Yes, and the funny thing is the author even didn't get the correct take-away from this event.

Ballmer looked at the bottom line, was surprised by the number he saw and then started looking at the math that produced that number in detail. It has nothing to do with being a math wizz. The lesson here is that good executives ignore noise (the speaker) and focus on importance (numbers).

Balmer isn't a superhuman who can listen to a talk, read slides and do higher level math simultaneously, but he can spot a bottom line number that is surprising given his mental model of the deal. He expected to see one number and saw something else. That's when he stopped skimming the slides and gave 100% of his attention to the math that produced that bottom line number. That's also the point where he tuned out the speaker completely.

Math genius is not required. Superhuman ability to divide attention is not required. The only skill Ballmer displayed here is ability to direct his attention to a number he didn't trust, which turned out to be the right decision.

Programmers of average ability have their spider sense tingle when they look at code with sql injections, or at loops that don't terminate, or suspect allocation/threading logic. Bad code looks bad. Not always, but often enough. Finance is no different.

I wish this were true of programmers of average ability.

In my experience most do. It’s just that they work on project that leave zero time to do anything to fix the issue. Customer is paying to add feature X not to fix Y that still worked yesterday.

Often so busy it's like merging on to the expressway with someone behind you honking, you look over your shoulder, it seems sorta alright, so you go ahead.

Also, if the math was that wrong that it made the entire deal not make sense financially given it was a very large deal in monetary terms (which he stated) what were those 30 people doing? Most M&A deals make sense strategically first and then at a price second - rather than for a price first (especially if that price was very high).

I am not impressed by this exploit, because there are some chance he had studied the document before the presentation, or even asked someone to verify it. He was flawed on many aspects, for example trying to attract developers by dancing and chanting "developers, dev...". His successors put Linux in Windows, open sourced .NET and this seems more efficient... without even harming Windows market share.

> ...trying to attract developers by dancing and chanting "developers, dev..."

That video was from Microsoft's _internal_ company-wide meeting held annually to rally their staff, so your assertion is invalid.

Moreover, it's a bad example to begin with; Ballmer was and still is absolutely correct. What makes the FOSS software ecosystem so successful? That's right: developers, developers, developers. Somebody has to write all that code and it isn't going to be the end-users. When developers get pissed off at a platform, they abandon or fork it, which is why it makes sense to keep developers happy.

Those of us who were around in the '80s-'90s remember that Microsoft's rise to dominance was partly powered by the fact that they offered relatively cheap and good compilers and dev tools and solid documentation to make it easy to develop software for their platform. Contrast that with the workstation vendors back then that charged much more than MS did just to get a compiler.

I did not say he was wrong for trying to attract developers. I said chanting to attract them is ridiculous.

And about compilers, Visual Studio has never been cheap. The express version was added only to counter Turbo C++ and other free tools like MingW.