Former Amazon employees bake Bezos principles into their startups

First off - opinions on HN don't matter at all.

Even the opinions of tech tastemakers often don't matter.

The vast majority of people in tech know nothing or care nothing of the personal disposition of Ballmer, Satya or Gates.

As you suggest 'perception matters' on some levels, but it's often not fundamental.

I'm doubtful at all that there was any material dissonance or embrace of MS technologies due to Ballmer v. Satya's approach.

Ballmer was by any reasonable measure, massively successful in growing MS developer mind share.

C# / .Net can only be described as a phenomenal success and this was mostly 'Ballmer era'.

Typescript, MS new daring web contribution was started under Ballmer, and it's also been important in terms of developing mind share.

MS VS Code was technically started under Ballmer, though it's possible he may have never supported it's release.

I think the failure of IE during the Ballmer era is a bad stain, but they were up against a good product as well (Chrome).

As for Satya - what products or initiatives has he launched that has improved MS position among developers? I think we can give him some credit for VS Code, what else?

Open Sourcing Chakra? That hasn't done much. Switching over to Edge/Chrome ... hasn't changed much.

Now let's consider the 'stock market attribution' issue.

" The stock market is by definition the best long term evaluator of a CEO "

So in early 2008, the majority of 'stock market' indicies would put most large bank CEO's in the 'good camp' but as it turns out they were completely wrong? Stock markets are often wrong.

What's at issue here is mostly market perceptions and macro fundamentals, not the assessment of CEOs.

In the early 2000's, P/E ratios in tech were not good, in 2009 obviously they crashed. Since then, we've seen increasing levels of liquidity from the Fed 'crazy market' valuations across the board. This has little to do with MS specifically.

Also in the 2000's MS had competitors in G and FB, investors were concerned about long term viability, keeping MSFT multiple specifically down a little. They thought Windows and Office were going to die. But this lack of foresight by analysts was wrong in retrospect wasn't it?

Windows is not dying.

Office is not dying esp. now that they are subscription + web.

The cloud is a big new business for MS, so are many of their other products.

In summary, almost everything Microsoft is today, is due to Gates and Ballmer. Were p/e ratios have been reasonable in perfect hindsight, the stock price would have reflected that and then some.

Satya has benefitted tremendously from the massive money making engine that Gates and Ballmer made, and it remains to be seen exactly what he will do that will make MS a fundamentally greater company.

I believe that Satya was the right choice for the right time, but that ultimately he will not be transformative on the level of either Gates or Ballmer. I don't think Satya is going to take MS into vast new lines of business, re-shaping what they are etc.. Instead - Satya will be guiding growth through a maturing of MS.

Amazon retail is growing like crazy. They have more retail channels opening up beyond the main ecommerce store and they're investing 1.5B for 1-day delivery (while trivially putting Fedex on death watch as a side effect). The only serious competition they have is Walmart which has hit on groceries as a magic bullet, and Target.

Fakes are not as big of a problem as HN makes it seem. Margins only help Amazon beat its competitors. And there's nothing antitrust can do since there's no monopoly on retail outlets, people want to shop there by choice.

Most people are looking for the best value they can get at the lowest price they can find. Amazon's site makes that process difficult and nearly impossible. I can only speculate as to why that is.

> It works well as it is, I certainly never find myself wanting something it doesn't currently do.

You are talking about functionality, and I am responding about Amazon's functionality.

Please do not strawman my position just because you disagree with it. Sorting by price doesn't sort by price, sorting by average customer review doesn't sort by average customer review and so on.

> So you can't perfectly compare an item that is cross-listed in multiple categories. Is that "broken", or not ideal?

When the feature says "sort by price" and it doesn't sort by price, it is broken. I assume you work in software development, so you should know this.

> Even ratings, the worst thing about amazon, are "useful" in that you can instantly look at the distribution. All 5's and 1's? Product sucks.

This isn't even remotely true. I've come across hundreds of listings that have reviews for products that are clearly not the product in the listing. The fact that this is even allowed means that the rating system is broken.