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Comment by duaoebg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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."

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what did he perform? can you expound more?

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