alt Hacker NewsSteve Ballmer Interview
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I found the episode very enlightening, and learned a lot as well as unlearned a few things that I thought I had known.
I never realized how much of azure was him early on.' I didn't realize the tension between him and Bill, always assumed those two were thick as thieves, all the time. I super respect him for stepping down so that the company can change in the way it needs to, and also so wall street would realize a change has happened (which was around spending discipline vs. investments, and giving forward guidance, etc)
I left this episode with a lot more respect for him as a person and saw him much more introspective and up front that I would have imagined based on what I thought I knew before.
Also, a formerly favorite phrase of saying "we're in the Ballmer era at X company" is struck from my vocabularly, since in most places I've used it, it's meant to be an insult to the company, however it's really just an insult to Ballmer. He was way more intuned than many others.
You know, Steve Ballmer is always fun and interesting to listen to.
Meanwhile you have Satya Nadella. This very sanitized, boring, fake, borderline manufactured personality. I can't imagine sitting through a 3hr interview/podcast with him as a guest. I had no problem listening to this one though.
Ballmer was hard-working, smart, and incredibly lucky in many ways. (Fairly or unfairly, I always have a soft spot for someone who survives Math 55 freshman year at Harvard—which Steve did!)
But he was also enthusiastic about weird non-tech marketing initiatives like trying to partner with big paper companies to launch “MS Office” branded paper for higher margin paper sales. I think this was a few years before the US version of The Office. But it sounds pretty Dunder-Mifflin to me! Whatever his flaws, I don’t see Satya going in this direction.
Source: I spoke directly with someone who worked with Ballmer on this.
I’m a big, big fan of acquired podcast, listened to every single of their episodes.
But I remember their entire Microsoft episodes felt like a lengthy defense of Steve Ballmer. There were too many instances of “here’s why this bad decision of Steve made sense given the circumstances” or “ here is how people underestimate the contribution of Steve on this good decision.” They were all well argued points, of course, but so numerous that I found myself wondering if the hosts does not have a relationship with Steve.
The existence of this interview does not help with that suspicion.
TIL that Ballmer built their enterprise division from scratch.
Figures. It was a highly profitable division that nobody could figure out what it did or how.
I’m not against wealthy people, and America has always had a Tycoon class…
But allowing a single person to go from $20B to $130B in assets in 10 years feels like a pretty obvious policy failure.
Since Steve was the guy who single handedly recruited David Cutler and his gang, I figured he has a lot of tricks in his bag.
You guys know Steve Ballmer is worth more than Bill Gates and owns a bigger share of MS? Gates diversified and donated to his foundation.
Truly a legendary man for finding himself in the right place at the right time.
Interesting interview in general, but I thought this was interesting framing on selling stock where you're ahead:
> Why would I sell, so we have less to give to philanthropy someday, unless I really think Microsoft’s going to underperform the market by essentially the capital gains rate.
I was disappointed that Ballmer didn't give Ray Ozzie more credit. Azure was incubated inside Ray's org and Cutler worked for Ray. I remember Ray telling me that he had to go to the board and ask for $1 billion to build a datacenter. This was in 2005, I think, when that seemed like a crazy amount of money.
Ballmer sort of acknowledged Ray's role when he said that Cutler would not have wanted to work in the Servers and Tools org. But I think Ballmer undersells how much of the Azure strategy actually came from Ray.
> We were trying to get our browser to be a platform, embrace and extend I think is what we said. We’ll embrace the Internet and we’ll extend with these ActiveX controls.
Haha, yeah, I think you've forgotten the last third there Steve.
I always thought Ballmer was an underrated CEO. He knew who was really important for the success of his company. What other billionaire tech leader is ever going to get up on stage all sweaty and rave and chant and dance for people like me, me, me?
due to the capitalistic nature of america, they lost a brilliant mathematician in ballmer, yet also gained an excellent salesperson / executive.
guess end of day - money is a scale not an item to be measured.
Direct link:
Another interview about the story of Microsoft, who skillfully managed to avoid any mention of Mary Maxwell Gates :-)
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/05/how-bill-gates-mother-influe...
Ballmer's chief mistake was sticking to what worked in the past. He was not willing to let go of the Windows monopoly, and Azure in its early days was based on Windows servers. Then Satya came in and said, no it is OK to support Linux, and in fact it is OK to run Microsoft's own services on Linux. It is OK to support Open Source, and in fact we'll open source some of our stuff. That put Microsoft back on track. For now.
Satya's mistake though is that he has filled Microsoft with average people. The best fresh graduates from the top colleges went to Google and Facebook in the last decade -- because they paid significantly more -- and Microsoft picked up the rest. What is the impact of that? Microsoft's execution ability is lower, and we'll see the impact of that in the coming years.
Another of Satya's mistakes is his faux pas related to women employees. He was accused -- unfairly in my opinion -- of saying women employees should not ask for a raise. He did no such thing. He said employees should not ask for a raise (not women employees specifically) and instead should rely on the system to give you the appropriate raise at the appropriate time. But since he said that at a women's conference the accusation stood that he meant women employees specifically. Satya has had to fight against this accusation and he has done so by establishing a quota system for promoting women employees. Executive compensation at all levels at Microsoft is directly tied to promotion of women employees, and as a result, a lot of women now occupy positions they would not otherwise. Again, the impact is decreased ability to execute.
Microsoft today is the second most valuable company behind Nvidia. But you wouldn't know that looking at their products. They don't have any interesting new products. To some extend they are coasting. Will their success continue into the next decade? It's going to be interesting to watch.