x) appointing Steve Balmer as CEO

Steve Ballmer wasn't a bad CEO. People keep talking about how he dropped the ball on mobile, but so what? So did Blackberry, Motorola and Nokia and those companies had mobile as their core business. To think a "better" CEO could've pulled it all off is delusional.

Under Ballmer, Microsoft focused on core business and reached into cloud - successfully. As a result, Microsoft is now stronger than Apple. Microsoft doesn't depend on people buying luxury cellphones, a market which is reaching saturation.

That's not a "sexy" story, but it's the truth. A more "proactive" CEO would've just blown more money on Zunes and Kinects to fail in the market.

Steve also managed to keep the company intact at a time when they were very close to get cut-up due to antitrust lawsuits. Also, Steve was probably the only one that could lead Microsoft post Gates as Bill remained in a decisive position pulling strings for quite some time (which in some sense is understandable, but not many could have faced such a situation).

> Steve also managed to keep the company intact at a time when they were very close to get cut-up due to antitrust lawsuits.

That was the change in administration. "Microsoft is a monopoly" came under judges appointed by Clinton. "The punishment is Microsoft has to give free Windows licenses to schools" was under judges appointed by the GW Bush administration.

Microsoft's failure in mobile lies squarely with Bill. He lead their mobile and pen computing initiatives as personal pet projects.

Nokia dropped the ball on mobile, then Ballmer bought Nokia. Also MS reached into the cloud thanks to Nadella, not tanks to Ballmer.

When Satya Nadella became CEO Microsoft Azure was four years old.

As old timer insiders said to me prior to that time “You wouldn’t believe just how committed Microsoft is on this. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

(But Satya has made it really work.)

I think the parent is saying that Nadella led the charge into the cloud inside MS under Ballmer, which is a big reason he was considered for the CEO position after Ballmer.

Could be, could be. I hadn’t thought of that.

wasn't Satya part of the Azure platforms from day 1?

> Also MS reached into the cloud thanks to Nadella, not tanks to Ballmer.

So if Microsoft fails in one market segment it's his fault, but if Microsoft succeeds, it's solely the success of the people doing the work?

That's not how it works when you're CEO. You might have a point if Nadella pushed for cloud against Ballmer, but that wasn't the case. To the contrary. In any event, Ballmer ultimately called those shots, not Nadella. That's his job as a CEO.

From what I've read, Nokia had some issues where certain departments wanted to stick with Symbian, and others were working in a new OS. The Nokia N9 was the last phone they released with the new OS (Meego).

I believe they would have been fine if they focused on the European and Asian markets instead of the US.

Even at the time of the Microsoft deal in 2011, Nokia hadn't been US-focused for at least 5 years. US carriers weren't carrying any Nokias beyond the $50 dumbphones you could get anywhere. Unlike the rest of the world where people bought phones at more or less full price, the US market had mostly carrier subsidized pricing, and carriers ran the ad campaigns, not manufacturers (except Apple).

Back when the iPhone, HTC G1 and Motorola Droid ads were saturating TV around 2008/9, I couldn't recall seeing a single ad for Nokia. Nokia's only real sales outlet were 3(!) retail stores in the entire US. And even those shuttered well before 2011.

The idea that focusing away from the US might have saved them as an independent entity doesn't hold up because their average selling price (ASP) was falling due to low-end models selling better than their more expensive smartphone line. Eventually it reached a turning point where the brand was more closely associated with super-durable and super cheap "burner" phones than upscale smartphones.

Finally, their smartphone line was a mess because like Windows Mobile 6.x, the OS appeared on a variety of screens, both touch and non-touch. The Ovi app store was deeply fragmented as a result, because old apps scaled badly on larger touch devices, and newer apps didn't work at all on the non-touch phones.

> The idea that focusing away from the US might have saved them as an independent entity doesn't hold up because their average selling price (ASP) was falling due to low-end models selling better than their more expensive smartphone line.

How much per unit profit were they making with their low-end models compared to the expensive smartphone models? As I recall, I spent roughly $300 to $350 per phone when I purchased models like the N95 8GB, N8, N9, and 808 (which isn't that expensive compared to certain smartphone models).

Most people I know/knew, before they switched to Android and iPhone, were using the higher end model Nokia and Blackberry phones. In fact, they had features that early models of the iPhone lacked (IIRC, the ability to copy and paste text).

> reached into cloud

As much of a problem I might have with some of Ballmer's ideas and actions, this is simply amazing. It completely saved the whole company.

This was entirely reactionary.

Microsoft looked at what AWS was doing and realized they were getting left in the dust and they are still playing catch up, albeit in very good shape.

Nadella discusses having to catch up to AWS in his book.

Ballmer's major contribution was finally allowing the company to follow Amazon's playbook.

> So did Blackberry, Motorola and Nokia and those companies had mobile as their core business.

I think one difference is that BB, Motorola and Nokia dropped the ball technically; Microsoft had a technical solution that was ahead of its time, but failed on the business side.

> reached into cloud

Belatedly. I mean, they’re the largest software vendor on Earth, and they’re still miles behind a book retailer.

Well he was the reason behind some of the other failures. But the title is obviously going for shock and awe clickbait, as most such "definitive" titles are.

I find it unexpected that Windows ME is also missing from the list; it used to be the blunder. See:

- Wikipedia's "reception" section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Me#Reception

- An XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/323/

Eh. I remember ME. It was the worst version of Windows at the time, but obviously predated Vista and 8. ME generated a lot of bad press, but it was mostly stability stuff that was quickly fixed. Vista was terrible and only ever got slightly less terrible before Windows 7 arrived. Windows 8 was so frustrating (from a usability standpoint) that I defected to Mac.

In any case, it's not meant to be an exhaustive list ...

It's funny because I felt Vista was perfectly fine as an OS, whereas ME was almost unusable (with the stability issues you mentioned). Vista was just boring, not great, but it worked. So it surprises me that so many people were frustrated by it.

Maybe I just hot lucky with my hardware choices at the time.

> So it surprises me that so many people were frustrated by it.

That might have been (in part) due to all of the underpowered PCs sold with "Windows Vista Capable" badges, IIRC there was a class-action lawsuit because of it.

My experiences are the same. I got a laptop around that time (one that promised an upgrade to Vista for free). XP would crash and blue screen about once a month. With Vista it never crashed or blue screened at all, and I was using it heavily for months. I built a PC soon after, which did blue screen with Vista, but I suspect it was the NVidia drivers (laptop had an ATI GPU).

I agree, Vista was boring, in the sense that it just worked and didn't get in the way. Now that I think about it, the built in Start Menu search bar made it awesome.

Vista, after a few service packs, was somewhat usable, but still a performance hog. It felt like an early alpha build of Win7 (once that came out).

Oh, WinME had much worse issues than just some crash here or there. As someone who at that time made a living by (among other things) deploying, maintaining and repairing Windows PCs at various small business offices, it was a nightmare.

Every install behaved differently and had random failures which were gone without a trace after a reboot, never to appear again. Troubleshooting a non-booting WinME box was a nightmare compared to troubleshooting a Win98 box with similar issues, which had all kinds of emergency "shell" with dozens of useful utilities (which were absent in WinME, with no replacement), and a "safe mode" which was actually useful and predictable.

The Control Panel, and all the GUI around configuration was a difficult to use abomination, stuck somewhere halfway between utilitarian look&feel of Win98 and sleek look of WinXP, with all the disadvantages and none of the advantages of either.

My personal mileage with ME was that it would hum along fine, but at some point would become unstable. Once it became unstable, the best solution was to reimage it. Whatever would break did not seem to ever get better, regardless of any attempts to find or fix the issue. So the first crash, just start reimaging.

Of course, I was used to reimaging my Windows machines at the time anyway. That's something that's mostly gone away, and I think one of the better (but mostly invisible) advances in Windows.

I occasionally felt that ME was so bad in order to push the last holdouts finally into the 32-bit era.

Presumably, you mean the NT-era and off the Windows 95 descended code base, but as I recall it was exactly the opposite: the ME that was released was something of a last-minute rush job because, it was supposed to be an NT-based OS, but that wasn't ready and was effectively delayed until XP.

ME was 32 bit... I think what you mean to say is to push the last hold outs into the NT on the desktop era.

NT was on the desktop! I think you mean in the home.

That didn't happen until people started using Windows XP. I only saw a few businesses using NT or Windows 2000, but I don't recall many people running those versions in their home computers.

-1) windows