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Re:What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer by nojvek on Sunday July 15, 2018 @10:20PM (#17538320)
Satya is already wayyyy more succesful as a CEO than Steve Ballmer ever was. MSFT stock price took a big dip after 2000 and never recovered in Ballmer from 2000 - 2014. He was a decent CEO in the sense that he didn't kill MSFT like Marissa Mayer did to Yahoo.

He missed a ton of opportunities and messed a lot of things like Nokia and Skype acquisitions that barely panned out. He let Apple and Google steal the mobile show when Windows Mobile had been the smart phone king for a long time. Microsoft used to be #1, now they are behind Apple, Amazon and Google.

Granted, he was good at milking the Windows and Office cash cows that had been gifted to him from Gates era, but he spent an insane amount of money on things that never panned out.

MSFT has a lot of money in the bank account so I'm sure they'll be fine even if they put a rock in the CEO seat.

Re:What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer by jaredklewis on Monday July 16, 2018 @01:44AM (#17539025)
> like Marissa Mayer did to Yahoo

Sorry to nitpick, but for some reason this comment irks me. Your comment seems to imply that yahoo was healthy, they hired Mayer, and then Yahoo died as a result.

Yahoo was a sinking ship, and it would have been a tough turn around for anyone.

Not that I think Mayer was the world’s best CEO or anything, but the idea that she “killed” yahoo seems absurd. It’s like accusing a surgeon of killing someone that died in ER surgery; the reason the person was in the ER in the first place was because they were dying.

Microsoft dying under Ballmer would have been night and day different as Microsoft was basically the world’s most valuable company, not a clusterfuck like 2012 yahoo.

Re:What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer by nojvek on Monday July 16, 2018 @02:07AM (#17539100)
Yahoo was behind, agreed! They had so many opportunities to sell though. Microsoft was willing to buy Yahoo at a huge premium and it didn’t go through. Good for MSFT.

In ER terms, the surgeon could have cut the leg off and saved the person, but got a bit too greedy and ended up killing the person by trying to save everything.

Re:What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer by cepth on Monday July 16, 2018 @09:13AM (#17541007)
Just to be clear, Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo for $45 billion in 2008, long before Marissa Mayer was CEO.

As the parent comment notes, your previous comment seems to suggest some kind of causation between Mayer’s tenure as CEO and the eventual breakup and sale of Yahoo. This is the fallacy known in poker as “resulting”.

Nicholas Carlson’s “Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo” is a fair account of her first few years at Yahoo. Keep in mind that when she joined, there was something like a total dozen mobile engineers at Yahoo. The company had burned through 3 CEOs in a decade, etc.

Mayer was not a perfect CEO in terms of strategic vision or her choice of acquisition targets, but I don’t think her time as CEO was particularly bad either.

Re:What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer by nojvek on Monday July 16, 2018 @10:33AM (#17541532)
I believe I got my facts wrong. Thanks for changing my perspective.
Re:What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer by sonnyblarney on Monday July 16, 2018 @01:32AM (#17538978)
No. The stock crash was really not about Ballmer, you can't blame it on him - he basically just took over as the whole world was going under.

Also - Satya has not yet had any real such things to 'miss'.

AI and blockchain are not products, there are no household-name dollar companies coming around on that yet.

It will be some time before we can judge Satya.

Re:What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer by nojvek on Monday July 16, 2018 @02:12AM (#17539121)
Should have specified that. Other tech companies recovered better from the crash than MSFT did. Once Satya came on, it’s been a nice rise. It’s a clear cut difference. I used to work at MSFT. We all felt it. Satya thought about things very differently than Ballmer.
Re:What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer by sonnyblarney on Monday July 16, 2018 @03:41AM (#17539452)
Ballmer massively increased MSFT's business.

Revenues grew quite substantially under him.

Under Satya ... not so much.

Have a look here: [1]

Satya is a better communicator, and he seems like a nicer guy. This is naturally going to make employees 'feel better', but really that may not be what drives the business.

The stock price was obviously trailing revenues for whatever reason, maybe analysts just didn't like Ballmer, but irrespective, he massively grew the business and the reflection in stock price would have been inevitable.

Jury is still out on Satya.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267805/microsofts-global...