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Comment by RandomThoughts3 | Hacker News Reader

> Ballmer's attempt to buy Yahoo and disregard for touch screen phones is what defined his legacy.

You are weirdly obsessed with that but Ballmer actually started Bing and bought Nokia to make touchscreen phones. I think you are extremely biased to the point of being entirely disconnected from the facts at hand.

> Ability to buy right things is important too.

Ballmer bought Skype and launched the foundation of what would become Teams - you know - arguably the most important corporate piece of software after Covid.

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Not OP, but Ballmer's attempt to reinvent Windows Mobile to compete with modern smartphones was too little too late.

Microsoft during that era was one bad call after another. When Apple saw multitouch they made a phone; Microsoft made a giant table[0] (very little imagination beyond the Jeff Han demo[1]). When Microsoft saw the iPhone reception, they sunk 2 years an $1B into the Kin line of phones[2], which lasted all of 2 months before being pulled from shelves. It was several years later when they bought Nokia, when then iPhone was already 6-7 generations in. By this time the world was already moving to "mobile first", and Microsoft was being left behind without a platform.

For a couple decades Microsoft worked to convince the world that Windows, Office, and Microsoft as a whole was needed to get real work done. It was during Ballmer's time at the helm that this belief eroded. People saw they didn't need Microsoft to make a good smart phone. They found they could get work done with Google Docs and didn't always need MS Office. They found macOS could be used to get work done just as well as Windows... and in fact, a desktop OS might not be needed at all. Ballmer's biggest failure was giving his competitors time to show the world that Microsoft wasn't as necessary as the world was led to believe.

As far as Teams goes... it is used a lot by companies that are all-in on O365, but Slack and Zoom were the two household names in the space during the pandemic. Once again, the world was shown that work could be done without Microsoft.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PixelSense

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_the_radical_promise_of_th...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin

> As far as Teams goes... it is used a lot by companies that are all-in on O365, but Slack and Zoom were the two household names in the space during the pandemic.

Tell me you have no idea of what’s happening in the real world outside your small tech bubble in one sentence.

Nobody uses Slack outside of tech. They are virtually unknown in Europe.

I don’t use Slack personally, but it’s always what I hear mentioned online. It’s also what I hear friends mention (who don’t work in tech) who aren’t working at big cooperations.

I’ve also heard many people use the phrase, “it’s like Slack”, when trying to explain what MS Teams is to a non-technical friend. It was all over the news during the pandemic, so people learned what it was. Same with Zoom.

"Microsoft made a giant table[0] (very little imagination beyond the Jeff Han demo[1])"

This is a wild take. Both the original Surface 1.0 table and the second SUR40 had some really amazing, highly-imaginative multi-user compute paradigms (a multi-user interface with no concept of “up”? Come on now.).

Commercially successful? No. But calling them "very little imagination" is a real head-scratcher.

What’s also interesting about this comment is that, in this very same Ballmer era, Microsoft later acquired Jeff Han’s Perceptive Pixel to create the Surface Hub product.

I am biased but I am not disconnected from the facts. I am still pissed at Ballmer with how they missed search and mobile market. They were late with Search and they were late with mobile.

With Teams it was just luck, but even then Team's growth happened years years after Ballmer and can be attributed to the multiplatform push of O365 by Satya.

Bing is insanely profitable. I fail to see how they missed search.

You are not disconnected from the facts but you happily discount Ballmer wins when they don’t suit your narrative.

> Microsoft under Ballmer was insanely profitable, more than its competitors and far more than before he took the helm.

Being profitable means nothing if your marketshare in low 10%. You are leaning too much on "profit". Ballmer was a good CFO (finance guy), but not CEO.

Azure Search is still broken FWIW. A lot of Azure is still vapor ware; it works in the tutorial but not in real life. Every time my company signs/re-up a contract with Microsoft, I die a little.

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