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Comment by coliveira | Hacker News Reader

Simple: MS went from living off their Windows OS to becoming a major cloud provider, where most services are implemented in Linux.

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I think Nadella deserves a lot of credit for this strategy and Ballmer deserves a lot of criticism for his really wrong windows at all costs strategy that held MSFT back for years.

Their turn around with Nadella is incredible and must be a really interesting story.

https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/

For the people that argue that CEOs don’t matter, this is another compelling example of how important top down direction and leadership can be.

> For the people that argue that CEOs don’t matter

Who argues that? Apple already gave us a solid proof of difference between a manager and great CEO decade ago.

It's fairly common to see comment threads every week or two arguing whether CEO compensation is justified and whether they make any overall difference to the performance of the company.

I've worked at Microsoft for over twelve years, and I think this radically oversimplifies the story. A lot of the changes that Nadella gets credit for were actually started during the Ballmer years, but it can take a really long time to change things at a company of 100k people.

Interesting! Feel free to elaborate :)

Stuff like releasing Vscode and Powershell under the MIT license, porting SQL Server to Linux, developing WSL… Did Ballmer contribute to/enable any of that stuff?

I only briefly worked at Microsoft as an intern (during the Ballmer years), but all the things you mentioned are Developer Experience things and from what little I saw/felt/noticed, that was always extremely important to Ballmer. As much laughed at as Ballmer was for the whole "Developers! Developers! Developers!" moment, that very much was a mantra for Ballmer. Despite not having nearly the technical acumen of his predecessor nor his successor, he never forgot Microsoft was a company founded on Developer Tools and Developer Experience. He tried his best to cheer-lead it where he saw it (literally in some cases, hence the moment that got so many laughs around the internet), and enable whatever he could to get the ball rolling for good Developer Experiences. Even when his stubborn "home team or no team" cheer-leading for Windows and Office sometimes got in the way of cheer-leading for Developer Experience, he could still sometimes be persuaded that the right thing for Developers was the right thing for Microsoft even when it wasn't always the right thing for Windows or for Office, because he worked to never forget that cornerstone of Developer Experience to the company. (Though of course he still tried to prioritize where those overlapped, he wasn't as bad as some make him out to be about it.)

Those specific things didn't happen under Ballmer or kick off under Ballmer, but some their predecessors did (the earliest open source projects happened under Ballmer; the Monaco Code Editor was started under Ballmer even if the trajectory to it becoming VSCode wasn't likely clear back then). You can't necessarily draw a straight line from Ballmer era to those those projects that you like, but you also can't connect all the dots without including some of the dots from the Ballmer era too. Ballmer wasn't the great villain a lot of retrospectives seem to want to make him. He was an infectious cheer-leader and sometimes his cheer-leading led him astray (especially in trying to force people to use Windows/Office, instead of trying to encourage people to want to use Windows/Office; probably the biggest distinction between Ballmer and Nadella, and even then it doesn't seem that wide of a gulf as people make it out to be), but his intentions were in the right place and some of his instincts still lead the company in the right general direction (eventually).

That's one way to look at it. I'd say those changes were at least a decade late, and yes Ballmer's fault.

Ballmer missed mobile as well, despite having a decade head start. Remember his predictions about the iphone?

Yeah, while Google immediately scrapped their blackberry like phone project to quickly accelerate an iPhone-ish design for the first android phone, Ballmer made MSFT's probably largest strategic mistake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qycUOENFIBs

I don't buy the 'things were in motion' while he was there, I think if they were it was in spite of his direction, not because of it.

But don't worry you guys! We're going to rush the Zune to the market and win the media player wars that Apple just ended!

I hated microsoft's plays for sure program. What a lie.

Funnily enough Zune wasn't even PlaysForSure. Microsoft actually killed their own music player ecosystem to try and create another one that they owned completely. Then the music industry said "fuck it, we're going DRM-free" if only so that they could sell songs outside of iTunes and have them work on iPods.

It helps that Jobs himself hated DRM on music so much that he was willing to give up a legitimate competitive advantage to improve the customer experience.

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