Are we sure that Amazon is stagnating right now like Microsoft was though? A more appropriate question might be along the lines of who could prevent sliding into the Ballmer-Microsoft-like Stagnation.

There was never any stagnation at Microsoft other than in the stock price.

Have a look: [1] [2] - what changed really was simply the price/earnings multiplier, not really the underlying fundamentals. Though this is very important, I don't think it's the most important part of the Ballmer culture era.

Revenues and product line expansion grew phenomenally, Ballmer brought huge new business lines and the cloud into the fore.

The culture may have been perceived as toxic by some, but it's debatable if that's just hearsay or if it had a real effect on productivity etc..

That Ballmer failed on a few points (slow to embrace Linux) is fine - no big companies win everywhere and neither will Satya. MS failed at search? Well Google failed as social as well. Neither of them are hard done by it, there are other unassailable market leaders who do it better somewhere else anyhow,

Satya is obviously a welcome shift, and culture change was probably timely along with embrace of open source etc. (right man for the right time) - but Ballmer was good for MSFT. He was the right man for the right time as well, and probably good that he left when he did.

My experience is that it's really, really hard to judge culture from the outside - and literally different buildings/groups have completely different culture.

Amazon will be a case study in that stage of growth however - it may have a lot to do with how much Bezos cares to deal with it, or play with rockets all day like Larry and Sergei. I wonder how very few companies have done that really well - i.e. gone from 15K -> 100K and maintained dynamism. Probably few if any.

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

[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/sto...

Sad to see this downvoted. Balmer moved MS into the cloud defeating IBM and into hardware over Gates' objections. He was imperfect and underrated. Microsoft under Nadella is built on Ballmer's shoulders.

From my recollection, Ballmer continually overpaid for random acquisitions that screamed “in the moment hot thing” versus well-thought, strategic. From an outsiders view, the whole we must take over the world syndrome manifested into trying to buy a way into everything that could be big versus fit well with Microsoft.

You mean like Google's $3.2 B acquisition of Nest, which has nothing to do with their core offer and is losing money? Or FitBit, another money losing entity for $2B? Or Alphalbet's other substantial moonshot investments none of which have panned out? They're all 'strategic' but that's what all bad investments are pinned as.

I think your statement might be driven by narrative (which is my point about Ballmer's public perception) because if you have a look at the acquisitions, I don't think MS comes out looking bad at all next to G.

Have a look at G's acquisitions [1] , and MS [2]

MSFT looks actually a little more tame by the numbers.

Satya will have to do much more than amp up all the products and services that Gates and Ballmer launched in order to keep the reputation he has right now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

I completely agree on Alphabet as of late. Maybe they can justify having a hardware division for phones as a necessary cost center in order to facilitate R&D developments for Android. I’d even give Veerily the benefit of the doubt as it seems to relate to cloud offerings for healthcare. Ballmer’s Microsoft era was similar to Google from 2014 onward.

Selective memory? Google made this thing called Android. What was Microsoft doing?

Selective memory? MS launched XBOX into one of the world's largest markets (gaming) what was Google doing?

Ballmer re-orged MSFT's entire business model, and launched most of the platforms and services from which they derive their revenue today.

What has Satya done, materially, do improve MS revenue? In terns of new products, services or op models, etc?

We all love MS code, but it's not that important. Linux on Azure was a market-driven inevitability.

We'll have to wait and see to really judge, just as it's only really now becoming clear what Ballmer did and did not.

Ballmer screamed about developers, developers, developers while steadily losing their love and mindshare by breaking their trust that time spent learning windows coding skills was economically valuable (particularly on GUI and front end tech). Satya is regaining that mindshare with open source initiatives, VS Code, proper management of C# and Typescript, and a cloud platform that is incredibly well suited to the needs of enterprise developers even if it's not as popular in the SF hacker community and here on HN. He's pivoted the perception of the company for the better among both investors and developers. Positive perceptions enabled Microsoft to generate significant wealth under Gates and Satya and negative perceptions prevented it under Ballmer. The stock market is by definition the best long term evaluator of a CEO and Ballmer was a dud bracketed by greats.

You need to provide some evidence of your positions otherwise I suggest it might just be more propagating narrative than anything reflecting what's really happening, which is again my overall point.

First off - opinions on HN don't matter at all.

Even the opinions of tech tastemakers often don't matter.

The vast majority of people in tech know nothing or care nothing of the personal disposition of Ballmer, Satya or Gates.

As you suggest 'perception matters' on some levels, but it's often not fundamental.

I'm doubtful at all that there was any material dissonance or embrace of MS technologies due to Ballmer v. Satya's approach.

Ballmer was by any reasonable measure, massively successful in growing MS developer mind share.

C# / .Net can only be described as a phenomenal success and this was mostly 'Ballmer era'.

Typescript, MS new daring web contribution was started under Ballmer, and it's also been important in terms of developing mind share.

MS VS Code was technically started under Ballmer, though it's possible he may have never supported it's release.

I think the failure of IE during the Ballmer era is a bad stain, but they were up against a good product as well (Chrome).

As for Satya - what products or initiatives has he launched that has improved MS position among developers? I think we can give him some credit for VS Code, what else?

Open Sourcing Chakra? That hasn't done much. Switching over to Edge/Chrome ... hasn't changed much.

Now let's consider the 'stock market attribution' issue.

" The stock market is by definition the best long term evaluator of a CEO "

So in early 2008, the majority of 'stock market' indicies would put most large bank CEO's in the 'good camp' but as it turns out they were completely wrong? Stock markets are often wrong.

What's at issue here is mostly market perceptions and macro fundamentals, not the assessment of CEOs.

In the early 2000's, P/E ratios in tech were not good, in 2009 obviously they crashed. Since then, we've seen increasing levels of liquidity from the Fed 'crazy market' valuations across the board. This has little to do with MS specifically.

Also in the 2000's MS had competitors in G and FB, investors were concerned about long term viability, keeping MSFT multiple specifically down a little. They thought Windows and Office were going to die. But this lack of foresight by analysts was wrong in retrospect wasn't it?

Windows is not dying.

Office is not dying esp. now that they are subscription + web.

The cloud is a big new business for MS, so are many of their other products.

In summary, almost everything Microsoft is today, is due to Gates and Ballmer. Were p/e ratios have been reasonable in perfect hindsight, the stock price would have reflected that and then some.

Satya has benefitted tremendously from the massive money making engine that Gates and Ballmer made, and it remains to be seen exactly what he will do that will make MS a fundamentally greater company.

I believe that Satya was the right choice for the right time, but that ultimately he will not be transformative on the level of either Gates or Ballmer. I don't think Satya is going to take MS into vast new lines of business, re-shaping what they are etc.. Instead - Satya will be guiding growth through a maturing of MS.

> very few companies have done that really well - i.e. gone from 15K -> 100K and maintained dynamism. Probably few if any.

A footnote: Amazon is approaching a 1,000,000 employees.

Amazon doesn't need a turnaround. Entire industries are afraid of its relentless march to perfect execution at the lowest possible price. It's only accelerating in new developments and innovation and is far from its peak.

> to perfect execution

Their retail business is pretty far from perfect. Just a few days ago I got my first obviously fake product that was "sold by Amazon".

They're simply ignoring massive rates of fraud in their store so they can profit from it, and have been for... what, over half of their existence, at this point? ("oh but we're trying, no really we are, but it's just soooooo hard" uh how about you shut off the features that enable massive amounts of fraud until you can fix it, then, and if you can't fix it I guess you'll have to leave them off? Oh, right, you're making mountains of money from it, I forgot)

I frankly can't believe the way the operate is anywhere near legal.

I'm talking about operating as a business. Nobody executes better than Amazon right now.

As for as the store experience, their selection, price, speed and convenience has led to their wild success. The fakes from 3rd-party sellers are not as big of a problem as HN makes it seem, and they could drop them overnight if they really wanted to in case any liability arises.

> Even with occasional 3rd-party product issues

The problem with Amazon is anything can be "3rd-party" and you'll never know until you have a problem with it. Maybe the fraudulent product was the result of a sketchy 3rd-party dealer but also I don't really care -- I bought it from "Amazon" and they sent me tainted inventory.

Target and Walmart are catching up with their online operations and at least with them I don't have to worry about being shipped fake products.

> "Target and Walmart are catching up"

Exactly. Amazon is still well in the lead. They have likely analyzed this entire problem with news and features scheduled over the next 2 years to resolve it as soon as their competitors gain any real ground.

That's still not anything close to "perfect execution".

You seem to be looking at this as a consumer who got a fake item (from a 3rd-party seller). Store experience is not the same as business execution.

The company is operating optimally, making the most revenue with the most growth while controlling costs and taking market share from all of its rivals. Nothing's perfect, but this is as close as you can get with a trillion dollar company that remains in the lead and is pulling even further ahead.

Truth

Amazon is VERY far from the stagnation that happened at Microsoft in the Ballmer era. In fact I'd say they are moving faster than ever. Why would you say they need a "turnaround"?

The website hasn´t changed and notably hasn´t improved in over a decade.

The customer feedback has gone from being the reference for buying products to only being able to trust the 1 star reviews.

It´s flooded with stuff relayed from China, and consequently its cheaper to just buy direct from China.

Here in the UK we have creepy corporate amazon stakhanovite "we just love pushing these parcels" ads to endure all christmas. Apparently one of the workers brings in cakes for her colleagues every Tuesday - oh, Amazon, the company that can´t even put food for its underpaid and overworked employees in the company break rooms.

What a wonderful world.

I don't want Amazon's website to change. It works well as it is, I certainly never find myself wanting something it doesn't currently do.

> It works well as it is

Search is horribly broken, sorting is broken, ratings are broken, products are broken up into categories that don't make sense and searching and sorting between categories is broken.

You just articulated basically every complaint I have about buying anything from Amazon. It seems unarguably true that I can’t buy anything from them if I can’t find it. So, why is it so hard to search for anything I don’t already know the exact name of?

> It seems unarguably true that I can’t buy anything from them if I can’t find it.

Most people are looking for the best value they can get at the lowest price they can find. Amazon's site makes that process difficult and nearly impossible. I can only speculate as to why that is.

So much of the result of a search is now explicitly advertising. Amazon now has a new incentive to sell ads and display those ads as often as possible, whereas before their only goal was to return relevant results to the customer making the search.

You can say the same about Google search, yet their organic results are still quite relevant. Isn’t Amazon supposed to be focusing on the customer?

That hasn't been my experience at all, but the further point is that is all background stuff. They can improve the search without changing the UI, so it's not really a response to my point.

It's very much a response to your point. From your original post:

> It works well as it is, I certainly never find myself wanting something it doesn't currently do.

You are talking about functionality, and I am responding about Amazon's functionality.

this is such a classless reply.

You don't get to tell me what my point was and you certainly don't get to argue with me about what my point is.

The person I responded to said the website hasn't changed. I read that as a redesign of the site itself.

Now, there's nothing wrong if you read it differently. Where you stepped over the line is when you decided to argue with me about what my point is.

> You don't get to tell me what my point was and you certainly don't get to argue with me about what my point is.

You said one thing, which I replied to, and now you're claiming it's another thing. I'm not really sure what you expect when you do that.

and this is how you get dismissed.

"Broken" is one-dimensional-black-and-white-thinking-speak for "works for most, most of the time, but has some behavior I don't like so it's 100% useless."

So you can't perfectly compare an item that is cross-listed in multiple categories. Is that "broken", or not ideal?

Even ratings, the worst thing about amazon, are "useful" in that you can instantly look at the distribution. All 5's and 1's? Product sucks.

> "Broken" is one-dimensional-black-and-white-thinking-speak for "works for most, most of the time, but has some behavior I don't like so it's 100% useless."

Please do not strawman my position just because you disagree with it. Sorting by price doesn't sort by price, sorting by average customer review doesn't sort by average customer review and so on.

> So you can't perfectly compare an item that is cross-listed in multiple categories. Is that "broken", or not ideal?

When the feature says "sort by price" and it doesn't sort by price, it is broken. I assume you work in software development, so you should know this.

> Even ratings, the worst thing about amazon, are "useful" in that you can instantly look at the distribution. All 5's and 1's? Product sucks.

This isn't even remotely true. I've come across hundreds of listings that have reviews for products that are clearly not the product in the listing. The fact that this is even allowed means that the rating system is broken.

Problems with Amazon's website:

- For a long time they performed poorly on Firefox. Opening multiple tabs would cause my PC to come to a crawl. They fixed this 1-2 years ago.

- I used to be able to jump directly to reviews. Now it's multiple clicks away. One click to get to the review section. Then scroll down. Then click again. This is very annoying.

- I don't get notified when someone replies to my review. The rest of the world solved this problem well over 15 years ago.

- Lumping of quite different products into one listing, so when I'm reading reviews I can't easily tell if I'm reading the review for the product I want.

- Way too many gamed reviews out there. Whole web sites exist to handle this problem that Amazon has.

- Same item has multiple listings. Why?

I could list all the other problems that their retail division has, but the above is just about the web site. Whenever I hear that they are Customer Obsessed, I wonder which world they live in. As someone who buys stuff from them, and as someone who has sold stuff through them, neither experience could be classified as caring much for the customer.

Their retail division really does remind me of MS Windows and its stagnation, where MS wouldn't improve anything because of their dominance.

Google's website hasn't changed either, and neither has HN. And that's a good thing. Nothing drives customers away faster than change for change's sake and constant pointless redesigns.

Google’s homepage has changed but very slightly. For instance voice input options, removing ‘I’m feeling lucky’ and the addition of profiles/account info. But it’s a pretty minimalist page, and big redesign is usually a bad idea since they are liable to piss off your most loyal and dedicated customers/users/subscribers.

Except the search page has changed, just well.

Within the last few years they moved the footer to stick to the bottom of the page and made the buttons flatter.

https://web.archive.org/web/*/google.com

Google does this constantly with Gmail, calendar, Android, and so on.

I think Amazon as a store is probably being deprioritized in favor of Amazon as a giant e-commerce facilitator that handles all the payment processing and backend logistics.

The consequence has been ruining the storefront experience, but that’s not really what they care about anymore.

That’s because Amazon knows retail is already dead. Either they get beat out by a competitor or the fed breaks up the company and retail is doomed without the integration. AWS is just quietly milking the cash out of retail and funding the science projects.

This is a preposterous statement.

"Retail is already dead?"

By what metric. Please enlighten us how people buying things is not a massive lever to the economy and Amazon's success?

Retail is far from dead with just about every retailer reporting record sales and consumer confidence remaining high. Amazon has plenty marketshare to take, whether as a monolithic organization or several independent companies.

Retail as a business is fine.

Amazon's retail may be slowly dying, overcome with fakes, razor-thin margins, dwindling faith of buyers, and a looming anti-trust investigation. The retail department is at some risk of downsizing back to mostly books.

It would be wise for them to concentrate on stuff that goes well: AWS, Alexa.

Downsizing back to books? That goes against every available metric.

Amazon retail is growing like crazy. They have more retail channels opening up beyond the main ecommerce store and they're investing 1.5B for 1-day delivery (while trivially putting Fedex on death watch as a side effect). The only serious competition they have is Walmart which has hit on groceries as a magic bullet, and Target.

Fakes are not as big of a problem as HN makes it seem. Margins only help Amazon beat its competitors. And there's nothing antitrust can do since there's no monopoly on retail outlets, people want to shop there by choice.

> Using Jeff’s words: We are well into Day 2.

Where did Jeff Bezos say this?

Jeff didn't say Amazon is at Day 2, but he did outline what that would look like: https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/2016-letter-to-sha...

Employees frequently use that framework to discuss how they think Amazon (or the org they work in) is truly done for.

> Satya managed an incredible cultural and business turnaround of Microsoft after it stagnated.

Is Amazon really stagnating? They still seem to be making a ton of moves from my casual observation.

Prime, Prime Now, Prime video with exclusive content, Audible, Amazon Go, Kindle, Amazon Lockers, 1 day shipping, Whole Foods, their own delivery services, supposedly drone delivery, market leading Cloud services, etc.

My husband and I invested north of $200K in Amazon back in 2014. Their stock alone has performed tremendously for me.

I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I haven’t cashed out. I’m betting on Papa Bezos for the long term.

One thing I respect about Amazon is how they figure out stuff that isn’t working and kill it. Amazon Restaurants is now gone.

I work at another big tech company - I’m in Kirkland ;) My employer pays me better than Amazon pays for a similar role, so I get best of both worlds...

I do have friends at Amazon as well.