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Comment by sangnoir | Hacker News Reader

> Microsoft became almost irrelevant under Ballmer or was at least trending that way

I'm not Ballmer's biggest fan, but I think he's often sold short (to Nadella's benefit), you'd almost believe Microsoft was tanking, but it grew a lot under Ballmer (mobile failures notwithstanding).

As far as I can tell, Nadella just reprioritized projects that Ballmer launched or shepherded in his boring-but-efficient way: what new tech or project did Satya launch that you can attribute MS's "turnaround" to? IMHO, it's mostly PR/hearts-and-minds stuff, but I quit MS tech a long time ago and haven't been following closely.

In retrospect, I think the Win mobile failures were overblown, the zeitgeist then was mobile would replace desktop/laptop computers, therefore failing on mobile could be fatal to Microsoft, and remained as a stain on Ballmers name. The "post-pc" world suggested by Apple/Jobs never materialized.

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In a company the size of Microsoft, reprioritizing projects correctly is how you create a turnaround. He made Azure and Office 365 the central focus of the company just as software revenue growth was shifting to cloud hosting and SaaS, he stopped lighting money on fire trying to resurrect Windows Phone, he pushed Linux and OSS compatibility/development, and he put Phil Spencer in charge of Xbox which has saved the gaming division. He's also made some really nice acquisitions, IMO.

Yep. You looked at the revenues and it was Windows and Office which were clearly not continuing growth areas. Azure was floundering and only targeting .Net. Xbox wasn't doing great. They were flaming out on mobile. They had most of the pieces. They just weren't arranged and prioritized properly.

Azure was originally Windows Azure, but that was changed a month after satyan became the CEO.

(MS employee; I work in Azure, but didn't become an MS employee until 2019.)

See: https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/

I think that article gets most of it. There's some MSFT narrative that comes up here a lot where people say Ballmer was doing great and Nadella just continued his plans, I don't buy it.

MSFT had a lot of strategic failures as well as product failures under Ballmer. Nadella shifted strategy and made them a serious competitor again.

> There's some MSFT narrative that comes up here a lot where people say Ballmer was doing great and Nadella just continued his plans, I don't buy it.

Then it should be easy to say which green-field projects Nadella launched then. I can't think of any, but I'm open to learning.

Sometimes shifting the priority is all it takes.

"made them a serious competitor again?"

They were making money hand over fist, massive growth in revenues almost ever year under Ballmer. [1]

Which part of that massive money train is 'not serious competitor'?

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267805/microsofts-global...

I'm open to being wrong here and I'd agree that my initial comment was stated in a provocative way, but let me clarify a bit.

Revenue growth isn't the whole story. If you're extracting rents from legacy locked-in products or enterprise deals that doesn't necessarily mean you're a competitor on the new paradigms (phone, cloud, web).

At the time Windows phone was a failure and they missed that entire platform because of Ballmer (there's hints of your argument in this video, "we're making money with windows mobile"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

MSFT cloud wasn't doing well and was overly focused on .NET

They were too focused on Windows rather than recognizing the strategic value they could provide outside of it: https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/

Today I'd make a similar argument for Intel. Intel doubled down on old style fabs and is not competitive with TSMC. They failed to compete on mobile. They're ignoring the end of x86 and mocking Apple: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/21/02/08/2221233/intel-b...

Increasing revenue is a good sign, but it matters how. If you're making short-term decisions to extract money from legacy stuff at the expense of new products - that's bad for your long-term future. It can take a while to catch up to you, but it eventually will. Then you'll just limp a long as a dinosaur that makes enough money to survive but nobody really wants to work there and you're done doing interesting projects. That's basically what I mean by irrelevant.

I see where you want to go with that, but I'm not sure you made the argument you're trying to make.

Ballmer didn't 'make money from extracting rents and screw everything else up'.

Ballmer entrenched and expanded MS core products i.e. Office to the Cloud and along with that massively expanded revenues, which continue to this day, long after his departure, with no signs of slowing down.

He completely screwed up Search and Mobile, but those were risky new things, that's to be expected. Frankly he should have had 1 of 2 ...

But he also established XBox and Cloud; the former is a very successful play into a very difficult space (though maybe not as nice in terms of profits) - remember, Google just completely failed at this. The later, is now a hugely successful and growing business, and frankly, over the long haul has a shot at actually going toe-to-toe with Amazon.

Microsoft has 10's of thousands of sales people and direct access to every single CTO in the world if companies with > 1000 emoloyees. Much the same way they are going to stomp Slack, they have that kind of advantage (though not the same leverage) against AWS. Point being - he started a massive business.

Azure now has revenues of more than Windows did when Ballmer started, and it's growing by 40% YoY.

So yes 'revenue' is not the 'whole story' if someone is bilking a cache cow and running everything else into the ground ... but that's now what happened.

Ballmer 'grew and entrenched the cash cows' and made some other huge bets, some of them working out to the point where they are now also, big growing foundational aspects of the business.

'The Market' took a long time to recognize this, but all the historical sales numbers are there for everyone to see.

I believe that once Analysts realized that 1) Windows and Office is 'here to stay' and 2) due to AWS, Azure is going to be huge ... that they revised their view on MSFT from a 'old company' to a 'well run growth company'.

Satya seems great and has made some good moves, but nothing of the magnitude that Ballmer did. At least not yet.

Some of the best quarters for Nokia & co were just before they went under so that's not a solid reference point, unfortunately.

It's a solid reference point because we now have a lot of history to look back upon, and those revenues were from foundational businesses.

Satya's changes have been positive but most of the money he is making is due to Gates + Ballmer.

I think he's good but we'll have to wait to see the full picture.

Nadella I think brought focus on ideas and prioritization that complimented Ballmer's ideas. He doesn't need to launch new projects, but ensure they are managed into a place of relevance. In that regard, it really showcases the excellent people MSFT has in the chain and how they can help each other get to where they collectively want to go.

>The "post-pc" world suggested by Apple/Jobs never materialized.

Clearly, it was in Apple's interest to emphasize the ascendance of mobile where they were strong vs. the PC where Microsoft was. I doubt Jobs thought desktops/laptops were going away, just that they'd become a less important part of the landscape--and that's almost certainly true among consumers as a whole.

"The "post-pc" world suggested by Apple/Jobs never materialized."

I think if you could measure the man hours spent using iDevices and Android devices, as a percentage of general computing hours, you'd find that it would dwarf anything. Everyone has a smartphone now. And tablet sales alone outnumber PCs.

You may be right, but the implied threat to Microsoft was that most/all Windows user's interactions would be mediated by iOS/Android apps, which would displace Windows apps and the browser. Fortunately for Microsoft, the latter didn't happen, and what at first appeared to be exponential app downloads turned out to be an S-Curve. It turns out people have a maximum number of apps they are willing to install and put up with, but this was not yet known at the height of the mobile wars when Microsoft was fighting to be #3.

I am sure someone inside Microsoft saw this early, and figured that Azure could be a platform-agnostic backend to mobile apps and browser-based apps, without having to completing with Apple since they lack core-competences there. Pivotally, tablets failed to replace desktops in the enterprise market, as was initially predicted (and feared by Microsoft).

From my point of view, the things I've most "noticed" coming from MS that are great seem to all have been launched/started during Ballmer's days (2000-2014). For me those are:

Office/Word Online (2010)

Azure (2008/2010)

WSL (Can't find info. Looks like it started before 2014 under Project Astoria)

.Net Core (Happened in 2014 - not sure who "started it")

>The "post-pc" world suggested by Apple/Jobs never materialized.

This is a very US/EU centric evaluation of computing. It might not even be accurate for Gen Z, overall.

Stratchery did a nice piece on this: https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/

That stratechery piece confirms that a number of Satya's "quick wins" were projects mostly developed under Ballmer but credited to Nadella... Which is exactly my point - that Ballmer doesn't always get the credit he deserves, for the sake of magnifying the contrasts between the 2 leaders.

I don't know about this. I think great engineers delete more code than they write. Perhaps something similar is relevant here.

> I think great engineers delete more code than they write.

...but someone has to write the code first, before some of it can be deleted by a great engineer ;)

If it wasn't there before, the great engineer could do something more useful than deleting code!

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