chucke1992

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.

We cannot tell if the currently most profitable divisions would become that profitable under Ballmer.

That's the whole point - Satya somehow was able to develop the platforms through acquisitions and business vendor lock much better than Ballmer ever could. And we saw what happened with Windows division under Ballmer - it was profitable but it had no future. MSFT could become another IBM.

With Ballmer we could get some Windows hubris like "Azure only with Windows OS license" or something.

My only issue with Satya is that he is not "a cult of personality" type of person like Jensen Huang or Phil Spencer. He is basically a guy who "walks softly and wields a big stick".

> How can you right this in good faith while replying to a comment laying out to you that Microsoft most successful investments a decade later were all started by Ballmer and that he took a lot of risks with R&D?

Investment in R&D means nothing if you can't deliver. Intel has enormous R&D budget. Boeing too. Did it help them? No.

> Also the Microsoft Phone with, you know, touch screens

With Windows Phone he was too late to the market. It does not matter if he thought of it later - he famously disregarded iPhone saying that it did not have keyboard. They had Windows Mobile, but they were busy competing with Blackberry instead of going after innovation.

But here is the thing - launching the initiative means nothing. Satya is able to expand and develop it.

Like with Ballmer we certainly would not have got O365 to iOS for example. It would be 100% bundled one way or another to Windows services or something or browser or whatever.

Even with Azure we would not have got such aggressive expansion and attempts to push services across Windows and Linux or playing with Open Source platforms like K8S. I think Ballmer was closer to the modern Google who is hell-bent on not using anything Windows.

Ballmer's attempt to buy Yahoo and disregard for touch screen phones is what defined his legacy. He was a good CFO who knew how to run business, but not a great CEO.

> Satya has been good with acquisitions but what else?

Ability to buy right things is important too. Like Ballmer wanted to buy Yahoo, while Satya bought Github. One cost 80b, while another created a whole foundation for Copilot push. Linkedin purchase was great and with OpenAI I am 100% sure that Ballmer would have missed AI train (like AWS did).

He was a good CFO type of a leader. Unlike a lot of other companies like Intel or Boeing, that were run by CFOs, he did not last long enough to run MSFT into the ground due to being too late to modern trends.

Sure he build the foundation, but he was not smart enough to lead the path forward. With him MSFT would have never reached top 3 most valuable companies - I would say it would be at 500-600b maybe at best.

Even with Azure and Office, he was too much into "bundle with Windows" type of guy. Similar to how he was saying that touchscreen would never work as businesses needed buttons to type. I think with Satya, they would have tried multi touch screen at least for sure.

By and large, Ballmer was not the very open minded person. And his attempt to buy Yahoo...Oof.

The problem with Ballmer is that he missed a lot of opportunities.

Satya is much better in that regard.

well, values don't feed you. I am pretty sure a lot of folks would abandon their own beliefs if somebody gave them 1m.

they are sensationalist because they are trying to imitate the discourse like on TikTok or Twitter - some short sentence that makes people pay attention while reading the headline. It is like "click on us!!!"

And it is getting worse because media has to compete with online media.

> I'm sure some people crave the hollow mindless screaming of random influencers but there's still mindful people out there.

For sure, there are event podcasts with cool and calm discourse too. There are options.

reminds me of this https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Gawc7-sXwAAHPaR?format=jpg&name=...

nobody wants independent journalism. never wanted. people want something that aligns with their point of view.

that's why streamers, podcasters and subgroups are so successful - you find like-minded folks there that agree with you. And that's why you often have forums and discord groups that literally ban people left and right.

It has always been the case.

They are basically implying that the government should support businesses that fall in line with the government.

Which is a strange thing to support though, but it often happens anyway.

traditional media is already losing the influence to be honest. Even big networks like CNN or Fox News are basically dying.

In the era of tiktok, twitter, podcasters and other services - traditional media is just too boring source of news. I would say that even the traditional search will die sooner or later.

I don't think it was that expensive of a purchase to care. In the first place it was done in order to stop bashing Bezos himself (I remember how the pivoted from saying how millionaires should not exist to millionaires are good).

Plus a lot of left leaning media hate Bezos anyway.

Oh, they had more subscribers than I expected.

Essentially they are not competitive due to regulations and being "a pension fund" nobody working there is willing to innovate or change anything "not incrementally"

Shame that they cannot be lean and mean due to unions either. Car industry in europe in general will die sooner or later.

Adobe has a powerful moat. That's why companies like MSFT can find better way to integrate AI into workflows rather than just AI companies without any moat.

Except MSFT got OpenAI extremely cheap. They invested in them early on and basically are paying them with Azure credits.

Now we can nuke a database to the orbit for real

Adobe has a really huge moat they can leverage to acquire users.

wow, 1.5m crazy

That's understandable. Control over standards has the immense value. Just like look at Nvidia's CUDA.

> Free speech is good upto certain extent

Until you own speech is banned right? We are the "good ones" after all.

So basically closer and closer to governmental control over social networks. Seems like a global trend everywhere. Governments will define the rules by which communication services (and social networks) should operate.

Fix it by piping

With Whatsapp it is pretty obvious at this point that it is in cahoot with governments in regards of backdoors and stuff. With Signal? Who knows? Maybe too.

Governments don't go after services that they can access freely.

Famous quote that if you sacrifice freedom for security, you will get neither.

Except Telegram is considered one of the most secured apps around. Obviously it cannot stop people from being stupid when they expose themselves.

The very reason why France is not happy is that because they cannot get access to private chats and stuff. EU was (and is) pushing for the end of E2E encryption after all (it failed this time, but they will try again).

Durov created Telegram because the russian government was trying to take over his original social network - VK (basically imagine USA gov taking over Facebook). Thus he sold his shared and left the country.

I do find it hilarious to see apologists of government over-reach like you.

> I don't believe there are any western nations that want non-locally-backdoored messaging of any sort

But that's what exactly they want no? EU is literally implementing a regulation that will allow to "circumvent end-to-end encryption to address child sexual abuse material". I believe it failed to pass recently, but they will try again - and nothing stops countries to implement it independently. I think France is the one who was pushing for that in the first place.

Basically as he did not provide access to the encrypted messages and communication in Telegram, they accused him for supporting the criminals. That's all to it.

It is basically the part of the current politics in EU where they are trying to force access to all encrypted traffic across devices.

> Do you unironically believe it's not already backdoored for Russian government?

Yes. You should read the history of Durov and why Telegram was created in the first place.