Meet Gabe Newell, Microsoft’s next CEO | Hacker News Reader

Meet Gabe Newell, Microsoft’s next CEO

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59 pointsrodolfor38 comments

> Gabe Newell (Valve’s CEO, founder and, if I’m not wrong, its only shareholder) keeps giving interviews where he states that “he doesn’t want to sell“. Many take him at face value. Well. Firstly, in M&A, when you don’t want to sell you just don’t. There’s no need to blab to the press about it.

Except, I dunno, when they ask you?

> Secondly, if your statements appear in the press, it usually means that what you are saying is: “I am not for sale. Unless you offer more than X. Then we’d totally sell out.” I believe this is the message Mr. Newell is trying to convey.

Yes, we clearly live in that kind of world. The kind of world where the unwavering position that a highly achieved person demonstrates in almost everything they do has to be suspicious. You know what you should also do? Pepper your article with lots of pointless statistics and expletives. Because that totally helps make it seem more credible. Numbers! Charts! Fuck! Am I cool yet!?

> Did anyone ever question why, suddenly, all these articles about company culture are appearing?

Because you've only been paying attention the past couple months.

> Valve is reportedly working on a Steam Linux box. This can only be intended to remove the Windows license and its concomitant restrictions from the market.

Yes, clearly that's the only intent possible.

Phew. Ok guys, I enjoy picking apart nonsense blog crap just as much as the next HN user, but this one makes it so easy that it's already getting boring a couple minutes in.

Agreed on all points; however, he's making a bold and verifiable prediction here. If it comes true he's going to look like a fucking genius and if it doesn't it's just more forgotten sound and fury of the blogosphere.

The boldest blind chicken there ever was.

Well, if you have $n \to \infty$ blind chickens running around, at least one is bound to run in the right direction!

I was referring to articles on msm like the ones from the WSJ. Anything that goes there is a carefully choreographed dance between the journalist and the PR rep and a lot of questions end up on the cutting floor. Spending time explaining why this and why that is only done for a reason. If they are irrelevant there will be other talking points.

Again as someone said below I made a very specific prediction in a verifiable timeframe. We'll see. I was not trying to be a genius but since I believe Valve will be acquired wanted to make a post about it.

> Anything that goes there is a carefully choreographed dance between the journalist and the PR rep

You mean the PR rep that Valve is quite proud of not having? How about instead of busyworking the numbers to death, just listen to Gabe for an hour or so? There are plenty of talks/interviews of him to go around. If that doesn't give you a rather unmistakable impression of what he is up to then you have a calibration error. Maybe instead of talking msm, m&a, sales, profits and billions, try honing your human modules a little more.

If Mr. Newell sells out to Microsoft, he's an idiot. From what I can tell, he is very much not an idiot. How's that for an analysis?

> Numbers! Charts! Fuck! Am I cool yet!?

Upvote to you

Sorry, but this sounds like an extremely bizarre proposal to me. Everything I've learned about Gabe indicates he has absolutely no interest in this course of events. Why would he want to run Microsoft when he is head of a large, incredibly successful, innovative, growing company like Valve? This makes zero sense to me.

"Yes, Gabe likes making games and selling silly virtual hats and guns that make big dimensional holes."

I think this is extremely belittling of Gabe and Valve, and games in general, and completely mistaken to boot.

There is one thing that is important here. Valve/Steam, even if they have a linux client, are at the hand of Microsoft/Apple. I think the reason they are moving to Linux is to see if they can get out of that stranglehold but I doubt it. They can convert us techies, but most people don't give a crap's ass about Ubuntu or Mint, they want Windows+Steam+Office+Visual Studio (or whatever combination).

But make no mistake, if MS thinks of buying Valve/Steam (or Apple, but I think MS has a better chance) making Steam hard to install/use can kill it. Steam lives of Windows users and I don't see many people buying a Steambox (when they can either buy a full Windows PC or a Playstation 3/4 or Xbox 360(/720?))

If I recall correctly, Gabe expressed his fears that Microsoft and Apple would move against Steam, as it provides an "App Store" that would compete with that shipping with the OS, motivating his desire for a Linux-powered steambox and to make Linux a viable gaming platform.

Yes, I pointed to that, the thing is, people won't switch to linux because of that. I know Linux guys always want to say 'X is going to be the reason Linux will be adopted' but the thing is, it won't. Outside tech circles, and what I call technohipsters, Linux won't gain that much traction. Not at least to make Valve consider Linux only client. I have a Mac and PC at home. Steam on Mac has 76 games, Steam on PC 238. I don't know about Linux, but I'm guessing even less. And from those 76 Mac games, more than half are indie games. Few AAA games there were released on Mac Steam a good half year after the PC version. Do you really think the 50 million people that bought Call of Duty on the first weekend will move to Linux where they can't play those games?

A Linux based steam console will get more publishers on board if people buy it. There were rumors going around that the PS4 OS was going to be Linux based too. If that's the case Linux will get pretty much everything.

But people will only buy it if publishers publish for it.

And while I don't know the details of a Steam box, assuming a x64 config, you won't be able to really undercut Dell or HP. So why buy a Steam box if you can get a WIndows PC which allows you to run Office?

And about PS4, I have been out of the industry for a while, but if PS4 really is linux based, most games will target THAT specific linux distro with specific drivers. While I doubt Sony would make PS4 just another Linux distro, even if they do, they will add Sony Middleware to it that won't be available on other distros.

I would like to see Linux succeed. I periodically switch to Linux and back to Mac everyonce in a while, but I just don't see it. And back to the original topic, when you are a marketplace on another's man ecosystem, you will always be at their mercy. Now if Steam moved to the browser, maybe I could see something there, but Linux, no, sorry, not gonna happen (as much as I would love it to.)

Linux has been widely adopted for a long time, just not on desktop PC. Android is based on Linux, and we don't see Linux 'get pretty much everything'.

I believe console gamers and PC gamers are a largely different demographics. Among PC gamers, People don't switch to a platform because the game is there, instead, people play a game because the game is here on their platform.

Because Gabe is an engineer and engineers have an insatiable need to fix things and microsoft needs fixing.

But I don't buy it either. I think it would scare the pants off of the corporate customers of MS.

Fixing Microsoft isn't an engineering problem; if it were, I'd wager their thousands of engineers would've done it already.

It may be an engineer on top kind of solution that is needed. Apple had a designer at the top of their structure, so design got its way. This even made up for mistakes made while Jobs wasn't there.

Having Gabe in sufficient control of non technical managers may well work, but then you could switch Gabe out for any trustable non-manager.

I think it would scare the pants off of the corporate customers of MS.

Ballmer's erratic leadership is scaring the pants off of customers, ISVs, and IHVs alike. In fact, the only people who still have their pants are Microsoft's competitors.

He might be an engineer but he was at Microsoft for 13 years and served as producer for the first three releases of Windows.

"Gabe Newell (Valve’s CEO, founder and, if I’m not wrong, its only shareholder) keeps giving interviews where he states that “he doesn’t want to sell“. Many take him at face value. Well. Firstly, in M&A, when you don’t want to sell you just don’t. There’s no need to blab to the press about it."

Help me understand M&A, when you're asked by a reporter about selling your company, what can you say that will result in communicating to people that you don't want to sell your company?

I think the author is reading too much into things

If you don't want to sell the question never gets printed in the article and instead there's more of you blabbing about TF2 hats.

"In Q3 2012, Steam added, for no apparent reason, non-gaming software to its library. "

I believe this was to compete directly with the Windows 8 app store, of which Valve has been vocal in its distaste.

I'm placing my bets on Marissa Mayer being Microsoft's next CEO

Of two implausible outcomes I find this one (Marissa) the slightly less implausible. (certainly Yahoo has already been courted once before and they work closely on search)

> Looking at the micro level, it seems that Microsoft is just full of nasty backstabbing middle managers who violently defend the P&L of their unit, as opposed as working as a group (non-backstabbers get fired thanks to Microsoft’s bone-headed employee review method called ‘stack ranking’. it’s terrible and everyone points at it as the reason why Microsoft lost ground against its competitors.)

Microsoft's adoption of this policy is termed by folks over at leswrong.org as an example of, "Conjuring An Evolution To Serve You." Like conjuring a genii, it's fraught with the strong likelihood of dire unintended consequences.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/l8/conjuring_an_evolution_to_serve_y...

That photo looks like someone took Gabe's head from this image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gabe_newell_doug_lombardi.... (this is a real photo of Gabe)

and pasted it on a picture of someone else.

My money is on the poor performance of Windows Store, which could undermine OS sales. Since those are near-sacred at MSFT in my opinion will spur the Valve acquisition. The 'Gabe as CEO' is just a long shot but not the Valve M&A.

If anything Valve as a development studio has a notorious 'policy' of delivering product 'when it's done' (aka Valve Time) as opposed to MSFT product that are released periodically and that need numerous minor AND major patches with each and every enumeration. Based on that: How would Steam be integrated into MSFT corporate culture, without being killed? That might be the same question Newell is asking himself, in this scenario.

This is so far-fetched I barely know how to respond.

OT, but am I the only one out there who thinks "Bumfuck Willy: The Fedora of Time 2D" would actually be awesome to play?

I really want a 2d time-travelling tomb-raider game with that title now.

"[Gabe] running Microsoft? It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity."

But the necessary genetic engineering to save Microsoft from extinction is far more than building a brand new successful company from scratch. What would be the point?

I humbly disagree. Building a company to be the size of Microsoft is not a trivial matter, no matter how you stretch it. You'd need to catch a VERY big wave of innovation.

I'm totally on side that the author is exercising a little "wishful thinking", and changing microsoft would suck, But I'd rather have (very deep seeded) management problem then have to come up with an idea as basic/brilliant as selling software for a profit.

Why would Valve do this? Don't see any reason at all. Judging from interviews, Gabe loves games. Why the hell would he want to leave them for software & enterprise? Doesn't makes any sense to me.

A bit strange that he brings Gabes ego into it. I would think that if hes trying to fill his ego (nothing about him seems to indicate that) he would try to stomp out microsoft, not run it.

Wow, wild guessing aside, I certainly hope not! shivers

Do you have any reference to support Jobs shorting Apple?

Correction, he sold not shorted. But it was not declared publicly that he was the seller to put pressure on Gil Amelio. http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Steve-Jobs-Confirms-A...

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