since that means that playing dirty patent troll tricks or financing things like the SCO lawsuit is a legitimate way to "win", as opposed to winning by delighting the user.

> Exhorting the team to "crush the competition"

I worked on a consumer product in a highly competitive space. Our competition released products that dropped frames and had laggy UIs.

The discussion wasn't "We're going to make a smoother UI so our users have a wonderful and pleasant experience." it was "Hah, how the hell, they have literally 20x the CPU power, a GPU, over 1000x the RAM, and they are dropping frames? Let's show'em how its done!"

In certain domains, and when trying to perform at certain levels, you need every single human emotion you can draw on to get enough energy to find the motivation to do amazing work.

Is that needed 99% of the time? Nope. But MS sure as hell could have used someone pissed off about their mobile experience being terrible about, oh, say, 3 years earlier than what did happen.

Another example. Gmail launched 2004. Imagine if 2002 a senior leader at Microsoft had burst into a meeting of the Hotmail leadership team and started shouting "Why the hell do other email providers even still exist? And why the fuck do I have to still delete emails every couple of days? I want every other free email provider out of business right asap. Lose money on it, I don't care, just make us the best!"

But instead, someone at Google got upset about the same problem and made a product that completely dominated the entire consumer email market.

If you go into a competitive space (especially consumer!) with the idea of "we'll look at the market research and do what is needed to establish a place for ourselves" then no one cares about you.

"We're going to make a product that makes everyone else on the market look like incompetent jerks" is an actual mission statement that can be used to get things done.

The competition has a painful first run experience? Yours isn't better, it is perfect. Why? Because screw the competition. Your competitors have fat profit margins? Yours are razor thin, because screw the competition. There product has an industrial design comes in black and ugly grey, you have designer colors, because screw the competition.

If you are a multi-billion dollar company, and you have the resources to do everything better than anyone else in the field, then you either perform at that level, or you lose.

The iPhone launch was to be a tour de force of this ideology.

"They have ugly plastic buttons sticking out everywhere, we have metal and glass. They have a crappy joke of a keyboard, we'll reinvent the entire idea of an on screen keyboard. They have a shitty sales experience in stores? We'll partner with one carrier, and train the living daylights out of their sales people. Their UI is hard to use? We'll launch a world wide ad campaign where we show subtly people how to use the device during the ad."

I was at MS at the time. The idea there was "We'll let our OEM partners decide on how best to differentiate their product, they are after all the ones doing the main value ad and we rely on them for manufacturing."

Apple said screw that entire model, they just made it themselves, and they made it amazing.

There is an incredible energy on teams motivated by the ethos of doing the best and steam rolling the competition through sheer excellence. I'm not advocating for dirty business practices, but holy hell, telling your engineers "do good enough" is going to get you "good enough." When they wake up and go to work and the entire office is saying "we're going to make a product that puts everyone else to shame", you get a great product.

I agree with this. Swears and cursing are an efficient and motivating way to communicate orders of magnitudes.

Curious, what was the attitude like on the early Band team? I absolutely loved it, and was active on the beta, but didn't have a front-row seat to the early development.

> Curious, what was the attitude like on the early Band team?

I wasn't allowed to tell people I was interviewing what the job was for. (Most people figured out that an entire floor of HW and Firmware engineers were working on Hardware.)

I had to convince people to join me by telling them about the team and about why they wanted to work there.

I said things like

"this is a classic Microsoft team, we're going to take something that is elite and expensive and make it affordable for everyone, fuck elitism, Microsoft makes products everyone can use."

"We are understaffed and underfunded, this will be the hardest you've ever worked in your life, but we are making something that is fucking amazing and you'll be telling stories about this for years to come."

"Want to build an OS? How about an entire graphics system? Say yes and I'll have you at a desk next week doing stuff you never thought you could do."

The Band was critically under funded, I was told that it was under 60 million across all the years we were active. Apple Watch famously had a billion.

The energy was insane. We were a startup within MS, no one else knew we existed but the C-level leadership and maybe their directs. My team went to Ikea and got our own desks and put them together late one night. We stole (!) a TV from another team someplace in the building, wheeled it into our work area, and watched Twitch Plays Pokemon.

The firmware team wrote a runtime from scratch. Then my team took an off the shelf UI toolkit, rewrote almost all the drawing routines, rewrote the font rendering, and rewrote another ~60% or so of the remaining code, and made a butter smooth v-sync'd UI.

We had 96 MHz and 256 KB of RAM. 30 FPS locked, the UI could run at well over 60 but we had limited bandwidth to the display controller.

One day I read an article about touch latency on various mobile OSs. I said fuck it, we can do better than any of those. We optimized our touch system, max of 2 frame latency, min of 1. An amazing team from MSR came in and wrote us a machine learning gesture recognizer that also did motion estimation so that the screen tracked your finger almost 1 to 1 compensating for errors in the touch sensors.

Very understaffed, everyone did many things. Early on a bit of dead weight tried to attach itself to the project, it got cut eventually.

Lots of bad decisions. The team spun out of Xbox Accessories. No one there knew software except Firmware, I was hired on because I knew UI, all their other software engineers had no idea. UI was the green light on the Xbox 360 controller. Amazing firmware engineers though. Lots of issues around the cloud and mobile apps, they were started much later than the rest of the product and never had time to go through proper planning, esp. for the Band 1 launch.

Our design team was balls to the wall amazing. Our lead designer put so much thought and care into everything that was on the screen, it blew me away. It also taught me how much a real designer cares about their work. If I am lucky I'll get to work with a designer like that again in my life.

The battery life would've been a day longer on Band 2 but we had a shitty accelerometer chip that couldn't do step counting on its own (or maybe it could but it required a lot of programming to get it to that stage, I never was made 100% clear on that), so we had to take raw data and process it with the CPU. Horrible waste of power, I always was sad we never were given the time to add that extra 16-20 hours of battery life.

Everything we did we wanted to do better. We had very limited hardware, so everything had to be magic in code. The EE team did magic in hardware for sure, the screen portion of Band 2 was less than 2/3rds the thickness of the Apple Watch v1, so they had very little space to work with.

Every decision was "how can we do this better than anyone else?"

Nothing you said surprises me. It was fucking amazing. The v2 was a great leap over the v1, which was a leap over the other competitors. You could just tell how much effort went into those things. And you could tell that everyone was on board with making the best product possible, hunting for 10x+ leaps, and putting the user first. Thank you!

As a user it changed my life. I will never not wear them (on the Versa 2 now), and have years of actionable health data that has been life changing. And it's still so obvious to me that this is still the very, very early days of wearables and consumer biotech.

I was heartbroken when it was discontinued. I would love to read the high-level strategic thinking behind that. I understand perhaps the thought was Apple Watch would be tough to compete against, but the Band was years ahead of Apple (the first couple generations of Apple Watch completely missed the key point that the killer app for watches is health) so I like to think it had a chance, but more importantly I thought it was a fight worth fighting because of how much impact these things will have on people's health. It was also just inspiring that a new product like that could come out of Microsoft, and sad to see they didn't give it the 10+ years it deserved.

> I would love to read the high-level strategic thinking behind that.

1. It was the time of "One Windows". It didn't run Windows, and Windows wasn't going to ready to run on a wearable anytime soon.

2. It was expensive to manufacture. Curved screen, curved batteries, 2 rigid bodies. Everything about the industrial design was completely custom. It was amazing we even pulled it off at all.

3. Microsoft is afraid of entering new HW territories, HW tends to lose a lot of money.

4. Windows Phone died, which shouldn't have had an impact but it kinda did mentally. Users were actually evenly split between all three platforms, (which means Windows Phone users loved us!)

5. No one was willing to put in the actual engineering effort needed to do it properly. The entire team was burning out and we were bleeding people. Consumer hardware is not supposed to be at a 1 year cadence with only 1 team doing everything. Doing it that way also means you don't get a chance to make any dramatic changes, we had to only make small iterative improvements because if you only have 8-10 months to get boards up and running, get software ported over, and then finalize everything, well, you are working insane hours just pulling that off.

> Microsoft is afraid of entering new HW territories,

Correction: Nadella is afraid of entering new HW... He came on board with a chain saw and cut like crazy

> "I want every other free email provider out of business right asap. Lose money on it, I don't care, just make us the best!"

Every single large company I've worked at has had mandatory training classes where lawyers explain why you never, ever say or send e-mail with anything like that. If that ever got out on the front page of the New York Times, or worse yet, as part of a discovery effort from the FTC or state attorneys generals investigating abuse of Monopoly power.... well, it would be bad.

If there is anything like that from Zuckerberg, "I want every other social media company out of business ASAP" which is subject to legal discovery.... we'd be looking at a very nasty consent decree lasting years at best, or a forced breakup of Facebook, at the worst.

> Every single large company I've worked at has had mandatory training classes where lawyers explain why you never, ever say or send e-mail with anything like that.

Yup, I went through the same training.

> as part of a discovery effort from the FTC or state attorneys generals investigating abuse of Monopoly power.... well, it would be bad.

It depends though, losing money to acquire customers is sometimes OK, sometimes not.

How many years did Google lose money on Youtube?

Sometimes making the best technology requires going in heads first, not worrying about profit, and deciding that if you make the best product, you will eventually find a way to make some money. After all, Google had no problem monetizing Gmail, and it doesn't take a genius to think "hey, storage prices keep dropping, offer users a gig now and we may lose money, but that'll stop as prices for storage keep going down."

It isn't like Yahoo in their heyday couldn't have made the same decision.

Also, I never suggested sending that in an email! But telling the team that they need to make a product so much better that the competition has 0 hope? Well now the team has a mission statement, and one that they can go use to attitude adjust anyone who is too complacent with the status quo.

If some executive wanted to start threatening data center providers or cut off network peering agreements, yup, line way too far.

But if someone wants to make a REALLY damn good product, to the point that it is so good by the time everyone else catches up it is too late, well, more power to them.

The desire to achieve market dominance by making an insanely better product is often the means by which technology progresses.

Many startups lose money when they are first started; and a new product may very well be losing money until it reaches a certain scale. That's not the problem. The question is what's the motivation. If the motivation is to predatory pricing, where you are deliberately holding the price below the marginal cost per unit in order to drive the competition out of business, you'll find that the FTC frowns on such behavior.

This is why it's so bad to say anthing like, "I want to drive the competition out of business", or "I want to dominate the market". Even if you don't send it in e-mail, suppose you say it at a department meeting, and someone takes a video of it? Now if they ever get disgruntled, they can take that video to the FTC, and now you're in a heap of trouble.

There are plenty of other ways of motivating a team than trash-talking the competition. If you have a team where the only way to really motivate them is to curse and use that kind of war-like language, I'd argue that such a company has a massive culture problem, and it's certainly not a company I would ever want to work at. Not because I think the stock is at risk of pluging after the FTC announces a anti-trust investigation (although that would be a real risk), but because I'd find such an atmosphere positively toxic. It's something I'd expect of the Uber "bro" culture, and no, I'd never want to work there.

> If the motivation is to predatory pricing, where you are deliberately holding the price below the marginal cost per unit in order to drive the competition out of business, you'll find that the FTC frowns on such behavior.

Of course, but it is constantly debated line.

To go back to Email, "we'll be losing money until the price for storage drops" is that predatory?

"We're losing money because we haven't ramped up our partner ad program yet." Predatory?

There are many cases where a large pile of cash can help establish a business, and help create a higher quality user experience and a better product, precisely because there is the chance to not turn a profit money for awhile.

> but because I'd find such an atmosphere positively toxic. It's something I'd expect of the Uber "bro" culture, and no, I'd never want to work there.

I never encountered the Uber bro culture, but I have been lucky enough to work at teams where we wanted to do better than everyone else and where that was our mission day in and day out.

Part of that was looking at the competition and seeing how badly they were shafting users on price, and getting angry about it and funneling that anger into making a better product.

> This is why it's so bad to say anthing like, "I want to drive the competition out of business"

The goal is always to make a product so good that there is no possible competition, and that is of course perfectly legal to do, just so long as the competition is driven out of business solely because of consumer's making a free choice as to which product they want to buy.

> they can take that video to the FTC, and now you're in a heap of trouble.

My understanding is that the trouble only comes if the company has actually done something illegal. If the CEO says they want to dominate the market, and someone in sales goes and starts bribing people, huge problem. If the CEO says they want to dominate the market and the supply chain and engineering teams find a way to shave 30% off the product's price, or the software engineers and designers work together to make the product 10x more usable than anything else on the market, then there isn't a problem.

The issue that comes up of course is that if the CEO does say anything that might be seen as encouraging someone to win at "any cost", and any single employee takes those steps, then yeah, obvious legal problems.

But the overall fact is, in competitive winner-takes-all markets, the goal has to be winning big, and everyone needs to be aligned behind that goal, and everyone on the team has to believe in that goal.

> My understanding is that the trouble only comes if the company has actually done something illegal.

As you said earlier, "[pricing] is a constantly debated line". Suppose a search engine displays the lyrics on the results page, instead of requiring that the user click a link and go to some advertising-laden lyrics web site. Is that to improve the search user's experience, by giving them the answer right then and there? Or is it predatory move against the song lyrics web site? As you say, "it's constantly debated".

But if you have the CEO, or the product manager, saying, "I want to crush the competition; see them driven before me; and hear the lamentation of their women" (apologies to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Conan the Barbarian) you've just given a weapon to the FTC as to the intent of that "constantly debated line". And G-d help your company if that lands on the front page of the New York Times.

Also, even if you win the anti-trust lawsuit, the distraction and the legal costs are high. I'd argue that even if you ignore the toxic atmosphere argument, from a purely pragmatic and practical perspective, It's Just Not Worth It.

Want to motivate the team by asking them to build the best product ever? Sure! I'll note, by the way, that just because you have the objectively better, say, search quality score compared to all of the other search engines out there, that doesn't necessarily mean that the other search engines will go out of business. People choose which search engines to use for many reasons, and not just search quality. (Many people who use DDG admit doesn't always give the best results; but they use it because they hate Google, and it's "good enough".)

So it's actually better to come up with an objective quality metric, and constantly challenge the team to make it better, every year and every quarter, regardless of whether or not they are better than the competition. If you don't, you end up resting on your laurels, and that's no good either. So you align the whole team on making the product better, and delighting more and more users, regardless of whether or not you have the best product, and certainly not because you want to drive the competition out of business.

Take Microsoft Office, for example. For a long time it was the best, or at least most commercially successful, office suite. How do you challenge the team if your only focus is, "drive the competition out of business"? And what if your competition is the Open Source "libreoffice", which by definition can't be driven out of business, and is getting better year after year, with the end user of cost of zero dollars and zero cents staying constant?

> Another example. Gmail launched 2004. Imagine if 2002 a senior leader at Microsoft had burst into a meeting of the Hotmail leadership team and started shouting "Why the hell do other email providers even still exist? And why the fuck do I have to still delete emails every couple of days? I want every other free email provider out of business right asap. Lose money on it, I don't care, just make us the best!"

I can easily imagine this. The outcome would be that I would go outdoors, raise my hand, and ask "Any company out there willing to pay me to leave?"

Tell me: Did Google have a senior leaser burst into a meeting and start shouting "Why the the fuck do I have to still delete emails every couple of days? I want every free email provider out of business right asap. Lose money on it, I don't care, just make us the best!"

Is that how Gmail became dominant?

If your goal is to only employ one type of person - uber competitive type who cannot motivate themselves without wild pep talks - you're going to miss out on a lot of talent. I'll happily employ bright people who don't want to work for/with you.

Always problematic to assume that what works for you works for the majority.

> we do not 'crush the competition'

All employees of large (tech?) companies have received exactly the same message from legal.

Ballmer is a buffoon. Even if we are to accept that MS was caged. I remember being at a launch party during an internship. Suddenly half the people ran out of the massive tent. I thought it must have been a fire, I ran out too, grabbed someone and asked why the mass exodus. Their reply was that Ballmer just went on stage. With that response I figured I have to see this. I went back in and recorded it. I was not disappointed, the performance was very cringe worthy.

I do hope MS becomes a nice place for women to work, as a white guy I hated it so hopefully in the future they can do better.

Well that "buffoon" trippled Microsoft's earnings and doubled profits. But let these new growth areas slide because of the antitrust suit.

If the market judged Microsoft by its earnings, it's stock would have been up. The internet, mobile was the blockchain and AI of the era.

I can’t judge whether he was a good CEO or not, but, goodness, that dude lived the company. He was an exuberant uninhibited promoter. More than Evangelizer. The guy didn’t care what people said behind his back when he got all sweaty, nope, he was there to promote the company. A great cheerleader for the team.

"I've got just four words: I. Love. This. Company. YEEEEEAAAAAAHHHH!"

Used car salesman.

Yeah, but the stock didn't go up from when he started to when he finished, which is evidence that the growth that happened during his tenure was all anticipated before he began. Good decisions can reap benefits years in the future, bad ones can take a decade to come to roost. You can say that Apple sales grew during John Scully's tenure. But it is kind of obvious that the company was exploiting a prior period of innovation while failing to innovate (Newton, Pink etc.).

He inherited a company that was incredibly powerful and that power only diminished during his tenure.

The same applies now to their success. Satya is executing Ballmer's One Microsoft plan. He absolutely deserves credit for some of the reorg he initiated before he stepped away. Combining Office 365, Active Directory, Intune, and Windows 10 Enterprise into a single Microsoft 365 bundle is the icing on that holistic product line effort.

https://www.theverge.com/2013/7/11/4514160/steve-ballmers-re...

Also of interest in that memo is Amy Hood being put in charge of the Finance Group (truthfully she had already been CFO a couple months when the One Microsoft memo came out), which Satya appears to be getting credit for in the original article. She was appointed CFO a year before Nadella became CEO.

In my country we call it an "effective management", a tongue in cheek for a situation where on paper all company KPI are perfect and growing but the company is for a huge nosedive in a long run.

> ong the voices Microsoft needs to hear the most. Apparently, Microsoft has dipped only a single toe in the river that flows to the future."

reply

what did he perform? can you expound more?

>>This is the real reason behind's Ballmer's failure.

Yes, I am sure it had nothing to do with him lacking the basic vision one would expect in any tech CEO and saying idiotic things like "no one would buy such an expensive phone" (about the iPhone).

If you look like a buffoon, you act like a buffoon, and you talk like a buffoon...

It sounds like he had to say/believe that to keep the lawyers away.

Ballmer may be the best example of a Shaved Gorilla currently living, but I think he became the official scapegoat of Microsoft when they put him in charge.

Things were already going horribly wrong, and they put a despot in charge to soak up the blame for all of the terrible things his peers, subordinates and predecessors were already cocking up. The next person has a comparatively easy job of leading a Renaissance, assuming he didn't manage to run it into the ground in the interim. Which he nearly did.

I really miss http://minimsft.blogspot.com/ and not just for the schadenfreude. There was quite a bit of wisdom to be extracted from hindsight is 20/20 commentary, when you're an outside observer.

> saying idiotic things like "no one would buy such an expensive phone" (about the iPhone).

This is something that people keep saying but he way actually right and at this point this is just an Internet meme.

I remember that moment. The iPhone costed $800 with a phone plan. Insane. Nobody does that even today, so in that regard he was right.

Only after the iPhone 3 and $200 phone with a contract did it ever start selling.

The original iPhone did $745M in revenue before the iPhone 3G was released (not 100% sure if that the one you're talking about since there was never a phone called the iPhone 3). Not exactly 'nobody'...

Then why did the price drop 4x and sales grew 3x with the iPhone 3g?

Seriously, if price wasn't a problem and Ballmer was wrong, why did Apple even drop the price?

Truth is this wasn't that long ago, I still remember it, and the price drop was a huge deal to a lot of people.

Articles like these were everywhere.

https://www.npd.com/press/releases/press_090622.html

Thanks for the link. Many people feel that things we take for granted today were obvious successes in the past. Almost none of them ever hit the ground running.

Electricity, the internet, eCommerce, iPhone, even Bitcoin weren't obvious hits in the least. If the success of bitcoin was guaranteed or obvious, In 2009, I'd have bought 111,111 bitcoins for $100 at $0.0009 per bitcoin.

Now, I'd be a billionaire.

Right, so it went from a very popular phone to THE MOST POPULAR PHONE.

It was aleeady a success. Then it became a world beater.

> "no one would buy such an expensive phone"

Lower prices definitely had benefits, but 3/4 of a billion dollars in revenue clearly shows that many people would buy such an expensive phone.

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