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Comment by js2 | Hacker News Reader

Two thoughts.

1. I can't get over how primitive the Windows UI was compared to Mac years after Mac shipped. Apple began the Macintosh project in late '79 and by Jan '84 shipped both the Mac and the OS. Microsoft began Windows development in '81 and didn't really catch up UI-wise till Windows 3 in 1990. Meanwhile, Apple would squander its head start, not shipping an OS as technically sound as NT (1993) till OS X in 2000.

2. I have yet to read a flattering portrait of Ballmer and here he almost kills Microsoft going all in on OS/2. Was Microsoft successful in spite of him?

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From all the available recollections, Ballmer never had any valuable foresight.

I wonder why the board of directors left him as CEO after Gates’ retirement.

Also reportedly Ballmer was disagreeing with Gates about how important the market of smartphones and tablets is, with Gates wanting to invest heavily in it. Oops!

Microsoft made a ton of money with Ballmer as CEO. I imagine the board was pretty happy with him at least for most of that time.

How much of that revenue can be attributed to Balmer though?

As an outsider it seems to me that all Microsoft did during Ballmer was to milk the cash cows created during Bill Gates and at the same time destroy the good will of developers and the morale of their employees.

I’m assuming any big company acquires a certain inertia and will keep producing money for as long as there is demand and the supply can meet it. Just look at Apple.

So what did Ballmer do that can be praised?

I won't defend Ballmer, but the guy was a salesman, a really good salesman. Not a technologist.

Also Bill Gates was "chief software architect" during the Longhorn/Vista thing so he's hardly absolved of blame.

In defense of the Longhorn/Vista blunder, the problem is that Windows XP was really good (at least compared to previous Windows versions), some would say good enough for people to not upgrade to newer versions ... if you remember, this was the first Win NT version meant for consumers. By comparison previously Win 3.x, 95, 98, ME, and in between were really unstable and frankly unusable in certain scenarios, I know because I used them all.

I have a feeling that even now Windows XP is more popular than people think and that they aren't reporting the real number of Windows XP installs in the wild.

So they were competing against themselves, against a previous version that has been wildly successful, enough so that virtually nobody upgraded it. I mean, besides people capable of assembling and upgrading their PCs, component by component, I'm pretty sure that everybody bought into Windows 7 and later via new PCs. And PCs becoming good enough to keep around for years, I think the writing was on the wall that Windows's revenue will eventually go down.

That really echoes what I've been asking for years. If you get a CEO that walks in, does barely anything, will anyone even notice? Short of any media blunders or completely nuking a company, how can you really mess up a company during your tenure such that you get in and get out with your ridiculous compensation?

Sure . . . but they might have made more money with someone with better technical skills. Additionally, Ballmer had some dogma (Jack Welch style up-or-out review system, the "everything has to be Windows" nonsense [1]) that did a lot of damage.

We'll never know. But Satya seems to be doing very well indeed with a combination of better technical direction and removing Ballmer-era toxicity.

[1] On one project I worked on was an embedded system, and I joked that the only way that Ballmer would let it ship (if he'd known about it) would be to rename it "Microsoft Windows, Event-Loop-and-Some-Interrupt-Handlers Edition," whereupon it didn't matter what the heck the software looked like on the inside. As long as it said "Windows" somewhere on the outside, he'd be happy.

My guess, he was a money man appointed by a board filled with money men.

Was OS/2 tied to the PS/2 and MCA? In my first job out of school in the early 1990s, all the developers had OS/2 workstations. It was a good OS, stable, multitasked well, and from memory Microsoft didn't really equal it until Windows NT4 or maybe even 2000. From my perspective OS/2 didn't fail for technical reasons, it must have been IBM trying to recapture the PC as a proprietary platform when the market really wanted something that would run on any PC clone.

Not strictly, but the original plan was to have Microsoft market OS/2 2.0 to the clone makers. So when MS walked away, IBM didn't have a good story for 3rd parties. OS/2 2 had drivers for stuff with names like "IBM 3142" and you had to know whether that was the equivalent of an Adaptec SCSI adaptor or HP LaserJet printer. The association with PS2/MCA certainly muted OS/2's reception though.

That OS/2 2.0 debacle is one of my favorite topics BTW. It ended up in the end much worse than that.

I was quite young back then, but I started on os/2 and after about half a year we switched to nt4. I never used any windows before that, but nt felt much more mature. Unfortunately I don't recall the version of os/2 in use, but we mostly didn't upgrade the workstations when we switched and windows still felt "better", although I do remember some os/2 fans at our place complained about nt4 being a memory hog when the switch was announced. Iirc we had it running nicely on 8mb 486 even, and the visual basic 5 ide ran lightning fast.

Stability wise, my os/2 time was probably too short anyways, but I don't remember either os as unstable.

I ran OS/2 on a 486. One of the issues that held back adoption was it’s system requirements - you needed a minimum of 8MB of RAM for it to run smoothly, but most systems being sold at that time had 2-4MB.

> I have yet to read a flattering portrait of Ballmer

On HN six days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17535209

Thanks, missed it. Added to my reading list.

> 2. I have yet to read a flattering portrait of Ballmer and here he almost kills Microsoft going all in on OS/2. Was Microsoft successful in spite of him?

I don't have a lot to back this up on, just years reading books on the subject, but I always got the impression that Gates/Ballmer in the early Microsoft days made a fascinating good cop/bad cop routine. I will continue to wonder how much of what was attributed to either Gates or Ballmer in those early days was simply their assigned good cop/bad cop role (with the weird twistiness to it that I think the roles swapped in internal communications versus external communications; Ballmer was the friend of IBM, the respectable salesman, and Gates the hot shot kid that wouldn't take no for an answer / Gates the founder that loved technology and took everything seriously but Ballmer was the business man trying to reign in freedom) rather than their actual thoughts on the matter.

I certainly got the impression that early Microsoft was successful because of that two-headed dynamic. Microsoft could pet IBM with one hand and stab them in the back with the other, and IBM would let them try that again mostly because they succumbed to that good-cop/bad-cop routine quite effectively.

Some of the mythos internally at Microsoft always seemed to suggest that the dynamic played similarly inside the halls, in building the early culture.

I wonder if in Ballmer's tenure after Gates' retirement the problem was simply that he never quite found that replacement good cop to keep the dynamic alive internally (despite externally didn't really need a bad cop anymore). Satya to all appearances is nothing but "good cop", externally and internally and maybe that's all Microsoft needs now to survive. Early Microsoft probably wouldn't have.

Anyway, just supposition on my part.

During those days, the Mac was hardly seen in the wild outside US.

For example in Portugal, we had a single importer, Interlog, located in Lisbon and Porto.

For us, the only competition to PCs were Amiga and Atari systems, but they were seen as gaming machines by most, because MS-DOS was where business was.

By business I mean as terminals to mainframes, UNIX, or simple Novel Netware.

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