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Comment by irjustin | Hacker News Reader

> passionate about the product you're making and/or selling then you're going to not do very well

100% agreed. Not that it isn't possible, but I'd like to start with a product person because a product person will fight for what matters to the customer and I'd prefer to be in that camp.

Satya Nadella after Balmer would be another example. Balmer did great things for MSFT stock ticker, but so much of the 90's love was lost. Satya has a massive uphill battle but with Github, VSCode and other efforts - I do believe he sincerely cares.

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I did a little looking up about Ballmer after reading a book that disparaged his tenure as CEO in examples. He was at MS from 1980. I don't believe for a moment that he didn't care about the company. It was a changing time for Microsoft, mistakes were surely made, but he also laid some seeds for future growth areas like Azure.

This is like the political narrative, economy was doing badly under party X, starts doing well under Y so Y must be better. No, there were cycles and much of what happens under Y was started by X, and/or both had a lot less control than people think.

We've all seen videos of Ballmer, he was obviously a very passionate leader. Gates, Ballmer, Nadella, they're all business people and probably as evil as the other, just so happens that it is now more of a business imperative for Nadella to be seen as a good player in tech.

Reading Nadella's book is something I think everybody in this industry should do. You understand the impact his son Zain had on him and consequentially the reason why Microsoft is pushing in some of the areas it has been since he took over - accessibility being first and foremost.

> Microsoft is pushing in some of the areas it has been since he took over - accessibility being first and foremost

That's interesting to hear.

My eyes are getting older and I find the accessibility facilities in Windows 11 (and Mint as it happens) far more helpful than those on my M1 Air (little things like the ability to scale far more of the textual aspects of the OS in Windows).

Balmer cared but he didn't care about the end user in the way that we how Jobs and Nadella do as we're talking.

Balmer made office the massive cash cow it is today through amazing licensing - again great stuff for $msft, but there was no product through his tenure that people were like yea, Microsoft! The iphone was dismissed and the windows phone was too late and couldn't play catch up.

Today people are starting to care about Microsoft again. Definitely not 90s love but man I love VSCode. I really do.

Whatever Ballmer's faults, lack of passion wasn't one of them, and he was a founding member of MSFT (probably the first founder after Gates, going back to their salad days as roommates at Harvard), not a parachuted-in hedge-fund MBA. And who can forget "Developers, developers, developers!"?

Microsoft has gutted quality and support so bad.

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