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Comment by nojito | Hacker News Reader

>Under Balmer, Microsoft was stuck on the idea that Windows and Office defined their market, and any strategy had to enforce their centrality.

Corporate/business revenue skyrocketed under Ballmer's reign.

The fact that MS had its hands in so many markets causes people to focus on the failures and ignore the business/enterprise/corporate success he helped MS achieve.

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The comment you answered to (and the part you quoted) doesn’t say anything about revenue. What are you answering to?

People are quick to focus on the few consumer missteps of Ballmer while ignoring the huge strides MS made in the corporate/business space during his tenure.

The real problem was Microsoft under ballmer completely utterly missed the biggest computing revolution of the last 20 years.

Mobile.

That put Microsoft so far behind everyone in the industry that it forced the board to remove him...

He actually did a GREAT job in the enterprise space and efficiently maximizing profit in the other old school Microsoft sectors...

Put it another way... When Ballmer took over Microsoft owned +70% of computing OS market, when he left they owned something like 30% and were stuck on a trajectory where today they are at like 15%... Microsoft was primarily an OS company... He more or less sunk the company

Behind who?

Go look at the largest companies by market cap or look at the fact that MS apps are the most installed apps on iOS and Android.

Ballmer did amazing for MS and left a great company for Nadella.

I believe it's about potential. They could've been the second or third big mobile OS provider. They did incredibly well in enterprise (and now cloud computing) but they still left the field of mobile to Google and Apple. And there's no reason they couldn't do it, they had both the money and expertise to create something like Android.

> Go look at the largest companies by market cap or look at the fact that MS apps are the most installed apps on iOS and Android.

But that's thanks to Nadella, not Ballmer.

But did it? There was technological evolution in Microsoft products for sure (Windows Servers actually became viable), but that was going to happen when you run a company with thousands of engineers. Outside of that, what were the strides MS made? They started off with enterprise/desktop dominance, and by the end of Ballmer's term, they still had enterprise/desktop dominance but missed out on pretty much every other tech trend - from digital music, to cloud, to browsers, to smartphones, to search, and on and on.

Azure started in 08,

Bing is firmly in the 2nd spot to google

MS apps are the most installed on iOS and Android.

People forget that Ballmer left in 2014.

Isn't revenue one of the main if not the top metric that define "success" in a business?

It’s really “expected future revenue” that is the main metric.

Ballmer took over Microsoft at the height of the dotcom bubble valuations when pretty much everything in tech was overpriced. Any expectation that Microsoft's revenue would catch up to its inflated valuation in a short time frame was a great way to feel disappointed.

To that point, wasn't it Ballmer who really pushed for MS to spend $40B on Yahoo?

He was talking about market though. The two concepts are intimately related.

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