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Comment by mrandish | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you that Satya typically has a flat, measured style that comes across dry and he also stage manages himself rigorously. But it's also worth mentioning that being the CEO of a massive, high-profile public company puts him under different expectations and constraints than a long retired CEO. Nadella is still spokesperson #1 for the company, products and stock.

That said, I'm not sure we'd see a dramatically more forthright and unfiltered Satya when he's ten years out of MSFT. I think much of Satya's style is simply the way he is all the time.

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Generally agree but if you look at the body language and how engaged Steve is vs. what you generally see from Satya, there is a massive difference and Satya being #1 spokesperson for the company doesn't explain it in my opinion.

Matter of fact, I'd even argue that being #1 spokesperson and giving this low energy vibe is kind of bad for how the company is seen by the public. I'd rather have the "developers developers developers" CEO over whatever Satya is.

At my current (non-tech) company, someone in our C-suite has a very similarly controlled, low energy, slightly stilted vibe. If you get to know him, he's a ME with fantastic technical chops. He was pushed into a management role and simply isn't comfortable speaking in public. Of course he's had presentation training and speech coaching, but that just adds to the highly controlled, low energy vibe.

I'm told that when I give talks it sounds like a lecture from a college professor. That's ... probably a compliment, because I thought my public speaking skills were even worse than that.

Point is, I think part of the explanation is Satya coming from a technical background and still being uncomfortable and coming across as slightly forced as a result. Ballmer was a marketer first, an extroverted businessman, and quite comfortable on stage.

> I'd rather have the "developers developers developers" CEO over whatever Satya is.

I was fairly impressed with Satya in his first few years as CEO, mostly due to his embracing hard but necessary strategic changes that had been put off too long. However, the last few years I feel like he's really stalled out. To be clear, I'm not assessing based on the current revenue or stock price which can lag by five or more years but on doing the right things strategically, technically and on product vision. It's unclear the mind-boggling mountains of cash poured on AI (mostly OpenAI) in order to play catch-up are going to pay off in sufficiently high-margin revenue in a Wall Street-relevant time frame.

And big chunks of the mountains of cash dumped into rolling up large gaming franchises at peak post-Covid game bubble valuations are already being written off.

I would rather have Satya with his sedated stage acts than Ballmer with his stack ranking and dancing like a baboon. Ballmer was truly poisonous (not to mention a huge idiot. Spending tens of billions on acquisitions which were written off)

I think another point is that there's a huge difference between a founder-CEO (or near founder like Ballmer) and a manager/employee-CEO. The former has nothing to prove and can speak their mind, for better or worse, and the latter has to tow the company line.

There seems to be different personality clusters amongst CEO's but it is not so obvious which one is obviously better.

Elon has had good success with this brash behaviour while the others like Satya, Zucc and Sundar have taken the other route.

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