Comment by commandar
2 years ago
>Steve Balmer of Google
I've been making this exact comparison for years at this point.
Both inherited companies with market dominant core products in near monopoly positions. They both kept the lights on, but the companies under them repeatedly fail the break into new markets and suffer from a near total lack of coherent vision and perverse internal incentives that contribute to the failure of new products. And after a while, the quality of that core product starts to stumble as well.
The fact that we've seen this show before makes it all the more baffling to me that investors are happy about it. Especially when in the same timeframe we've seen Satya Nadella completely transform Microsoft and deliver relatively meteoric performance.
Balmer made Microsoft the most profitable it had ever been. He didn't grow them into big new areas, but he improved the focus, trimmed the costs, and vastly improved the bottom line. A successful company may need vision and expansion, but at some point it also needs to be able to actually convert that into profit, otherwise you turn into Sun - or indeed recent Google, who've come out with some great products but never managed to convert any of them into profit centers.
The dude shipped Windows 8! He insisted on this insane mishmash of tablet and windows that made sense to nobody. Somehow they shipped this, which tells me the emperor wears no clothes.
I completely agree with Satya Nadella, I haven't seen a turnaround since Steve Jobs came back to Apple. He took a company that couldn't seem to get out of its way and turned it into an innovative, exciting, and insanely profitable company.
He's also totally transformed the public image of Microsoft, from ruthless monopolist to one of the least evil, most open giant tech companies. With actions, not words.
It's not all perfect and wonderful, but they're miles away from the Gates/Ballmer era, it's remarkable.
Are you all on drugs? This is the company that published a poll speculating on the death of a missing woman. The one that asks you to explain yourself when you try to close OneDrive, and ignores/resets your browser preferences while also forcefully installing crapware like the Bing bar. They're the ones about to create a mountain of ewaste by making Win11 unusable on older hardware. They're also the ones fighting government (and winning) in order to consolidate the game industry to further reduce competition and hurt consumers. I could keep going, but it's a very long list.
There seems to be some small pocket of tech people who are permanently enthralled by this organization. Does Nadella have is own reality distortion field? If so it must be pretty damn strong in order to pierce the smell of dog shit surrounding his employer.