Ballmer's chief mistake was sticking to what worked in the past. He was not willing to let go of the Windows monopoly, and Azure in its early days was based on Windows servers. Then Satya came in and said, no it is OK to support Linux, and in fact it is OK to run Microsoft's own services on Linux. It is OK to support Open Source, and in fact we'll open source some of our stuff. That put Microsoft back on track. For now.
Satya's mistake though is that he has filled Microsoft with average people. The best fresh graduates from the top colleges went to Google and Facebook in the last decade -- because they paid significantly more -- and Microsoft picked up the rest. What is the impact of that? Microsoft's execution ability is lower, and we'll see the impact of that in the coming years.
Another of Satya's mistakes is his faux pas related to women employees. He was accused -- unfairly in my opinion -- of saying women employees should not ask for a raise. He did no such thing. He said employees should not ask for a raise (not women employees specifically) and instead should rely on the system to give you the appropriate raise at the appropriate time. But since he said that at a women's conference the accusation stood that he meant women employees specifically. Satya has had to fight against this accusation and he has done so by establishing a quota system for promoting women employees. Executive compensation at all levels at Microsoft is directly tied to promotion of women employees, and as a result, a lot of women now occupy positions they would not otherwise. Again, the impact is decreased ability to execute.
Microsoft today is the second most valuable company behind Nvidia. But you wouldn't know that looking at their products. They don't have any interesting new products. To some extend they are coasting. Will their success continue into the next decade? It's going to be interesting to watch.
Google has largely stagnated with products that they largely already had before Satya Nadella took over. Facebook was kind of at its peak then and they had bought Whatsapp and added Instagram to their portfolio. But since then, Meta has had a few duds as well and it seems a bit lackluster lately. Messenger launched and imploded. Then VR. And now they are messing up with AI.
The point is, if Google and Meta got the best people, what the hell did they do in the last ten years? I think they mostly got more people and less ability to do anything very well. It hasn't worked out that great for them. Neither of them has much to show for their efforts. Google bootstrapped AI and then had their people walk off to form OpenAI who are (for now) best buddies with MS. Facebook/Meta keeps changing their mind about what they are about. Social media, VR, and now AI. But it seems they end up chasing their tail every time.
MS actually got better over the last ten years. They too had a few nice acquisitions. But more importantly, they revitalized what was a pretty dead development strategy. Github was critical. The attitude towards Linux and the complete 180 on open source in general was critical. MS did quite a few things right under Nadella.
Reminds me of Bell Labs. The director was once interviewed asking "how do you manage a bunch of geniuses" and he answered "you don't." (I'm sure this wasn't the exact phrasing but the sentiment is right)
Edit: Appears my memory is better than I thought[0]
I think the point here is that there is nothing to back up the dubious claim that MS recruits were inferior; your observation essentially reinforces that point.
I've heard the claim so many times, and pay (that I was good enough to achieve) at MS was lower than salaries for FB and Google posted on Blind, but who knows how real those were. I never bothered to look into it myself. Honestly I was just kind of a Microsoft fanboy at the time, haha.
A lot of these companies self select for obedient, conflict avoiding employees that agree with everything that comes from above. That's great if you are executing a fixed plan. But, you need a certain amount of status quo challenging types to actually innovate when the plan needs to change. Google and Meta are clearly struggling on that front. They've hired the ability to innovate out of their leadership and company.
Just my impression; but kind of backed up by what's (not) happening at Google.
MS somehow found a way back from that to where they were doing different enough things to grow their business quite dramatically under Nadella. Google is in need of a similar change.
I would not say it was 180 turn on open source, more like 160 or 170 ;).
Just enough so they can steer people into using Azure but not so much to still have Visual Studio leads throwing wrenches into open source source wheels to stay relevant.
I'd call it more like a 330. MS is running GitHub - well OK, never liked that one. It's a pretty lame source hosting platform and way too centralized. MS is doing some half open source bullshit like VS Code and open source glue software that only runs on Windows (who are they kidding?). I wouldn't trust open source .net stuff to stay that way forever, especially if it had any success. There is some smaller stuff like cross-platform PowerShell and mimalloc that seems OK.
> if Google and Meta got the best people, what the hell did they do in the last ten years?
Invented the Transformer, Gemini, TPUs, monetized YT effectively, transitioned to mobile successfully, established GMaps as a foundation of internet etc.,
Google has a dozen services with > 1 billion users a month. Google in 2010 had only one
I agree with this, I've been less and less happy with Windows since Windows 7 for the most part. I don't want telemetry, ads, and certainly not react native start menus. I just want an OS that works well.
> if Google and Meta got the best people, what the hell did they do in the last ten years?
Honestly, what have any of them done in the last 20 years? Forget AI for a minute[0]. A lot of stuff happened in the early 2000's but what since? I have a hard time thinking of anything post 2007 (iPhone). But what has been done since then other than some grifts? We made VR billionaires. We made bitcoin billionaires. We've now made AI billionaires. We've turned everything into a subscription, made everything a dark pattern, and everyone is just complaining how everything is broken.
Sure, these companies have made lots of money, but what have they done?
I actually do believe these companies have "the best people." I'm pretty sure they're just paid a lot less and having a difficult time advancing to staff engineer. Promoting people who are good at politics and being a yesman rather than a "does-good-work-man". For all our leetcoding, our "just make it work" mentality, and "we're going to do 10 interviews and take 3 months so that we can ensure we get the best people" I'm pretty sure we've done a really terrible job at it all. Maybe they are getting the best people, but then just putting them in handcuffs until they give up. Or maybe it's just all politics and no one actually cares about building a god damn product, and no, the stock does not count as a product and it is embarrassing that I even have to clarify this.
[0] While impressive it is still out if this will be profitable and if it'll be positive. It's unclear yet, unlike the other things. Read the rest of what I wrote...
>> no one actually cares about building a god damn product
From my experience, that's true for over 90% of the headcount. Everyone talks about quality, about care for customers but rarely that is more than marketing bulshit.
As well as how smart they are and how they're the best. But then they can't be bothered to fix little issues because they question what's "the value".
It all reminds me of that scene from Silicon Valley where Barker explains up Richard that when you have the best marketing team you need to give them easier things to sell[0].
> Everyone talks about quality
I think my favorite is how everyone talks about simplicity and then introduces tons of complexity through over simplification while rejecting simplicity by calling it complexity. Not realizing there's a big difference in scope and that they could do a lot less work later by doing just a little more now
>The best fresh graduates from the top colleges went to Google and Facebook in the last decade -- because they paid significantly more -- and Microsoft picked up the rest.
That seems shaky as a justification. I don’t have any data behind it, but in a world of eight billion people, it’s a hard sell that there’s only enough top talent for 3 companies.
Plus, feel free to correct me but I don’t feel Meta has brought anything technically brilliant to the table lately. Google might be a better sell with alphafold and some other projects but none of it seems mainstream tech either.
Maybe pixels if you want to stretch it, but search, maps, Gmail, YouTube, android, and even photos were there a decade ago already.
Small startups will always excel in talent density because of the increase risk (and reward) and alignment along equity, but all of the large companies have enough technically brilliant people. Many in their 30s or 40s want to do excellent work and also have stability to provide for their families. Whether management gets out of their way is another question.
A few projects just in ML: DeepMind has plenty enough for Google alone but Jax and the TPU project are technically ambitious and very strategically important for Google; they hired Adam Paszke away from Meta. Besides Gemini they have Gemma and Veo and they have a reputation in the industry of having extremely high MFU averages. From Facebook there's PyTorch but that's a whole cluster of projects (compiler, abstractions for many accelerators, torchao, torchtitan). They're also famous for DINO and SAM models, as well as many others by FAIR (e.g. Mask R-CNN).
It's worth noting that many of those projects were the famous versions of papers, ones that were successful through scale rather than through innovation. I'll give a good example, here's essentially the same architecture as the 16x16 words ViT paper but a year earlier[0]. It's not even the first, they even mention two other works that used transformers on images. I'm all for scaling and it is important, but there's tons of papers like this that are greatly overshadowed because someone just scaled up and got a better benchmark. It's been getting out of hand...
>Small startups will always excel in talent density because of the increase risk (and reward) and alignment along equity, but all of the large companies have enough technically brilliant people. Many in their 30s or 40s want to do excellent work and also have stability to provide for their families. Whether management gets out of their way is another question.
You mean small startups founded by experienced engineers?
You often don’t see what Google and Meta bring to the table because they aren’t trying to sell you products, they’re trying to glue your eyeballs to your screen and they’ve done extremely well at that.
Have they? Meta's main product, Facebook, seems to be much less dominant than it was a decade ago.
I, in particular, used to use Facebook, Instagram, Google Search, and Gmail a decade ago. Now I don't, because the products have become unbearably worse.
We probably can't even name all their products. I doubt even anyone at these companies, even the CEOs can name all their products.
One conspiracy theory I've heard is that because they were making so much money, they hired or at least recruited enough people so they would not have any serious competition.
Also, a lot of things that look straightforward is probably a lot of work internally. For example, renaming Facebook to meta was likely not a simple one point story, right?
I always hear bad things about its standings in the frontier model rankings, although I don't follow that close enough to know if that's real or not. What's cool about Llama?
Basically after years of raising money as a non-profit & training on everyone's data, "Open"AI rug-pulled the world and decided to keep their secret models secret to become a for-profit venture.
I was pissed. Then Meta came out of nowhere to release Llama, a model with performance comparable to ChatGPT. I was able to download it & run it for free on my computer. Thank you Zucc, very cool.
I hear you, I might give people the benefit of the doubt too much, but I interpreted what he said more like while Facebook and Google were going out of their way to make sure they hired only the best, hiring was just not a point of emphasis for Microsoft and as a result it didn’t hire as many good people
I think that point is fair - at the very least, Microsoft wasn’t in the conversation as far as where the typical CS grad wanted to work - FANG doesn’t even include Microsoft in the acronym (I kid, I realize this doesn’t actually mean anything)
> Plus, feel free to correct me but I don’t feel Meta has brought anything technically brilliant to the table lately
PyTorch?
> Maybe pixels if you want to stretch it, but search, maps, Gmail, YouTube, android, and even photos were there a decade ago already.
I don't disagree really, in the end all three suck: G, MS, FB. Google did in fact hire all the top talent but only to make sure they don't work on something good for someone else.
Azure began adopting and offering Linux while Ballmer was CEO.
Microsoft already began the process of open sourcing stuff while Ballmer was CEO. Eg. What would become DotNet Core.
There are a number of other errors in your points. Some public, some not. I encourage you to re-examine what you think to be true.
Look, I agree it was time for Ballmer to retire and I’m glad Satya is CEO, but while he made some miscalculations, he wasn’t the zero some try to make him to be.
Satya has a charismatic nature in addition to his other skills. People who criticize him feel compelled to apologize for it.
Microsoft people always liked to tell the story about Ballmer losing his shit with people dealing with him using iPhones. The dude lacked public charisma and his belief in his company played like a NIH syndrome gone wild. But he was hella smart and his push for things like EAs and software assurance paved the way for the modern Microsoft cash cows.
Once a company are over a certain size its ability to execute is throttled by business process, not individual's abilities. Individuals are kept from making an impact as they don't want that, they want predictable, replaceable cogs in the machine. Google and Meta suffer the same problem but, as businesses, they are slightly more nimble as they 3x smaller, but that has 0 to do with their hiring/promotion practices.
I was hired as employee 500 and now we are at 5000 (numbers rounded to protect the innocent)
It’s really really interesting what happens - obviously 5000 doesn’t compare to the behemoth that Microsoft is, but it’s still been interesting to see
It really is a confluence of factors that slows things down and I don’t think it’s as simple as saying business process
Some off the top of my head observations:
You have to try really hard to not settle on hires - the more you grow, the bigger the pile of work and you just want help - to the point where you might hire someone who’s good enough vs holding out for someone exceptional
It’s one thing for 100 people to be throwing money at problems in terms of tooling and outside contractors, once you’re big buying things is way more scrutinized - this is good because you don’t waste money on stupid tools, bad because it slows down buying of non stupid tools that you actually need
Things that didn’t matter before start to matter - security things, legal things, privacy things - these activities take time and also slow things down
Some work just doesn’t scale well - where in the past you could get away with throwing cheap manual labor at the problem, at some point you have to build automation to take care of - this speed things up in the long run, but usually you hit a wall first - as in things get so big they get slow - before you finally build the tools. Knowing which tools are worth building ahead of time is really hard
Related to the above - where in the past it made sense to buy a lot saas apps to run your business, these tend to be expensive so you start building your own
That’s just off the top of my head and nothing scientific. Also, I didn’t mention it specifically but of course you still have your run of the mill bureaucracy that slows things down
> Also, I didn’t mention it specifically but of course you still have your run of the mill bureaucracy that slows things down
Parallel friction: the more peers your work impacts, the more peers their are that can gatekeeper your work, for good and ill.
Grows roughly: log P, where P is impacted peers.
Serial friction: the more significant a change, the more management layers decision making has to pass up through, and every layer already has enough to do without considering significant changes. Can be very hard for a great idea to actually make it to someone who can say "yes", and for them to have the time.
Grows roughly: S^2, IMHO, where S is layers of "too busy" management to be traversed to a potential "yes".
That's the natural default. Some large organizations fight hard to keep the friction down, but it's going to be a fight.
After many years of nimble progress, a company I worked with went through a phase transition, and I spent as many years and more, slowly sinking into quicksand. Before giving up on my own project and moving on.
IMO you just can’t have one unit in the business be subservient to the other
People should be able to deploy changes without seeking approval/permission from other people/teams as long as they are around to immediately fix something if it breaks
This of course only works provided you’re staying in your lane and only updating systems you own/maintain and systems in close proximity
I think you can actually do a lot with average people, if you have sufficient structure, process, guard rails, documentation, training and reviews. And big companies have a lot of this, specifically put in place to harvest above-average work from average talent. Yes, a company full of John Carmacks, un-shackled by process, can probably run circles around an average tech giant, but who can actually find and hire all these John Carmacks?
I think a company of Carmacks would probably be a mess; maybe resembling Xerox PARC, in that they came up with many interesting ideas, but rarely if ever actually created a profitable suite of products.
> I think you can actually do a lot with average people, if you have...
This is an important perception. Possibly due to general (and HN) bias towards talent and hero worship, this reality is overlooked at times. But at scale in a normal distribution, not all people will be within some stringent bounds of sigma. And companies once they become big will have some 'business to run'. Of course, on small scale I have seen a few skunkworks projects and have seen them work well.
I’ve worked through all 3 CEO eras of Microsoft. Satya’s biggest mistake will be breaking the internal culture that made Microsoft what it is, for better and worse. Classic “be careful what you wish for” or perhaps law of unintended consequences, imo.
And yes, part of that involves the way they’ve changed the hiring and retention objectives.
I'm curious to hear more about your take on why the culture change could be a mistake. From speaking to a couple of long-timers at Microsoft, while they didn't seem to have complaints under Ballmer, they did seem to welcome some aspects of Satya's culture change, specifically how it had become much more collaborative internally. To me, that seemed like a fix for the internal dynamics at MSFT depicted in that popular comic about Big Tech org-charts: https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts
I thought there was grumbling about Ballmer adopting GE’s stack ranking employee evaluation system where every team has to grade at least some people as below par. So that led to weird incentives like not collaborating across teams, sabotage, etc.
I don't know, anecdotally I never heard MSFT employees grumbling about stack ranking. The lack of internal collaboration seemed to be more top-down, stemming from powerful execs expanding and protecting their fiefdoms.
Compare that to, say, Amazon, where stack-ranking seems to be an unofficial yet actively enforced policy. I've worked and talked with a huge number of ex-Amazon people and each and every one of them had myriad horror stories about the dysfunctional corporate culture. On the other hand, MSFT employees seemed to have much more balanced experiences.
Somehow I've always been in the MS ecosystem for work. I wouldn't call their MS365 strategy "coasting". MS365 is incredible value for money, and there is an element of looking outside and incorporating it (just copy Slack with Teams for example), it does all work quite well. I join MS365 regularly as a 100% Linux person and for example PowerPoint went from being unusable to pretty good in the FireFox over a period of a year or so. I can live in the ecosystem in the browser as long as I do office/consulting work, obviously I'd hate it if would force me to Windows. I just installed a Windows 11 PC for my neighbor, what a s*show. I think I clicked "pass" on 100 options and offers, I asked some to my neighbor, she said: "Please, you decide I don't know what any of this means". Compare that to Ubuntu, which just works after you give it your name, and stays out of your way. I'm converting their old desktop to Ubuntu this week now that it's e-waste to MS.
> let go of the Windows monopoly, and Azure in its early days was based on Windows servers. Then Satya came in and said, no it is OK to support Linux, and in fact it is OK to run Microsoft's own services on Linux. It is OK to support Open Source, and in fact we'll open source some of our stuff. That put Microsoft back on track
Not to be over cynical, I'm happy when big corps give away stuff for free, but has this made them any money?
They seem to have lost all their moats. LibreOffice is on par with MS's offering (which hasn't really done anything interesting in decades). Windows is semi abandoned and bloated adware. The unified OS ecosystem between desktop console and mobile is pretty much dead. The MS "ecosystem" is a half hearted afterthought at this point
Sure, Azure happened to boom in the meantime, but that seems coincidental and not a product of them giving everything away. It's also a lot less of a moat. Cloud is becoming commodity over time.
MS is now Azure with a bunch of atrophying vestigial bits hanging off the side.
Not suprising. One of the greatest programmers I ever knew eventually got hired by Microsoft. He worked as hard as one can work, only for his whole team to quit one by one due to the workload pushed on him by a boss seeking KPIs. The boss did so because it was the only way to get promoted. After all the coders on the team including my friend being the last, eventually quit, the boss ended up leaving after not being promoted / being unhappy a couple years later. Non of those coders will ever want to return.
Such terrible loss for the company, that deserves no better due its handling of them, with as usual a complete lack of oversight of its middle managers.
But Microsoft was never known for carefully curation of talent or breaking technologies, from its roots it was a , take what it can, hold on it, sue the rest. From the earliest days of DOS to the later years of ignoring the iphone, to the careful privacy invading code even from the 90s.
I am greatful for all they have done, and some thin skinned managers may read this and be upset, but this is just feedback, which can help improve the company.
I work with customer facing and adjacent Microsoft people regularly. I’d say in my observation they recruit well. The problem is that the culture is a toxic waste dump.
If I write down the 10-12 best MS people I’ve worked with in those forward facing roles… I’d say 80% of them have been laid off at random or due to internal politics. Standing out there is bad for your health. As a customer, I’m aware of their politics — bad sign.
We dearly miss Steve Balmer among those of us that still care about Windows desktop development tooling.
Satya would kill Windows if he could, and replace everything with Azure OS thin clients.
Likewise XBox woes with console, is due to similar approach, he only cares about XBox as games publisher umbrella brand for all Microsoft Games Studios subdivisions.
Not sure if your message is tongue-in-cheek, but Windows desktop dev work is gone. If you wish MSFT would go back to that and give up Azure then you wish Microsoft would be less than half the size it is today... (and still no-one would use those Windows desktop dev tools)
I know it is a mess, yet looking at the competition, one doesn't need to give up native platforms in the name of cloud.
Android and iOS/macOS are what Longhorn never managed to be (granted still under Balmer), and SwiftUI/Jetpack Compose have managed to be something useful in half the time Project Reunion has been going with a joke in resourcing.
>The best fresh graduates from the top colleges went to Google and Facebook in the last decade -- because they paid significantly more -- and Microsoft picked up the rest.
1. The best new grads are absolutely not going to Google or Meta. There are many far sexier companies. As a CS grad, landing in big tech is mostly regarded as having settled for mediocrity.
2. Microsoft's compensation for early career is competitive with Google and Meta (at least for the first couple of years; Meta will grow your level faster and Google gives better annual RSU refreshers, but many people don't know this and go by the offer's face value). I don't think there's much of a difference in the talent that they can pick up.
Microsoft also aggressively sops up the best talent in Tier 2 geos -- it's unlikely that the best devs in the Bay Area work at Microsoft but some of the best devs in Vancouver or Atlanta probably work at Microsoft.
>Microsoft's compensation for early career is competitive with Google and Meta (at least for the first couple of years; Meta will grow your level faster and Google gives better annual RSU refreshers
It's not. Microsoft's stock grants are a joke. I left Microsoft after 8 years with ~36k in unvested stock (vesting over 4-5 years) and a title of Senior (L63). Both Google and Meta offered me a downlevel (L4) for a 40% increase in total comp and with annual stock refreshers significantly larger than 5 years worth of stock grants at MSFT.
Microsoft starts to become competitive around Principal/Staff, sort of, but from a compensation perspective working at them at a junior/midlevel/senior level is a huge mistake.
Yes but as I said, that's mainly because Microsoft doesn't give good refreshers. For a new grad, a Microsoft L60 and Google L3 offer should have similar "TC".
I would say though that you’re both correct. Satya came in 2014 and during the last 11 years I would say that the majority of that is as the GP described.
I’m not sure when what you are describing became the outside perspective, but I suspect somewhere around 2019-2022, when Google lost a very large amount of its shine as the former Oracle Execs started to take over fully.
And the Satya revisionist history on his quote is absurd since it’s well documented. He didn’t just say it at a women’s conference. He was asked “For women who aren’t comfortable asking for a raise, what’s your advice for them?”. And part of response included “That might be one of the initial ‘super powers’ that, quite frankly, women don’t ask for a raise have. It’s good karma. It will come back.”
He has since sufficiently walked this back, so it’s odd the need to lie about what he said.
Attitude to Linux and open source was not really a problem for Ballmer IMO. Microsoft had vast revenues locked in to their software in PC and business servers. In the regulatory environment in which they were permitted to operate, it made a lot of sense to try to keep competitors out. A cohort of geeks hated Microsoft's attitude, but I'd be surprised if it did much to their bottom line. But Linux and OSS are just a tools, easily adopted when the winds change.
Microsoft under Ballmer completely missed the boat on a bunch of things which should have been pretty close to Microsoft's wheelhouse -- search, social media, mobile/smartphone, and cloud, to name some of the big ones (each one of these spawned a big 10 corporation). It's not that they should be expected to cover all these things or that no other tech company should have become successful, it's just that they had little response to any big developments in the industry for many years.
I think it's less that he wasn't willing to let go of Windows, more that the myopic focus on it blinded them to other issues, or deluded them into believing they could continue using Windows to gatekeep and buy or crush competition. They missed the boat on the internet before Ballmer too, but eventually managed to use the money and power that Windows provided them to grind down the competition.
"a lot of women now occupy positions they would not otherwise. Again, the impact is decreased ability to execute."
This is not necessarily causation. People still make the decisions, and it can free them to make better choices that are hard to otherwise support. Every system will be gamed, sometimes to the benefit of something unexpected.
>Satya's mistake though is that he has filled Microsoft with average people. The best fresh graduates from the top colleges went to Google and Facebook in the last decade -- because they paid significantly more -- and Microsoft picked up the rest. What is the impact of that? Microsoft's execution ability is lower, and we'll see the impact of that in the coming years.
How do you know it (that top ppl didnt go there) and why it didn't materialize after a decade?
LLMs and whatever succeeds them are going to change how we interact with information in a big way. Microsoft has so far mostly stayed out of that race and that’ll be a huge issue that compounds over time. What they do have though is access to power and pretty significant data centre presence. I definitely wouldn’t write them off but it’s not looking good over the long term.
> he has filled Microsoft with average people. The best fresh graduates from the top colleges went to Google and Facebook in the last decade
Is there a way to demonstrate that this actually mattered? That paying more did get them “better” talent that actually made a difference?
Ie. not any self serving “they did because they’re better and they’re better because they were paid more.”
Look at AI. Microsoft was an early leader in AI but that was only because of their investment in OpenAI. What has Microsoft done in AI since then? Is anyone excited about Copilot? Look at what Google has done since then. Lots of interesting stuff. Only recently has Microsoft released something interesting: Mustafa Suleyman released the company’s first model trained internally from start to finish [1].
I was never a fan of Windows, being a Mac guy. However Word used to be good. After a long avoidance I had to use it for work.
Teams Word, online Word, Word.app Word. It is a complete cluster fuck and formatting etc is a shambles across versions. The ecosystem within MS products is a dumpster fire. And yet is the state of the art.
The Office suite is one of their key products, and it’s awful.
God the inability of Sharepoint Online to show all sites, but only “Recent sites” is infuriating. You create a site and wait an hour to show up in the sidebar. Or the slew of bugs across Office UX.
At least Google feels like a designer looked at it after things have gone live.
I have been both impressed and kind of disappointed in Satya's role. He made some hard and direct changes initially that has allowed them to coast very comfortably, but we have also seen Microsoft become very tame in some areas. I was optimistic at first, especially because he was willing to make the hard choices like binning Windows mobile even with all the potential it had.
Cloud is just being the cloud, the AI stuff they are excited on but maybe at the detriment of everything else, Xbox is dying a slow sad death as they are directionless and Windows is just a dump truck for all the more questionable business decisions possible.
Managers and above know this. In order for execs to get their bonus they have to meet diversity goals. So execs have promoted women to positions they would not ordinarily be promoted, in order to get their bonuses. This started many years ago, and continue to this day.
> He said employees should not ask for a raise (not women employees specifically) and instead should rely on the system to give you the appropriate raise at the appropriate time.
Sorry but he surely got burned because this completely ignores systemic advantages given to men. If everyone quietly relies on the system then women will be disadvantaged. I know that's not a popular thing to say around here but it's been shown time and again and the women at that conference all knew it too.
> Satya has had to fight against this accusation and he has done so by establishing a quota system for promoting women employees...
That's great and everything but did he actually own the error or recognise the problem with what he said? Volunteer for bias training or anything that would actually help the issue at the core rather than putting bandaids over the wounds?
I think Microsoft actually just hired experienced H1Bs instead of new college grads. And they have such a moat with their corporate customers using excel, outlook, etc that execution doesnt matter as much for them.
Nonsense. None of the top companies are H1B abusers. Meta, Google, Microsoft are all using H1Bs for the intended purpose. The abusers are companies not in tech industry like Disney etc. who bring in H1Bs to decrease their payroll expense. Top tech companies don't do that.
Disney might not care about appearances, and the HQs might be flagrantly flouting the rules, but what of the hundred subsidiaries and shadow corps that are their hands and feet? They don't need to court those hires.
An acquaintance is an H1B at an Alphabet (owned) corp, hired to work a position that anyone with an Industrial Engineering BS could. And he only found out who owned his employer after an inspection by HQ prior to the scale up for Bard.
I'm happy he got the opportunity, and it enabled his family to marry him and for his new wife to come to the US and start a teaching position at a university, but his role could have been filled by a local grad... if they could have been convinced to accept his salary.
There are a ton of highly qualified American citizens that are not able to find work, or are underemployed. The layoffs of the past few years have made it very clear that there is an abundance of local talent, and big tech hiring from outside is not about a lack of labor supply
I'm a Ballmer truther. He was completely right about many things including his vision for AI. I know that being early is often the same as being wrong but I don't think his big strategic moves as CEO were incorrect. Microsoft during his era was more marked by an inability to execute on those strategies.
I wonder if this is another one of those "two sides of the same coins" situations: on the one hand I agree that Ballmer was too weirdly competitive, e.g. with Linux/etc., plus the cringey takes on the iPhone, Google, etc.
On the other hand Microsoft had a fire and passion that I don't really see anymore. I miss Developers, Developers, Developers. Now it's just ads, AI, blah.
> on the one hand I agree that Ballmer was too weirdly competitive
He was really the epitome of that, and that was the MO of Microsoft at the time. I always thought of him as the embodiment of that, the pinnacle, the ne plus ultra.
Thinking about this some more -- in the interview, he seemed to have a feeling of Microsoft "struggling for survival" well past the timeframe when that was actually a reality
What was his vision for AI, and how could it be relevant? He was gone before the current wave hit.
Going on TV and laughing at the iPhone pretty much told me everything I needed to know about Ballmer. The best thing I can say about him is that unlike Nadella, he didn't spend too much of his time actively trying to enshittify Windows.
> Microsoft is directly tied to promotion of women employees, and as a result, a lot of women now occupy positions they would not otherwise. Again, the impact is decreased ability to execute.
I mean are you saying women are worse leaders? Because it seems to me microsoft is harnessing the limitless potential of gender diversity. With a gender-diverse staff they will be able to crush their peers by streamlining against horrible things such as toxic masculinity where the bourgeois men keep down honest and hardworking proleteriat women
How I interpreted it is that where there's a limited pool of women and promotion of women is encouraged, eventually you'll have some women who have worse leadership qualities than their male counterparts getting promoted over them.
Works both ways btw, if promotion of men is encouraged, you eventually have men of worse leadership qualities than fellow female colleagues promoted over them.
1. there's a significant population of men in tech who make the environment actively hostile for women,
2. women know about this,
3. many women do not want to work in environments actively hostile to them, and
4. women who choose to work at them underperform because dealing with hostility directed at you does take a cognitive toll
(I am only responding to this very weird straw man: "With a gender-diverse staff they will be able to crush their peers by streamlining against horrible things such as toxic masculinity where the bourgeois men keep down honest and hardworking proleteriat women")
You know, Steve Ballmer is always fun and interesting to listen to.
Meanwhile you have Satya Nadella. This very sanitized, boring, fake, borderline manufactured personality. I can't imagine sitting through a 3hr interview/podcast with him as a guest. I had no problem listening to this one though.
I agree with you that Satya typically has a flat, measured style that comes across dry and he also stage manages himself rigorously. But it's also worth mentioning that being the CEO of a massive, high-profile public company puts him under different expectations and constraints than a long retired CEO. Nadella is still spokesperson #1 for the company, products and stock.
That said, I'm not sure we'd see a dramatically more forthright and unfiltered Satya when he's ten years out of MSFT. I think much of Satya's style is simply the way he is all the time.
Generally agree but if you look at the body language and how engaged Steve is vs. what you generally see from Satya, there is a massive difference and Satya being #1 spokesperson for the company doesn't explain it in my opinion.
Matter of fact, I'd even argue that being #1 spokesperson and giving this low energy vibe is kind of bad for how the company is seen by the public. I'd rather have the "developers developers developers" CEO over whatever Satya is.
At my current (non-tech) company, someone in our C-suite has a very similarly controlled, low energy, slightly stilted vibe. If you get to know him, he's a ME with fantastic technical chops. He was pushed into a management role and simply isn't comfortable speaking in public. Of course he's had presentation training and speech coaching, but that just adds to the highly controlled, low energy vibe.
I'm told that when I give talks it sounds like a lecture from a college professor. That's ... probably a compliment, because I thought my public speaking skills were even worse than that.
Point is, I think part of the explanation is Satya coming from a technical background and still being uncomfortable and coming across as slightly forced as a result. Ballmer was a marketer first, an extroverted businessman, and quite comfortable on stage.
> I'd rather have the "developers developers developers" CEO over whatever Satya is.
I was fairly impressed with Satya in his first few years as CEO, mostly due to his embracing hard but necessary strategic changes that had been put off too long. However, the last few years I feel like he's really stalled out. To be clear, I'm not assessing based on the current revenue or stock price which can lag by five or more years but on doing the right things strategically, technically and on product vision. It's unclear the mind-boggling mountains of cash poured on AI (mostly OpenAI) in order to play catch-up are going to pay off in sufficiently high-margin revenue in a Wall Street-relevant time frame.
And big chunks of the mountains of cash dumped into rolling up large gaming franchises at peak post-Covid game bubble valuations are already being written off.
I would rather have Satya with his sedated stage acts than Ballmer with his stack ranking and dancing like a baboon. Ballmer was truly poisonous (not to mention a huge idiot. Spending tens of billions on acquisitions which were written off)
I think another point is that there's a huge difference between a founder-CEO (or near founder like Ballmer) and a manager/employee-CEO. The former has nothing to prove and can speak their mind, for better or worse, and the latter has to tow the company line.
I found the episode very enlightening, and learned a lot as well as unlearned a few things that I thought I had known.
I never realized how much of azure was him early on.'
I didn't realize the tension between him and Bill, always assumed those two were thick as thieves, all the time.
I super respect him for stepping down so that the company can change in the way it needs to, and also so wall street would realize a change has happened (which was around spending discipline vs. investments, and giving forward guidance, etc)
I left this episode with a lot more respect for him as a person and saw him much more introspective and up front that I would have imagined based on what I thought I knew before.
Also, a formerly favorite phrase of saying "we're in the Ballmer era at X company" is struck from my vocabularly, since in most places I've used it, it's meant to be an insult to the company, however it's really just an insult to Ballmer. He was way more intuned than many others.
I’m a big, big fan of acquired podcast, listened to every single of their episodes.
But I remember their entire Microsoft episodes felt like a lengthy defense of Steve Ballmer. There were too many instances of “here’s why this bad decision of Steve made sense given the circumstances” or “ here is how people underestimate the contribution of Steve on this good decision.” They were all well argued points, of course, but so numerous that I found myself wondering if the hosts does not have a relationship with Steve.
The existence of this interview does not help with that suspicion.
I think the big thing was Steve did make a lot of great decisions, some of the best the company could at that time in those respective fields but completely missed on everything that Apple did. Portable media players, smart phones and tablets and those are the three huge misses and that is really were it counted.
The old three envelope joke.
You become CEO and there are three envelopes on your office desk, a note says "Every time there is an issue you open them in order and do what is inside". First envelope says "Blame your predecessor.". The second says "Blame yourself". The third says "Prepare three envelopes".
This is the problem with podcasts, but also modern media, in general. You have to play softball or be ideologically homogeneous to get access. Anything else has a negative k for a variety of reasons.
I haven't listened to all their MSFT coverage but it's possible they genuinely feel Ballmer's gotten a worse rap than he deserves and they're trying to contextualize some of the decisions and circumstances.
Yes, but as sibling comment says there's that thing about softball.
I think Ballmer was better than how he was perceived. So I did expect some justification, etc in their MS episodes. But these points seemed, to use your word, numerous. I think they must have done this because in preparation for those MS episodes, they did talk to Ballmer, and expected him to listen to the episodes. Comparatively their Bernard Arnault, LVMH games take on episodes like LVMH, Hermes seemed somewhat balanced.
I disagree with the sentiment. Who is made worse off, who is made poorer because he held Microsoft shares? OP describes it as a "policy failure"... what kind of social wrong does a "policy" which would have forced him to sell his shares in 2015 correct?
Wealth doesn't circulate. Currency circulates. They aren't the same thing. And a "concentration of wealth" can't lead to inflation or debasement, I'm not sure what that sentence means.
Pretty ironic that you'd call out economic chops when this is a very basic and well understood principle. Perhaps be more cautious and less confident in your presuppositions going forward.
Yes and: Our economy now has fewer young(er) small- to mid-sized companies. The kind that have historically been the engines for creating jobs, for creating wealth (vs merely transferring it), and innovation.
I was excited by all new green energy startups due to Biden Admin's policies (BIL, IRA, etc). Oh well...
I know you know all this; I'm just compelled to repeatedly point out the obvious.
Others have given some answer to who was made poorer by Ballmer holding Microsoft shares, but I'd argue that this is the wrong question. Instead of looking at a specific individual, we should look at systems.
A system that allows this kind of extreme wealth accumulation is quite fundamentally at odds with democracy because extreme wealth can be and is in practice used to influence politics in a way that undermines democracy.
Some people might not care about that, but if your goal is improving the outcomes of the largest number of people, then pretty much everything else is secondary to having a functioning democracy.
This is genuinely the only response I ever get - that wealth can be used to influence politics. In my view this is a poor argument for two reasons.
1. The amount wealth actually influences politics is hard to measure but likely much lower than most people assume. Trump was outspent significantly both times he won. Bloomberg dropped $1B in a couple months and won nowhere but American Somoa. Probably the two biggest boogiemen, Koch and Soros, have spent billions over the years on their causes, and the present administration and general overton window is actually something neither of them like! The nonelected king-makers in American and EU politics are not actually wealthy people at all, just those with a lot of accumulated political capital, for instance, Jim Clyburn who single-handedly gave the 2020 nomination to Biden.
2. The amount that it takes to finance initiatives is much lower than centibillionaire level. Is the original $20B OP mentioned not sufficient to finance some ballot initiative? Why is it the increase to $130B that causes concern? The truth is that even a wealthy non-billionaire can easily do that, or bankroll someone's run for congress, or fund a partisan thinktank. The maximum level of wealth you'd have to set your ban-limit at would be problematically low.
It always strikes me as interesting that this entire community was founded around startups and providing value to customers and making money in return, however it's now mostly dominated by those who think it's wrong to provide value and get money in return
This community is diverse. It's just really in fashion today to be against capitalism and the rich. Marxism is the answer apparently.
The interesting thing to me isn't this community specifically, it's that all the prosperity that we (here anyways, for the most part) are enjoying, all the technological achievements, the lifting of billions of people from poverty ( https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief ), elimination of many diseases, increased lifespan, were mostly achieved under some version of capitalism.
It's not that there aren't problems (lots) and it's not that the widening gap between the very rich and everyone else isn't a concern but the simple narratives are also wrong.
Capitalism, really, when it comes down it is just individuals being able to profit off of the things they create. GDP per person throughout almost all of history (thousands of years at least) was less than $2 per day. Capitalism came along where people could actually profit off what they create and now on average it's about 40/day.
If people can't profit off of things they won't innovate, and even if they did there is no market if people can't profit off it.
Very, very few by comparison. We have thousands of innovations every single day now. How many innovations can you name pre capitalism that had a major impact on society?
Shareholders do not provide value, workers do. After he retired, Steve Ballmer did not provide $110B of value to Microsoft customers, but he received that wealth anyway.
That is completely untrue. Companies frequently own their own stock, and issue more when the price is high it continues to be quite valuable to the company
They can buy back shares and keep them in treasury, that's correct. But they need cash to buy them back first and it only actually results in a positive flow of money if they are able to sell it at a profit later.
And when they issue more, then this initial offering again (of new stock).
Investor dollars are not kept in a giant vault, but they are also not necessarily "being put to use the U.S. economy." If I buy $1000 of Microsoft stock, Microsoft doesn't suddenly have $1000 more to fund their projects. Some other investor gets it because he sold, and he's not necessarily putting that money to actual use either. It's all just numbers getting updated in a giant database somewhere, over and over until someone cashes out and actually spends that money to buy groceries or something. I guess some might consider those database updates and the growth itself to be "put to use" but I don't.
> It's all just numbers getting updated in a giant database somewhere, over and over until someone cashes out and actually spends that money to buy groceries or something.
send me your numbers then edgelord... o wait theyre not just numbers now that Ive asked for some. Go read up on futures markets - they were invented to service a legitimate, real world problem - yes deriviative markets of today have become abstract but its no as black and white as capitalists vs us.
Almost all of that was an increase in stock price. That's about as close as you can get to just sitting in a vault. If he were selling it and using the money for something else, that would be one thing, but he's really not using much of it.
This is not to say it's his fault. That's how our laws are written. But that is the point of OP. That our policies should be forcing him to sell and put that money back into the economy.
> Almost all of that was an increase in stock price. That's about as close as you can get to just sitting in a vault.
It would be at least as accurate to say it's as close as money can get to not existing at all. Policy should probably not be "forcing" people to realize gains that, in many cases (maybe not MS, but policy has to work for everyone), may as well be Monopoly money.
Owning stock is the polar opposite of having money in a vault - it is giving money to the economy. Specifically to a part of the economy that is a money-generating machine: a company. Put in circulation precisely to be invested on the economy.
When you buy a stock, "the economy" is not getting the money. Some other investor is getting it, who may or may not be putting that money to use. They may just turn around and buy another stock, giving that money to another investor, who buys a different stock, and on and on and on, with no other actual economic activity happening.
It's a lot more complicated than this. For example, money can be borrowed using stock as collateral and spent. Companies can and do also issue more stock. There are also indirect effects, for example investors putting money in new ventures.
Either way the economy is not zero sum game where there's a fixed amount of money. If the stock market grows there is more money. That money reflects future expectations discounted to today but it's still more money.
On the original question, how does Ballmer being very wealthy impacts the rest of us, there is no easy answer. It depends on what he does with his money. It can be neutral, positive, or negative. The sentiment though seems to be mostly driven by jealousy and a sense of unfairness. It's in fashion these days (in some circles) to hate the "rich" (which is basically anyone better off than yourself more or less).
> The only time money actually flows to the company is when stock is initially offered.
> A company might be valued billions in the stock market, but this is not money that the company can work with.
Both of these statements are demonstrably false. Why do you think companies go public (which is quite troublesome) in the first place? Just vanity to see the billions they don't have access to? Or to allow investors to make money without helping the company in any way? It's clear why investors would come to a purely speculative market with no intrinsic value (e.g. crypto) but it's unclear why a company would offer their shares to be traded like a shitcoin.
Being public is the instrument for the company first and foremost. There's the IPO, then companies continuously issue and buyback stocks depending on the cashflow. Look e.g. at the graph of Tesla's outstanding shares [1]. Then companies also sell bonds or borrow money using their own stock as the collateral. The bigger valuation you have the more capital you have access to.
Not to mention that even in the OP's simplistic view of the market there is an actual "new value" aspect: if you buy stocks from a VC or a founder, they use it to fund the next startup.
I think my terminology might not be the test (non-english native speaker).
When I say initial offering, I mean whenever stock is newly (initially) issued - whether that's in IPO, after an IPO or also in a private offering. Not sure what the correct term would be.
My point was, money essentially only flows into the company at that point.
E.g. company issues stock, investor A buys it.
When investor A sells to investor B, money only flows between these two investors. No money flows to the company.
Unless - as you have pointed out - company assumes the role of an investor in its own stock.
But the fact alone that a stock price is rising as such does not generate any new capital to work with for the company. And that is a point many people seem to misunderstand.
When Microsoft is worth 3.76 trillion USD, that doesn't mean that Microsoft has 3.76 trillion USD it can work with. That was the point I was trying to make.
Not sure if you’re really curious but it’s because it means the US is going from using tax to sustain itself to borrowing money (hence the ballon of debt). When your government relies on borrowing money, the rich always win no matter how you slice it because typically, you borrow money from them somehow. This reliance is the beginning of oligarchy and bad policies that strongly favor the rich from this endless cycle of debt. It’s been true for any developed nations like Four Asian Tigers and been true for nations with strong historic roots like the UK. How do you think the British “royals” sustain themselves?
The value of Microsoft exploded. It seems to me that someone's compensation being directly linked to the value they helped create is exactly how you want people compensated.
Who exactly do you suggest to manage these $130B better than him? Government? Pension fund? An example of a company managed by pension funds is Intel.
The whole point of capitalism is to put chunks of economy under control of capable people. If they managed to get rich then on average they're much better at that than the general population.
This is not an unpleasant side-effect, this is the main reason the whole system exists, remove it and it's not capitalism anymore.
You say manage this 130 billion as though it materialized from nothing. The point of the original comment was that his accrual of this much money is the failure.
Who do you think generated that excess 110 billion? Ballmer's advanced managerial capabilities? Sure "the market" might have valued equity more, but that's still the policy failure. Saying that "this is how this works" is silly. It could just as well work some other way.
I'm not saying "this is how it works", I'm saying "this is how it should be". The whole point is for entrepreneurs to have control over businesses or big chunks of them.
The only way for your "policy" to "prevent" is to redistribute the control to someone else, usually bureaucrats. And I, again, strongly believe that it's better for businesses to be controlled by entrepreneurs and not by bureaucrats.
> What does this even mean? Pension funds have a lot of board seats? I only see one person from Blackrock on their board right now.
The Board members are appointed by the Intel Corporate Governance & Nominating Committee, the chair of the committee is Barbara G. Novick, co-founder of BlackRock. The board is de-facto run by the trio of BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, smaller investors follow their lead.
> Why would it be bad for a pension fund to have influence on running a company? Are their incentives somehow mis-aligned with other investors?
Alignment of interest is not magical: it's necessary to achieve results but it isn't sufficient. You need actual talents, vision, execution to make things happen, not just interest.
Pension funds have no vision beyond "stock go up", no strategy other than "more revenue, less costs". In the end they are roughly as good at running things as are socialist states: economy is owned by everyone so no one in particular, run by people who never proved that can run a lemonade stand. In fact a successful socialist state (if they ever existed) would be indistinguishable from a huge pension fund that swallowed the whole economy.
> The Board members are appointed by the Intel Corporate Governance & Nominating Committee, the chair of the committee is Barbara G. Novick, co-founder of BlackRock. The board is de-facto run by the trio of BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, smaller investors follow their lead.
Thanks I learned something new today. Is Intel unique or is it common? Does Novick have this position due to pension funds specifically, or index funds in general? AIUI index funds own large stakes in many public companies so if this is true, they are all effectively run by Blackrock and Vanguard (or should be).
> You need actual talents, vision, execution to make things happen, not just interest. Pension funds have no vision beyond "stock go up", no strategy other than "more revenue, less costs".
As opposed to other investors? Outside of founder-owners you've described 99% of retail and institutional investors. Why do you believe pension funds specifically lack "talent"? As long as there is competitive pressure in every market, it doesn't matter. Some of them will be right and actually deliver better products, services, and profits.
> In fact a successful socialist state (if they ever existed) would be indistinguishable from a huge pension fund that swallowed the whole economy.
I've long believed that's the only way to make the welfare state numbers (in any country) work in the long run. Not the whole economy but like substantial proportions of the stock market. You can't tax labor to fund retirees when capital captures most of the returns and there are fewer and fewer workers. And you can't renege on promises already made to people who have been contributing throughout their careers. This can work: sovereign wealth funds are an example. Rising productivity is an updraft that pension funds should capture.
> Is Intel unique or is it common? Does Novick have this position due to pension funds specifically, or index funds in general?
I'm not a market guru, just happen to know about Intel because I worked there between 2009 and 2015 and it was sad for me personally to witness the downfall. The company started to rot around 2012, but the stock prices shot up and kept rising for 8 years. The strategy was "higher CPU price, less R&D, less people budget, no risky bets like mobile", this drove the earnings up to the pleasure of shareholders. You can't even call this strategy "shortsighted", it's "medium-sighted" because of the huge momentum that took years to dissipate, but the company's fate was sealed then. I don't know details of what happened to Boeing but suspect it was something similar.
> AIUI index funds own large stakes in many public companies so if this is true, they are all effectively run by Blackrock and Vanguard (or should be).
They almost never have the majority so control is determined by the presence of other figures which smaller investors could follow during the vote. A founder even with a partial control is often enough to steer it. When there's no one left but the funds they run the show.
> As opposed to other investors? Outside of founder-owners you've described 99% of retail and institutional investors.
Well first of all in this thread we are discussing precisely the question of how to redistribute the shares of the founder. OP says that the "policy" should have taken them away. "And who to give them?" I ask.
Second, I don't think 99% of investors (measured by volume of investment) have no strategy.
> Why do you believe pension funds specifically lack "talent"?
Because they're not backed by anyone in particular. Talent is always risky, systems that try to please millions of stakeholders are inherently risk-averse.
> I've long believed that's the only way to make the welfare state numbers (in any country) work in the long run.
I do realize many people think like that and that's why it's so scary for me. I don't believe this system could work.
He also saved Xbox from death [0]. More specifically the RROD (red ring of death) which afflicted most xbox360 consoles back in the day. I for one replaced my console three times before learning how to adjust the DVD drive's potentiometer after an insanely long disassembly process. Oh the good ole' days.
Steve Jobs tried to kill the Macintosh before he took over the division building it and became its champion. Sometimes an exec doesn't see the value of something, until they do. It's the nature of working and leading in a corporation, when you're just one human with limited visibility into what's going on.
What they were building under Raskin, before Steve took over the team, was nothing like what the Mac became.
It was text only, no mouse or GUI, and used some weird automatic mode switching UI that Raskin tinkered with for decades after but never really went anywhere.
Ballmer was hard-working, smart, and incredibly lucky in many ways. (Fairly or unfairly, I always have a soft spot for someone who survives Math 55 freshman year at Harvard—which Steve did!)
But he was also enthusiastic about weird non-tech marketing initiatives like trying to partner with big paper companies to launch “MS Office” branded paper for higher margin paper sales. I think this was a few years before the US version of The Office. But it sounds pretty Dunder-Mifflin to me! Whatever his flaws, I don’t see Satya going in this direction.
Source: I spoke directly with someone who worked with Ballmer on this.
He's legendary for being Bill's bulldog, and aggressively convincing people to buy Bill's solutions. Whether he was qualified to lead a technical organization like Microsoft on his own, as Bill's successor? Ehhhhh... maybe?
You know that "used car salesman" persona that he had in that internal Windows 1.0 video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgJS2tQPGKQ)? That's kind of his business strategy -- sell, sell, sell, push, push, push. Don't let potential clients say "no" to Microsoft products. And when you're an aggressive company like Microsoft, you want that in an exec -- but not necessarily a CEO who's in charge of managing the technical developments also. So I think he was really competent and essential to Microsoft's success, even if he didn't make such a good CEO.
(Fun fact: I used to think that the character Palmer from Final Fantasy VII, a member of Shinra Company's executive leadership, was a parody of Steve Ballmer himself based on his name, appearance, and goofy mannerisms. I'm no longer convinced this is the case, but it's a pretty funny coincidence.)
That's honestly a bit dismissive. You might not like him because he's loud and "not an engineer", but you gotta give him credit for tripling their revenue under his watch.
Not the person you just spoke to, and I don’t have any skin in this game, but technically speaking we don’t know if it tripled because of him or despite him, right? The truth is likely somewhere in the middle, but who knows where exactly.
Or if another CEO could have done better. While Microsoft was a mature company at the time, it's still part of a very high growth industry. He was CEO for 14 years, so just tripling the revenue (and that's in nominal terms, not counting inflation) isn't exactly spectacular.
Well, there's the CEOs of IBM, Sun, Yahoo, HP, DEC, Compaq, AOL, Palm Computing, and other formerly high flying competitors to compare against. I'm sure people could suggest a few others. Whatever else might be said about him, he didn't crater Microsoft while on the job.
Interesting interview in general, but I thought this was interesting framing on selling stock where you're ahead:
> Why would I sell, so we have less to give to philanthropy someday, unless I really think Microsoft’s going to underperform the market by essentially the capital gains rate.
> We were trying to get our browser to be a platform, embrace and extend I think is what we said. We’ll embrace the Internet and we’ll extend with these ActiveX controls.
Haha, yeah, I think you've forgotten the last third there Steve.
"Embrace and extend" was how Microsoft publicly described its strategy wrt web standards, or really open standards of any sort in the 90s. They were savvy enough not to say the quiet part out loud.
Popping back into this thread because I just heard a clip of Steve Balmer introducing a new player to his Clippers basketball team in very much a classic Balmer way. (re: Developers! Developers!...)
I was disappointed that Ballmer didn't give Ray Ozzie more credit. Azure was incubated inside Ray's org and Cutler worked for Ray. I remember Ray telling me that he had to go to the board and ask for $1 billion to build a datacenter. This was in 2005, I think, when that seemed like a crazy amount of money.
Ballmer sort of acknowledged Ray's role when he said that Cutler would not have wanted to work in the Servers and Tools org. But I think Ballmer undersells how much of the Azure strategy actually came from Ray.
I always thought Ballmer was an underrated CEO. He knew who was really important for the success of his company. What other billionaire tech leader is ever going to get up on stage all sweaty and rave and chant and dance for people like me, me, me?
Even when it first became a meme, I realized that "developers, developers, developers" was not just a chant or a slogan but an integral part of Microsoft's platform strategy. Get third-party developers on board, lock 'em in, convince them that it was worth their while to build on and for Windows specifically. The mire developers loved and wrote fir Windows, the more valuable Windiws became and the stronger Microsoft's positi(n was. Every release of the MSDN library had a new API to get excited about. Keep iterating on their development tools, culminating in Visual Studio, which trammelled everything else in the marketplace. Even John Carmack, Miguel de Icaza, and Larry Wall thought Microsoft's platform was pretty much best of breed. To this day the debugging situation on Linux is still stone knives and bearskins compared to what VS offers.
It worked, too. Every enterprise shop in the mid-late 90s was all in on Windows NT and ActiveX, until Java could get enough of a toehold in the enterprise space.
Yes, Visual Studio 6 was a mind-expanding experience. Nothing else came close until I tried IntelliJ a decade later, and even that is still missing a ton of advanced features.
Microsoft gets a lot of hate for being anti-open source, but they really did treat developers very well -- as long as you stayed within their ecosystem.
Ballmer's chief mistake was sticking to what worked in the past. He was not willing to let go of the Windows monopoly, and Azure in its early days was based on Windows servers. Then Satya came in and said, no it is OK to support Linux, and in fact it is OK to run Microsoft's own services on Linux. It is OK to support Open Source, and in fact we'll open source some of our stuff. That put Microsoft back on track. For now.
Satya's mistake though is that he has filled Microsoft with average people. The best fresh graduates from the top colleges went to Google and Facebook in the last decade -- because they paid significantly more -- and Microsoft picked up the rest. What is the impact of that? Microsoft's execution ability is lower, and we'll see the impact of that in the coming years.
Another of Satya's mistakes is his faux pas related to women employees. He was accused -- unfairly in my opinion -- of saying women employees should not ask for a raise. He did no such thing. He said employees should not ask for a raise (not women employees specifically) and instead should rely on the system to give you the appropriate raise at the appropriate time. But since he said that at a women's conference the accusation stood that he meant women employees specifically. Satya has had to fight against this accusation and he has done so by establishing a quota system for promoting women employees. Executive compensation at all levels at Microsoft is directly tied to promotion of women employees, and as a result, a lot of women now occupy positions they would not otherwise. Again, the impact is decreased ability to execute.
Microsoft today is the second most valuable company behind Nvidia. But you wouldn't know that looking at their products. They don't have any interesting new products. To some extend they are coasting. Will their success continue into the next decade? It's going to be interesting to watch.
Google has largely stagnated with products that they largely already had before Satya Nadella took over. Facebook was kind of at its peak then and they had bought Whatsapp and added Instagram to their portfolio. But since then, Meta has had a few duds as well and it seems a bit lackluster lately. Messenger launched and imploded. Then VR. And now they are messing up with AI.
The point is, if Google and Meta got the best people, what the hell did they do in the last ten years? I think they mostly got more people and less ability to do anything very well. It hasn't worked out that great for them. Neither of them has much to show for their efforts. Google bootstrapped AI and then had their people walk off to form OpenAI who are (for now) best buddies with MS. Facebook/Meta keeps changing their mind about what they are about. Social media, VR, and now AI. But it seems they end up chasing their tail every time.
MS actually got better over the last ten years. They too had a few nice acquisitions. But more importantly, they revitalized what was a pretty dead development strategy. Github was critical. The attitude towards Linux and the complete 180 on open source in general was critical. MS did quite a few things right under Nadella.
> They don't have any interesting new products.
None of these companies do.
> what the hell did they do in the last ten years?
Having the best people and knowing how to use them effectively are two very, very different things
Reminds me of Bell Labs. The director was once interviewed asking "how do you manage a bunch of geniuses" and he answered "you don't." (I'm sure this wasn't the exact phrasing but the sentiment is right)
Edit: Appears my memory is better than I thought[0]
[0] https://westviewnews.org/2019/11/01/bell-labs-second-best-ke...
I think the point here is that there is nothing to back up the dubious claim that MS recruits were inferior; your observation essentially reinforces that point.
I've heard the claim so many times, and pay (that I was good enough to achieve) at MS was lower than salaries for FB and Google posted on Blind, but who knows how real those were. I never bothered to look into it myself. Honestly I was just kind of a Microsoft fanboy at the time, haha.
Knowing how google interviews… I have some doubts that they are in fact hiring the best people.
A lot of these companies self select for obedient, conflict avoiding employees that agree with everything that comes from above. That's great if you are executing a fixed plan. But, you need a certain amount of status quo challenging types to actually innovate when the plan needs to change. Google and Meta are clearly struggling on that front. They've hired the ability to innovate out of their leadership and company.
Just my impression; but kind of backed up by what's (not) happening at Google.
MS somehow found a way back from that to where they were doing different enough things to grow their business quite dramatically under Nadella. Google is in need of a similar change.
I am .NET dev and made my living on MSFT stack.
I would not say it was 180 turn on open source, more like 160 or 170 ;).
Just enough so they can steer people into using Azure but not so much to still have Visual Studio leads throwing wrenches into open source source wheels to stay relevant.
I'd call it more like a 330. MS is running GitHub - well OK, never liked that one. It's a pretty lame source hosting platform and way too centralized. MS is doing some half open source bullshit like VS Code and open source glue software that only runs on Windows (who are they kidding?). I wouldn't trust open source .net stuff to stay that way forever, especially if it had any success. There is some smaller stuff like cross-platform PowerShell and mimalloc that seems OK.
I trust .net staying open source as long as it brings devs to Azure. So I would say pretty much forever :)
Google has a dozen services with > 1 billion users a month. Google in 2010 had only one
10 years ago was 2015, not 2010.
So you can have transformers, but the rest all happened much longer ago than 10 years.
Google search became less effective (imo) but probably more profitable.
Google hired the greatest minds to avoid competition that threatened googles monopoly on the search money printer
It became so good I had to finally switch to use something else.
> MS actually got better over the last ten years.
Some someone who (still) uses Windows I have to disagree. The gradual enshittification of Windows over the last ten years is infuriating.
I agree with this, I've been less and less happy with Windows since Windows 7 for the most part. I don't want telemetry, ads, and certainly not react native start menus. I just want an OS that works well.
Sure, these companies have made lots of money, but what have they done?
I actually do believe these companies have "the best people." I'm pretty sure they're just paid a lot less and having a difficult time advancing to staff engineer. Promoting people who are good at politics and being a yesman rather than a "does-good-work-man". For all our leetcoding, our "just make it work" mentality, and "we're going to do 10 interviews and take 3 months so that we can ensure we get the best people" I'm pretty sure we've done a really terrible job at it all. Maybe they are getting the best people, but then just putting them in handcuffs until they give up. Or maybe it's just all politics and no one actually cares about building a god damn product, and no, the stock does not count as a product and it is embarrassing that I even have to clarify this.
[0] While impressive it is still out if this will be profitable and if it'll be positive. It's unclear yet, unlike the other things. Read the rest of what I wrote...
>> no one actually cares about building a god damn product
From my experience, that's true for over 90% of the headcount. Everyone talks about quality, about care for customers but rarely that is more than marketing bulshit.
As well as how smart they are and how they're the best. But then they can't be bothered to fix little issues because they question what's "the value".
It all reminds me of that scene from Silicon Valley where Barker explains up Richard that when you have the best marketing team you need to give them easier things to sell[0].
I think my favorite is how everyone talks about simplicity and then introduces tons of complexity through over simplification while rejecting simplicity by calling it complexity. Not realizing there's a big difference in scope and that they could do a lot less work later by doing just a little more now[0] Sorry, I literally cannot find a better quality video or any other version for that matter... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5sTbjO3eI_0
>The best fresh graduates from the top colleges went to Google and Facebook in the last decade -- because they paid significantly more -- and Microsoft picked up the rest.
That seems shaky as a justification. I don’t have any data behind it, but in a world of eight billion people, it’s a hard sell that there’s only enough top talent for 3 companies.
Plus, feel free to correct me but I don’t feel Meta has brought anything technically brilliant to the table lately. Google might be a better sell with alphafold and some other projects but none of it seems mainstream tech either.
Maybe pixels if you want to stretch it, but search, maps, Gmail, YouTube, android, and even photos were there a decade ago already.
Small startups will always excel in talent density because of the increase risk (and reward) and alignment along equity, but all of the large companies have enough technically brilliant people. Many in their 30s or 40s want to do excellent work and also have stability to provide for their families. Whether management gets out of their way is another question.
A few projects just in ML: DeepMind has plenty enough for Google alone but Jax and the TPU project are technically ambitious and very strategically important for Google; they hired Adam Paszke away from Meta. Besides Gemini they have Gemma and Veo and they have a reputation in the industry of having extremely high MFU averages. From Facebook there's PyTorch but that's a whole cluster of projects (compiler, abstractions for many accelerators, torchao, torchtitan). They're also famous for DINO and SAM models, as well as many others by FAIR (e.g. Mask R-CNN).
It's worth noting that many of those projects were the famous versions of papers, ones that were successful through scale rather than through innovation. I'll give a good example, here's essentially the same architecture as the 16x16 words ViT paper but a year earlier[0]. It's not even the first, they even mention two other works that used transformers on images. I'm all for scaling and it is important, but there's tons of papers like this that are greatly overshadowed because someone just scaled up and got a better benchmark. It's been getting out of hand...
Fuck... I'm starting to sound like Schmidhuber
[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.03584
>Small startups will always excel in talent density because of the increase risk (and reward) and alignment along equity, but all of the large companies have enough technically brilliant people. Many in their 30s or 40s want to do excellent work and also have stability to provide for their families. Whether management gets out of their way is another question.
You mean small startups founded by experienced engineers?
You often don’t see what Google and Meta bring to the table because they aren’t trying to sell you products, they’re trying to glue your eyeballs to your screen and they’ve done extremely well at that.
Have they? Meta's main product, Facebook, seems to be much less dominant than it was a decade ago.
I, in particular, used to use Facebook, Instagram, Google Search, and Gmail a decade ago. Now I don't, because the products have become unbearably worse.
We probably can't even name all their products. I doubt even anyone at these companies, even the CEOs can name all their products.
One conspiracy theory I've heard is that because they were making so much money, they hired or at least recruited enough people so they would not have any serious competition.
Also, a lot of things that look straightforward is probably a lot of work internally. For example, renaming Facebook to meta was likely not a simple one point story, right?
Also, I bring this up every chance I get because it bothers me so much but making a worse product probably takes more effort in terms of man hours than making a good one. Look at this... .https://developer.chrome.com/blog/autoplay#media_engagement_...
The comment that I was commenting said
> they’re trying to glue your eyeballs to your screen and they’ve done extremely well at that
I was saying that they haven't, in my experience. The number of products and the volume of work involved is important, but not relevant.
>I don’t feel Meta has brought anything technically brilliant to the table lately
I was pleasantly surprised by Llama.
I always hear bad things about its standings in the frontier model rankings, although I don't follow that close enough to know if that's real or not. What's cool about Llama?
Basically after years of raising money as a non-profit & training on everyone's data, "Open"AI rug-pulled the world and decided to keep their secret models secret to become a for-profit venture.
I was pissed. Then Meta came out of nowhere to release Llama, a model with performance comparable to ChatGPT. I was able to download it & run it for free on my computer. Thank you Zucc, very cool.
I hear you, I might give people the benefit of the doubt too much, but I interpreted what he said more like while Facebook and Google were going out of their way to make sure they hired only the best, hiring was just not a point of emphasis for Microsoft and as a result it didn’t hire as many good people
I think that point is fair - at the very least, Microsoft wasn’t in the conversation as far as where the typical CS grad wanted to work - FANG doesn’t even include Microsoft in the acronym (I kid, I realize this doesn’t actually mean anything)
> Plus, feel free to correct me but I don’t feel Meta has brought anything technically brilliant to the table lately
PyTorch?
> Maybe pixels if you want to stretch it, but search, maps, Gmail, YouTube, android, and even photos were there a decade ago already.
I don't disagree really, in the end all three suck: G, MS, FB. Google did in fact hire all the top talent but only to make sure they don't work on something good for someone else.
PyTorch was released nine years ago.
Azure began adopting and offering Linux while Ballmer was CEO.
Microsoft already began the process of open sourcing stuff while Ballmer was CEO. Eg. What would become DotNet Core.
There are a number of other errors in your points. Some public, some not. I encourage you to re-examine what you think to be true.
Look, I agree it was time for Ballmer to retire and I’m glad Satya is CEO, but while he made some miscalculations, he wasn’t the zero some try to make him to be.
Satya has a charismatic nature in addition to his other skills. People who criticize him feel compelled to apologize for it.
Microsoft people always liked to tell the story about Ballmer losing his shit with people dealing with him using iPhones. The dude lacked public charisma and his belief in his company played like a NIH syndrome gone wild. But he was hella smart and his push for things like EAs and software assurance paved the way for the modern Microsoft cash cows.
No, ms didn’t offer ”azure” during ballmer’s reign. They offered ”Windows azure”. That speaks volumes.
It’s true Azure offered Linux under Balmer, but who was running Azure at the time?
Exactly. Satya was in charge of Azure just before he became CEO and it was his decision to open things up in Azure.
Once a company are over a certain size its ability to execute is throttled by business process, not individual's abilities. Individuals are kept from making an impact as they don't want that, they want predictable, replaceable cogs in the machine. Google and Meta suffer the same problem but, as businesses, they are slightly more nimble as they 3x smaller, but that has 0 to do with their hiring/promotion practices.
I was hired as employee 500 and now we are at 5000 (numbers rounded to protect the innocent)
It’s really really interesting what happens - obviously 5000 doesn’t compare to the behemoth that Microsoft is, but it’s still been interesting to see
It really is a confluence of factors that slows things down and I don’t think it’s as simple as saying business process
Some off the top of my head observations:
You have to try really hard to not settle on hires - the more you grow, the bigger the pile of work and you just want help - to the point where you might hire someone who’s good enough vs holding out for someone exceptional
It’s one thing for 100 people to be throwing money at problems in terms of tooling and outside contractors, once you’re big buying things is way more scrutinized - this is good because you don’t waste money on stupid tools, bad because it slows down buying of non stupid tools that you actually need
Things that didn’t matter before start to matter - security things, legal things, privacy things - these activities take time and also slow things down
Some work just doesn’t scale well - where in the past you could get away with throwing cheap manual labor at the problem, at some point you have to build automation to take care of - this speed things up in the long run, but usually you hit a wall first - as in things get so big they get slow - before you finally build the tools. Knowing which tools are worth building ahead of time is really hard
Related to the above - where in the past it made sense to buy a lot saas apps to run your business, these tend to be expensive so you start building your own
That’s just off the top of my head and nothing scientific. Also, I didn’t mention it specifically but of course you still have your run of the mill bureaucracy that slows things down
> Also, I didn’t mention it specifically but of course you still have your run of the mill bureaucracy that slows things down
Parallel friction: the more peers your work impacts, the more peers their are that can gatekeeper your work, for good and ill.
Grows roughly: log P, where P is impacted peers.
Serial friction: the more significant a change, the more management layers decision making has to pass up through, and every layer already has enough to do without considering significant changes. Can be very hard for a great idea to actually make it to someone who can say "yes", and for them to have the time.
Grows roughly: S^2, IMHO, where S is layers of "too busy" management to be traversed to a potential "yes".
That's the natural default. Some large organizations fight hard to keep the friction down, but it's going to be a fight.
After many years of nimble progress, a company I worked with went through a phase transition, and I spent as many years and more, slowly sinking into quicksand. Before giving up on my own project and moving on.
IMO you just can’t have one unit in the business be subservient to the other
People should be able to deploy changes without seeking approval/permission from other people/teams as long as they are around to immediately fix something if it breaks
This of course only works provided you’re staying in your lane and only updating systems you own/maintain and systems in close proximity
So you're saying average people are fine for a big company? I would agree, if all you want to do is maintain existing products.
I think you can actually do a lot with average people, if you have sufficient structure, process, guard rails, documentation, training and reviews. And big companies have a lot of this, specifically put in place to harvest above-average work from average talent. Yes, a company full of John Carmacks, un-shackled by process, can probably run circles around an average tech giant, but who can actually find and hire all these John Carmacks?
I think a company of Carmacks would probably be a mess; maybe resembling Xerox PARC, in that they came up with many interesting ideas, but rarely if ever actually created a profitable suite of products.
> I think you can actually do a lot with average people, if you have...
This is an important perception. Possibly due to general (and HN) bias towards talent and hero worship, this reality is overlooked at times. But at scale in a normal distribution, not all people will be within some stringent bounds of sigma. And companies once they become big will have some 'business to run'. Of course, on small scale I have seen a few skunkworks projects and have seen them work well.
A steady state calls for steady people.
The concept applies everywhere. The most skilled painter of art is probably not the best person to paint your living room.
its risky for big companies to move quickly. They mostly want to maintain what they have. its a myth that they want to innovate daily
Increase the conversion rates a couple percent, decrease the turnover a couple percent, and pretty soon your talking about big money.
Big companies 100% focus on maintaining their products/position, relying on acquisitions for innovation.
But Microsoft in 2000 to 2005 was still huge and had the best browser, OS, dev environment, smartphone, and messenger .
I’ve worked through all 3 CEO eras of Microsoft. Satya’s biggest mistake will be breaking the internal culture that made Microsoft what it is, for better and worse. Classic “be careful what you wish for” or perhaps law of unintended consequences, imo.
And yes, part of that involves the way they’ve changed the hiring and retention objectives.
I'm curious to hear more about your take on why the culture change could be a mistake. From speaking to a couple of long-timers at Microsoft, while they didn't seem to have complaints under Ballmer, they did seem to welcome some aspects of Satya's culture change, specifically how it had become much more collaborative internally. To me, that seemed like a fix for the internal dynamics at MSFT depicted in that popular comic about Big Tech org-charts: https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts
I thought there was grumbling about Ballmer adopting GE’s stack ranking employee evaluation system where every team has to grade at least some people as below par. So that led to weird incentives like not collaborating across teams, sabotage, etc.
I don't know, anecdotally I never heard MSFT employees grumbling about stack ranking. The lack of internal collaboration seemed to be more top-down, stemming from powerful execs expanding and protecting their fiefdoms.
Compare that to, say, Amazon, where stack-ranking seems to be an unofficial yet actively enforced policy. I've worked and talked with a huge number of ex-Amazon people and each and every one of them had myriad horror stories about the dysfunctional corporate culture. On the other hand, MSFT employees seemed to have much more balanced experiences.
Has stack ranking worked well anywhere? Genuine question.
edit: Not relevant for stack ranking thing but I will highly recommend the book Lights Out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_Out_(book)
More important question is: is there any big company that DOESN'T stack rank?
I don't like the guy because he killed Windows Phone and the Native (Chakra-based) Edge browser - both of which were excellent products.
Also it was towards the end of Ballmer's tenure that the Linux switch happened AFAIK - though Nadella got the credit for it.
Because he lead the Linux switch internally prior to becoming CEO?
Somehow I've always been in the MS ecosystem for work. I wouldn't call their MS365 strategy "coasting". MS365 is incredible value for money, and there is an element of looking outside and incorporating it (just copy Slack with Teams for example), it does all work quite well. I join MS365 regularly as a 100% Linux person and for example PowerPoint went from being unusable to pretty good in the FireFox over a period of a year or so. I can live in the ecosystem in the browser as long as I do office/consulting work, obviously I'd hate it if would force me to Windows. I just installed a Windows 11 PC for my neighbor, what a s*show. I think I clicked "pass" on 100 options and offers, I asked some to my neighbor, she said: "Please, you decide I don't know what any of this means". Compare that to Ubuntu, which just works after you give it your name, and stays out of your way. I'm converting their old desktop to Ubuntu this week now that it's e-waste to MS.
> let go of the Windows monopoly, and Azure in its early days was based on Windows servers. Then Satya came in and said, no it is OK to support Linux, and in fact it is OK to run Microsoft's own services on Linux. It is OK to support Open Source, and in fact we'll open source some of our stuff. That put Microsoft back on track
Not to be over cynical, I'm happy when big corps give away stuff for free, but has this made them any money?
They seem to have lost all their moats. LibreOffice is on par with MS's offering (which hasn't really done anything interesting in decades). Windows is semi abandoned and bloated adware. The unified OS ecosystem between desktop console and mobile is pretty much dead. The MS "ecosystem" is a half hearted afterthought at this point
Sure, Azure happened to boom in the meantime, but that seems coincidental and not a product of them giving everything away. It's also a lot less of a moat. Cloud is becoming commodity over time.
MS is now Azure with a bunch of atrophying vestigial bits hanging off the side.
Not suprising. One of the greatest programmers I ever knew eventually got hired by Microsoft. He worked as hard as one can work, only for his whole team to quit one by one due to the workload pushed on him by a boss seeking KPIs. The boss did so because it was the only way to get promoted. After all the coders on the team including my friend being the last, eventually quit, the boss ended up leaving after not being promoted / being unhappy a couple years later. Non of those coders will ever want to return.
Such terrible loss for the company, that deserves no better due its handling of them, with as usual a complete lack of oversight of its middle managers.
But Microsoft was never known for carefully curation of talent or breaking technologies, from its roots it was a , take what it can, hold on it, sue the rest. From the earliest days of DOS to the later years of ignoring the iphone, to the careful privacy invading code even from the 90s.
I am greatful for all they have done, and some thin skinned managers may read this and be upset, but this is just feedback, which can help improve the company.
I work with customer facing and adjacent Microsoft people regularly. I’d say in my observation they recruit well. The problem is that the culture is a toxic waste dump.
If I write down the 10-12 best MS people I’ve worked with in those forward facing roles… I’d say 80% of them have been laid off at random or due to internal politics. Standing out there is bad for your health. As a customer, I’m aware of their politics — bad sign.
We dearly miss Steve Balmer among those of us that still care about Windows desktop development tooling.
Satya would kill Windows if he could, and replace everything with Azure OS thin clients.
Likewise XBox woes with console, is due to similar approach, he only cares about XBox as games publisher umbrella brand for all Microsoft Games Studios subdivisions.
Not sure if your message is tongue-in-cheek, but Windows desktop dev work is gone. If you wish MSFT would go back to that and give up Azure then you wish Microsoft would be less than half the size it is today... (and still no-one would use those Windows desktop dev tools)
I know it is a mess, yet looking at the competition, one doesn't need to give up native platforms in the name of cloud.
Android and iOS/macOS are what Longhorn never managed to be (granted still under Balmer), and SwiftUI/Jetpack Compose have managed to be something useful in half the time Project Reunion has been going with a joke in resourcing.
>The best fresh graduates from the top colleges went to Google and Facebook in the last decade -- because they paid significantly more -- and Microsoft picked up the rest.
1. The best new grads are absolutely not going to Google or Meta. There are many far sexier companies. As a CS grad, landing in big tech is mostly regarded as having settled for mediocrity.
2. Microsoft's compensation for early career is competitive with Google and Meta (at least for the first couple of years; Meta will grow your level faster and Google gives better annual RSU refreshers, but many people don't know this and go by the offer's face value). I don't think there's much of a difference in the talent that they can pick up.
Microsoft also aggressively sops up the best talent in Tier 2 geos -- it's unlikely that the best devs in the Bay Area work at Microsoft but some of the best devs in Vancouver or Atlanta probably work at Microsoft.
>Microsoft's compensation for early career is competitive with Google and Meta (at least for the first couple of years; Meta will grow your level faster and Google gives better annual RSU refreshers
It's not. Microsoft's stock grants are a joke. I left Microsoft after 8 years with ~36k in unvested stock (vesting over 4-5 years) and a title of Senior (L63). Both Google and Meta offered me a downlevel (L4) for a 40% increase in total comp and with annual stock refreshers significantly larger than 5 years worth of stock grants at MSFT.
Microsoft starts to become competitive around Principal/Staff, sort of, but from a compensation perspective working at them at a junior/midlevel/senior level is a huge mistake.
Yes but as I said, that's mainly because Microsoft doesn't give good refreshers. For a new grad, a Microsoft L60 and Google L3 offer should have similar "TC".
That’s an interesting modern perspective.
I would say though that you’re both correct. Satya came in 2014 and during the last 11 years I would say that the majority of that is as the GP described.
I’m not sure when what you are describing became the outside perspective, but I suspect somewhere around 2019-2022, when Google lost a very large amount of its shine as the former Oracle Execs started to take over fully.
This take seems bad top to bottom.
And the Satya revisionist history on his quote is absurd since it’s well documented. He didn’t just say it at a women’s conference. He was asked “For women who aren’t comfortable asking for a raise, what’s your advice for them?”. And part of response included “That might be one of the initial ‘super powers’ that, quite frankly, women don’t ask for a raise have. It’s good karma. It will come back.”
He has since sufficiently walked this back, so it’s odd the need to lie about what he said.
Ballmer and MSFT got the last laugh. In 2005-2006 a lot of people counted them out.
Heck, even in 2013-2015 people were counting them out.
Attitude to Linux and open source was not really a problem for Ballmer IMO. Microsoft had vast revenues locked in to their software in PC and business servers. In the regulatory environment in which they were permitted to operate, it made a lot of sense to try to keep competitors out. A cohort of geeks hated Microsoft's attitude, but I'd be surprised if it did much to their bottom line. But Linux and OSS are just a tools, easily adopted when the winds change.
Microsoft under Ballmer completely missed the boat on a bunch of things which should have been pretty close to Microsoft's wheelhouse -- search, social media, mobile/smartphone, and cloud, to name some of the big ones (each one of these spawned a big 10 corporation). It's not that they should be expected to cover all these things or that no other tech company should have become successful, it's just that they had little response to any big developments in the industry for many years.
I think it's less that he wasn't willing to let go of Windows, more that the myopic focus on it blinded them to other issues, or deluded them into believing they could continue using Windows to gatekeep and buy or crush competition. They missed the boat on the internet before Ballmer too, but eventually managed to use the money and power that Windows provided them to grind down the competition.
>Satya's mistake though is that he has filled Microsoft with average people. The best fresh graduates from the top colleges went to Google and Facebook in the last decade -- because they paid significantly more -- and Microsoft picked up the rest. What is the impact of that? Microsoft's execution ability is lower, and we'll see the impact of that in the coming years.
How do you know it (that top ppl didnt go there) and why it didn't materialize after a decade?
LLMs and whatever succeeds them are going to change how we interact with information in a big way. Microsoft has so far mostly stayed out of that race and that’ll be a huge issue that compounds over time. What they do have though is access to power and pretty significant data centre presence. I definitely wouldn’t write them off but it’s not looking good over the long term.
> he has filled Microsoft with average people. The best fresh graduates from the top colleges went to Google and Facebook in the last decade
Is there a way to demonstrate that this actually mattered? That paying more did get them “better” talent that actually made a difference? Ie. not any self serving “they did because they’re better and they’re better because they were paid more.”
Look at AI. Microsoft was an early leader in AI but that was only because of their investment in OpenAI. What has Microsoft done in AI since then? Is anyone excited about Copilot? Look at what Google has done since then. Lots of interesting stuff. Only recently has Microsoft released something interesting: Mustafa Suleyman released the company’s first model trained internally from start to finish [1].
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/28/microsoft-tests-mai-1-previe...
Using both I don't see how copilot LLM is any worst than Gemini LLM honestly
Depending on which of the 40 Copilots you’re speaking of, context window is dramatically better with Gemini.
copilot.microsoft.com vs gemini.google.com
I was never a fan of Windows, being a Mac guy. However Word used to be good. After a long avoidance I had to use it for work. Teams Word, online Word, Word.app Word. It is a complete cluster fuck and formatting etc is a shambles across versions. The ecosystem within MS products is a dumpster fire. And yet is the state of the art.
The Office suite is one of their key products, and it’s awful.
Don't forget OneDrive and SharePoint and Teams.
But, every big company keeps buying this shit.
God the inability of Sharepoint Online to show all sites, but only “Recent sites” is infuriating. You create a site and wait an hour to show up in the sidebar. Or the slew of bugs across Office UX.
At least Google feels like a designer looked at it after things have gone live.
I have been both impressed and kind of disappointed in Satya's role. He made some hard and direct changes initially that has allowed them to coast very comfortably, but we have also seen Microsoft become very tame in some areas. I was optimistic at first, especially because he was willing to make the hard choices like binning Windows mobile even with all the potential it had.
Cloud is just being the cloud, the AI stuff they are excited on but maybe at the detriment of everything else, Xbox is dying a slow sad death as they are directionless and Windows is just a dump truck for all the more questionable business decisions possible.
Really interesting comment. Is there a source for the promo quota thing? Or is this a policy that’s only discussed internally on a need-to-know basis?
Managers and above know this. In order for execs to get their bonus they have to meet diversity goals. So execs have promoted women to positions they would not ordinarily be promoted, in order to get their bonuses. This started many years ago, and continue to this day.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/18/13681738/microsoft-diver...
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-microsoft-execs-earn-the...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-17/microsoft...
> Satya's mistake.... > Another of Satya's mistakes
same guy also says
> Microsoft today is the second most valuable company
go figure
> He said employees should not ask for a raise (not women employees specifically) and instead should rely on the system to give you the appropriate raise at the appropriate time.
Sorry but he surely got burned because this completely ignores systemic advantages given to men. If everyone quietly relies on the system then women will be disadvantaged. I know that's not a popular thing to say around here but it's been shown time and again and the women at that conference all knew it too.
> Satya has had to fight against this accusation and he has done so by establishing a quota system for promoting women employees...
That's great and everything but did he actually own the error or recognise the problem with what he said? Volunteer for bias training or anything that would actually help the issue at the core rather than putting bandaids over the wounds?
I think Microsoft actually just hired experienced H1Bs instead of new college grads. And they have such a moat with their corporate customers using excel, outlook, etc that execution doesnt matter as much for them.
Nonsense. None of the top companies are H1B abusers. Meta, Google, Microsoft are all using H1Bs for the intended purpose. The abusers are companies not in tech industry like Disney etc. who bring in H1Bs to decrease their payroll expense. Top tech companies don't do that.
Disney might not care about appearances, and the HQs might be flagrantly flouting the rules, but what of the hundred subsidiaries and shadow corps that are their hands and feet? They don't need to court those hires.
An acquaintance is an H1B at an Alphabet (owned) corp, hired to work a position that anyone with an Industrial Engineering BS could. And he only found out who owned his employer after an inspection by HQ prior to the scale up for Bard.
I'm happy he got the opportunity, and it enabled his family to marry him and for his new wife to come to the US and start a teaching position at a university, but his role could have been filled by a local grad... if they could have been convinced to accept his salary.
There are a ton of highly qualified American citizens that are not able to find work, or are underemployed. The layoffs of the past few years have made it very clear that there is an abundance of local talent, and big tech hiring from outside is not about a lack of labor supply
Clearly youve never worked inside these companies
I'm a Ballmer truther. He was completely right about many things including his vision for AI. I know that being early is often the same as being wrong but I don't think his big strategic moves as CEO were incorrect. Microsoft during his era was more marked by an inability to execute on those strategies.
I wonder if this is another one of those "two sides of the same coins" situations: on the one hand I agree that Ballmer was too weirdly competitive, e.g. with Linux/etc., plus the cringey takes on the iPhone, Google, etc.
On the other hand Microsoft had a fire and passion that I don't really see anymore. I miss Developers, Developers, Developers. Now it's just ads, AI, blah.
> on the one hand I agree that Ballmer was too weirdly competitive
He was really the epitome of that, and that was the MO of Microsoft at the time. I always thought of him as the embodiment of that, the pinnacle, the ne plus ultra.
Thinking about this some more -- in the interview, he seemed to have a feeling of Microsoft "struggling for survival" well past the timeframe when that was actually a reality
What was his vision for AI, and how could it be relevant? He was gone before the current wave hit.
Going on TV and laughing at the iPhone pretty much told me everything I needed to know about Ballmer. The best thing I can say about him is that unlike Nadella, he didn't spend too much of his time actively trying to enshittify Windows.
> Microsoft is directly tied to promotion of women employees, and as a result, a lot of women now occupy positions they would not otherwise. Again, the impact is decreased ability to execute.
I mean are you saying women are worse leaders? Because it seems to me microsoft is harnessing the limitless potential of gender diversity. With a gender-diverse staff they will be able to crush their peers by streamlining against horrible things such as toxic masculinity where the bourgeois men keep down honest and hardworking proleteriat women
My reading: the comment meant that encouraging diversity became a goal and it led to unintended consequences.
edit: lead > led
How I interpreted it is that where there's a limited pool of women and promotion of women is encouraged, eventually you'll have some women who have worse leadership qualities than their male counterparts getting promoted over them.
Works both ways btw, if promotion of men is encouraged, you eventually have men of worse leadership qualities than fellow female colleagues promoted over them.
Do you agree or disagree with this?
1. there's a significant population of men in tech who make the environment actively hostile for women,
2. women know about this,
3. many women do not want to work in environments actively hostile to them, and
4. women who choose to work at them underperform because dealing with hostility directed at you does take a cognitive toll
(I am only responding to this very weird straw man: "With a gender-diverse staff they will be able to crush their peers by streamlining against horrible things such as toxic masculinity where the bourgeois men keep down honest and hardworking proleteriat women")
True. AWS is also clearly leveraging the boundless power of gender diversity as its master plan to fade into irrelevance in the AI race.
Wait till you find out what the newly appointed bourgeois women are capable of
[dead]
You know, Steve Ballmer is always fun and interesting to listen to.
Meanwhile you have Satya Nadella. This very sanitized, boring, fake, borderline manufactured personality. I can't imagine sitting through a 3hr interview/podcast with him as a guest. I had no problem listening to this one though.
I agree with you that Satya typically has a flat, measured style that comes across dry and he also stage manages himself rigorously. But it's also worth mentioning that being the CEO of a massive, high-profile public company puts him under different expectations and constraints than a long retired CEO. Nadella is still spokesperson #1 for the company, products and stock.
That said, I'm not sure we'd see a dramatically more forthright and unfiltered Satya when he's ten years out of MSFT. I think much of Satya's style is simply the way he is all the time.
Generally agree but if you look at the body language and how engaged Steve is vs. what you generally see from Satya, there is a massive difference and Satya being #1 spokesperson for the company doesn't explain it in my opinion.
Matter of fact, I'd even argue that being #1 spokesperson and giving this low energy vibe is kind of bad for how the company is seen by the public. I'd rather have the "developers developers developers" CEO over whatever Satya is.
At my current (non-tech) company, someone in our C-suite has a very similarly controlled, low energy, slightly stilted vibe. If you get to know him, he's a ME with fantastic technical chops. He was pushed into a management role and simply isn't comfortable speaking in public. Of course he's had presentation training and speech coaching, but that just adds to the highly controlled, low energy vibe.
I'm told that when I give talks it sounds like a lecture from a college professor. That's ... probably a compliment, because I thought my public speaking skills were even worse than that.
Point is, I think part of the explanation is Satya coming from a technical background and still being uncomfortable and coming across as slightly forced as a result. Ballmer was a marketer first, an extroverted businessman, and quite comfortable on stage.
> I'd rather have the "developers developers developers" CEO over whatever Satya is.
I was fairly impressed with Satya in his first few years as CEO, mostly due to his embracing hard but necessary strategic changes that had been put off too long. However, the last few years I feel like he's really stalled out. To be clear, I'm not assessing based on the current revenue or stock price which can lag by five or more years but on doing the right things strategically, technically and on product vision. It's unclear the mind-boggling mountains of cash poured on AI (mostly OpenAI) in order to play catch-up are going to pay off in sufficiently high-margin revenue in a Wall Street-relevant time frame.
And big chunks of the mountains of cash dumped into rolling up large gaming franchises at peak post-Covid game bubble valuations are already being written off.
I would rather have Satya with his sedated stage acts than Ballmer with his stack ranking and dancing like a baboon. Ballmer was truly poisonous (not to mention a huge idiot. Spending tens of billions on acquisitions which were written off)
I think another point is that there's a huge difference between a founder-CEO (or near founder like Ballmer) and a manager/employee-CEO. The former has nothing to prove and can speak their mind, for better or worse, and the latter has to tow the company line.
There seems to be different personality clusters amongst CEO's but it is not so obvious which one is obviously better.
Elon has had good success with this brash behaviour while the others like Satya, Zucc and Sundar have taken the other route.
True, but at the same time I like Nadella's Microsoft much more than Ballmer's Microsoft.
I found the episode very enlightening, and learned a lot as well as unlearned a few things that I thought I had known.
I never realized how much of azure was him early on.' I didn't realize the tension between him and Bill, always assumed those two were thick as thieves, all the time. I super respect him for stepping down so that the company can change in the way it needs to, and also so wall street would realize a change has happened (which was around spending discipline vs. investments, and giving forward guidance, etc)
I left this episode with a lot more respect for him as a person and saw him much more introspective and up front that I would have imagined based on what I thought I knew before.
Also, a formerly favorite phrase of saying "we're in the Ballmer era at X company" is struck from my vocabularly, since in most places I've used it, it's meant to be an insult to the company, however it's really just an insult to Ballmer. He was way more intuned than many others.
I’m a big, big fan of acquired podcast, listened to every single of their episodes.
But I remember their entire Microsoft episodes felt like a lengthy defense of Steve Ballmer. There were too many instances of “here’s why this bad decision of Steve made sense given the circumstances” or “ here is how people underestimate the contribution of Steve on this good decision.” They were all well argued points, of course, but so numerous that I found myself wondering if the hosts does not have a relationship with Steve.
The existence of this interview does not help with that suspicion.
I think the big thing was Steve did make a lot of great decisions, some of the best the company could at that time in those respective fields but completely missed on everything that Apple did. Portable media players, smart phones and tablets and those are the three huge misses and that is really were it counted.
The old three envelope joke.
You become CEO and there are three envelopes on your office desk, a note says "Every time there is an issue you open them in order and do what is inside". First envelope says "Blame your predecessor.". The second says "Blame yourself". The third says "Prepare three envelopes".
>...The second says "Blame yourself".
The second step in this joke is something like "Reorganize.", not "Blame yourself".
https://kevinkruse.com/the-ceo-and-the-three-envelopes/
This is the problem with podcasts, but also modern media, in general. You have to play softball or be ideologically homogeneous to get access. Anything else has a negative k for a variety of reasons.
I haven't listened to all their MSFT coverage but it's possible they genuinely feel Ballmer's gotten a worse rap than he deserves and they're trying to contextualize some of the decisions and circumstances.
Yes, but as sibling comment says there's that thing about softball.
I think Ballmer was better than how he was perceived. So I did expect some justification, etc in their MS episodes. But these points seemed, to use your word, numerous. I think they must have done this because in preparation for those MS episodes, they did talk to Ballmer, and expected him to listen to the episodes. Comparatively their Bernard Arnault, LVMH games take on episodes like LVMH, Hermes seemed somewhat balanced.
I’m not against wealthy people, and America has always had a Tycoon class…
But allowing a single person to go from $20B to $130B in assets in 10 years feels like a pretty obvious policy failure.
I don't disagree with the sentiment, but Ballmer essentially made that money by simply not selling his Microsoft stock.
I disagree with the sentiment. Who is made worse off, who is made poorer because he held Microsoft shares? OP describes it as a "policy failure"... what kind of social wrong does a "policy" which would have forced him to sell his shares in 2015 correct?
If you’re asking with genuine curiosity: whatever venture was not invested in because it went to buying Tech Titan stocks instead.
Concentrated wealth doesn’t circulate well, which leads to inflation.
I thought we all had some economic chops on this forum?
Wealth doesn't circulate. Currency circulates. They aren't the same thing. And a "concentration of wealth" can't lead to inflation or debasement, I'm not sure what that sentence means.
Concentrated wealth along with a lack of currency circulation results in deflation, not inflation:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money
Pretty ironic that you'd call out economic chops when this is a very basic and well understood principle. Perhaps be more cautious and less confident in your presuppositions going forward.
You’re absolutely right, that was a test.
The fact that you’re the only one to point it out makes me think that I have put too much faith here.
It’s patently obvious that less circulation is a depressive force on economic activity.
Yes and: Our economy now has fewer young(er) small- to mid-sized companies. The kind that have historically been the engines for creating jobs, for creating wealth (vs merely transferring it), and innovation.
I was excited by all new green energy startups due to Biden Admin's policies (BIL, IRA, etc). Oh well...
I know you know all this; I'm just compelled to repeatedly point out the obvious.
Others have given some answer to who was made poorer by Ballmer holding Microsoft shares, but I'd argue that this is the wrong question. Instead of looking at a specific individual, we should look at systems.
A system that allows this kind of extreme wealth accumulation is quite fundamentally at odds with democracy because extreme wealth can be and is in practice used to influence politics in a way that undermines democracy.
Some people might not care about that, but if your goal is improving the outcomes of the largest number of people, then pretty much everything else is secondary to having a functioning democracy.
This is genuinely the only response I ever get - that wealth can be used to influence politics. In my view this is a poor argument for two reasons.
1. The amount wealth actually influences politics is hard to measure but likely much lower than most people assume. Trump was outspent significantly both times he won. Bloomberg dropped $1B in a couple months and won nowhere but American Somoa. Probably the two biggest boogiemen, Koch and Soros, have spent billions over the years on their causes, and the present administration and general overton window is actually something neither of them like! The nonelected king-makers in American and EU politics are not actually wealthy people at all, just those with a lot of accumulated political capital, for instance, Jim Clyburn who single-handedly gave the 2020 nomination to Biden.
2. The amount that it takes to finance initiatives is much lower than centibillionaire level. Is the original $20B OP mentioned not sufficient to finance some ballot initiative? Why is it the increase to $130B that causes concern? The truth is that even a wealthy non-billionaire can easily do that, or bankroll someone's run for congress, or fund a partisan thinktank. The maximum level of wealth you'd have to set your ban-limit at would be problematically low.
It always strikes me as interesting that this entire community was founded around startups and providing value to customers and making money in return, however it's now mostly dominated by those who think it's wrong to provide value and get money in return
This community is diverse. It's just really in fashion today to be against capitalism and the rich. Marxism is the answer apparently.
The interesting thing to me isn't this community specifically, it's that all the prosperity that we (here anyways, for the most part) are enjoying, all the technological achievements, the lifting of billions of people from poverty ( https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief ), elimination of many diseases, increased lifespan, were mostly achieved under some version of capitalism.
It's not that there aren't problems (lots) and it's not that the widening gap between the very rich and everyone else isn't a concern but the simple narratives are also wrong.
Capitalism speeds things up but its not the cause of innovation. Plenty of invention happens under other types of economic structures
Capitalism, really, when it comes down it is just individuals being able to profit off of the things they create. GDP per person throughout almost all of history (thousands of years at least) was less than $2 per day. Capitalism came along where people could actually profit off what they create and now on average it's about 40/day.
If people can't profit off of things they won't innovate, and even if they did there is no market if people can't profit off it.
> If people can't profit off of things they won't innovate, and even if they did there is no market if people can't profit off it.
patently absurd. no inventions before capitalism?
Very, very few by comparison. We have thousands of innovations every single day now. How many innovations can you name pre capitalism that had a major impact on society?
Shareholders do not provide value, workers do. After he retired, Steve Ballmer did not provide $110B of value to Microsoft customers, but he received that wealth anyway.
There is absolutely value in providing risk capital. That's literally the lifeblood of commercial innovation.
But this only happens when stock is initially offered. Not when it’s traded afterwards.
That is completely untrue. Companies frequently own their own stock, and issue more when the price is high it continues to be quite valuable to the company
They can buy back shares and keep them in treasury, that's correct. But they need cash to buy them back first and it only actually results in a positive flow of money if they are able to sell it at a profit later.
And when they issue more, then this initial offering again (of new stock).
Why? It's not like this money is in a giant vault filled with money and he swims around it. All of this money is being put to use in the U.S. economy.
Investor dollars are not kept in a giant vault, but they are also not necessarily "being put to use the U.S. economy." If I buy $1000 of Microsoft stock, Microsoft doesn't suddenly have $1000 more to fund their projects. Some other investor gets it because he sold, and he's not necessarily putting that money to actual use either. It's all just numbers getting updated in a giant database somewhere, over and over until someone cashes out and actually spends that money to buy groceries or something. I guess some might consider those database updates and the growth itself to be "put to use" but I don't.
> It's all just numbers getting updated in a giant database somewhere, over and over until someone cashes out and actually spends that money to buy groceries or something.
send me your numbers then edgelord... o wait theyre not just numbers now that Ive asked for some. Go read up on futures markets - they were invented to service a legitimate, real world problem - yes deriviative markets of today have become abstract but its no as black and white as capitalists vs us.
Almost all of that was an increase in stock price. That's about as close as you can get to just sitting in a vault. If he were selling it and using the money for something else, that would be one thing, but he's really not using much of it.
This is not to say it's his fault. That's how our laws are written. But that is the point of OP. That our policies should be forcing him to sell and put that money back into the economy.
> Almost all of that was an increase in stock price. That's about as close as you can get to just sitting in a vault.
It would be at least as accurate to say it's as close as money can get to not existing at all. Policy should probably not be "forcing" people to realize gains that, in many cases (maybe not MS, but policy has to work for everyone), may as well be Monopoly money.
Owning stock is the polar opposite of having money in a vault - it is giving money to the economy. Specifically to a part of the economy that is a money-generating machine: a company. Put in circulation precisely to be invested on the economy.
When you buy a stock, "the economy" is not getting the money. Some other investor is getting it, who may or may not be putting that money to use. They may just turn around and buy another stock, giving that money to another investor, who buys a different stock, and on and on and on, with no other actual economic activity happening.
It's a lot more complicated than this. For example, money can be borrowed using stock as collateral and spent. Companies can and do also issue more stock. There are also indirect effects, for example investors putting money in new ventures.
Either way the economy is not zero sum game where there's a fixed amount of money. If the stock market grows there is more money. That money reflects future expectations discounted to today but it's still more money.
On the original question, how does Ballmer being very wealthy impacts the rest of us, there is no easy answer. It depends on what he does with his money. It can be neutral, positive, or negative. The sentiment though seems to be mostly driven by jealousy and a sense of unfairness. It's in fashion these days (in some circles) to hate the "rich" (which is basically anyone better off than yourself more or less).
If the stock market worked the way you imagine, it wouldn't exist.
It’s a pretty accurate description of how the stock market works. How would you describe it?
The only time money actually flows to the company is when stock is initially offered.
A company might be valued billions in the stock market, but this is not money that the company can work with.
> The only time money actually flows to the company is when stock is initially offered.
> A company might be valued billions in the stock market, but this is not money that the company can work with.
Both of these statements are demonstrably false. Why do you think companies go public (which is quite troublesome) in the first place? Just vanity to see the billions they don't have access to? Or to allow investors to make money without helping the company in any way? It's clear why investors would come to a purely speculative market with no intrinsic value (e.g. crypto) but it's unclear why a company would offer their shares to be traded like a shitcoin.
Being public is the instrument for the company first and foremost. There's the IPO, then companies continuously issue and buyback stocks depending on the cashflow. Look e.g. at the graph of Tesla's outstanding shares [1]. Then companies also sell bonds or borrow money using their own stock as the collateral. The bigger valuation you have the more capital you have access to.
Not to mention that even in the OP's simplistic view of the market there is an actual "new value" aspect: if you buy stocks from a VC or a founder, they use it to fund the next startup.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSLA/tesla/shares-...
I'm not seeing how this is contradicting to what I said. IPO is initial offering of stock. That's when money flows to the company.
Fair point about using stock as collateral though.
What about issuing more stock after IPO? For many companies money flows in continuously, check the Tesla graph I sent above.
It wouldn't be called "Initial Public Offering" if it was the "Only Public Offering" like you suggest.
I think my terminology might not be the test (non-english native speaker).
When I say initial offering, I mean whenever stock is newly (initially) issued - whether that's in IPO, after an IPO or also in a private offering. Not sure what the correct term would be.
My point was, money essentially only flows into the company at that point. E.g. company issues stock, investor A buys it.
When investor A sells to investor B, money only flows between these two investors. No money flows to the company.
Unless - as you have pointed out - company assumes the role of an investor in its own stock.
But the fact alone that a stock price is rising as such does not generate any new capital to work with for the company. And that is a point many people seem to misunderstand.
When Microsoft is worth 3.76 trillion USD, that doesn't mean that Microsoft has 3.76 trillion USD it can work with. That was the point I was trying to make.
Not sure if you’re really curious but it’s because it means the US is going from using tax to sustain itself to borrowing money (hence the ballon of debt). When your government relies on borrowing money, the rich always win no matter how you slice it because typically, you borrow money from them somehow. This reliance is the beginning of oligarchy and bad policies that strongly favor the rich from this endless cycle of debt. It’s been true for any developed nations like Four Asian Tigers and been true for nations with strong historic roots like the UK. How do you think the British “royals” sustain themselves?
How so?
The value of Microsoft exploded. It seems to me that someone's compensation being directly linked to the value they helped create is exactly how you want people compensated.
Who exactly do you suggest to manage these $130B better than him? Government? Pension fund? An example of a company managed by pension funds is Intel.
The whole point of capitalism is to put chunks of economy under control of capable people. If they managed to get rich then on average they're much better at that than the general population.
This is not an unpleasant side-effect, this is the main reason the whole system exists, remove it and it's not capitalism anymore.
You say manage this 130 billion as though it materialized from nothing. The point of the original comment was that his accrual of this much money is the failure.
Who do you think generated that excess 110 billion? Ballmer's advanced managerial capabilities? Sure "the market" might have valued equity more, but that's still the policy failure. Saying that "this is how this works" is silly. It could just as well work some other way.
I'm not saying "this is how it works", I'm saying "this is how it should be". The whole point is for entrepreneurs to have control over businesses or big chunks of them.
The only way for your "policy" to "prevent" is to redistribute the control to someone else, usually bureaucrats. And I, again, strongly believe that it's better for businesses to be controlled by entrepreneurs and not by bureaucrats.
> An example of a company managed by pension funds is Intel.
What does this even mean? Pension funds have a lot of board seats? I only see one person from Blackrock on their board right now.
Why would it be bad for a pension fund to have influence on running a company? Are their incentives somehow mis-aligned with other investors?
> What does this even mean? Pension funds have a lot of board seats? I only see one person from Blackrock on their board right now.
The Board members are appointed by the Intel Corporate Governance & Nominating Committee, the chair of the committee is Barbara G. Novick, co-founder of BlackRock. The board is de-facto run by the trio of BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, smaller investors follow their lead.
> Why would it be bad for a pension fund to have influence on running a company? Are their incentives somehow mis-aligned with other investors?
Alignment of interest is not magical: it's necessary to achieve results but it isn't sufficient. You need actual talents, vision, execution to make things happen, not just interest.
Pension funds have no vision beyond "stock go up", no strategy other than "more revenue, less costs". In the end they are roughly as good at running things as are socialist states: economy is owned by everyone so no one in particular, run by people who never proved that can run a lemonade stand. In fact a successful socialist state (if they ever existed) would be indistinguishable from a huge pension fund that swallowed the whole economy.
> The Board members are appointed by the Intel Corporate Governance & Nominating Committee, the chair of the committee is Barbara G. Novick, co-founder of BlackRock. The board is de-facto run by the trio of BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, smaller investors follow their lead.
Thanks I learned something new today. Is Intel unique or is it common? Does Novick have this position due to pension funds specifically, or index funds in general? AIUI index funds own large stakes in many public companies so if this is true, they are all effectively run by Blackrock and Vanguard (or should be).
> You need actual talents, vision, execution to make things happen, not just interest. Pension funds have no vision beyond "stock go up", no strategy other than "more revenue, less costs".
As opposed to other investors? Outside of founder-owners you've described 99% of retail and institutional investors. Why do you believe pension funds specifically lack "talent"? As long as there is competitive pressure in every market, it doesn't matter. Some of them will be right and actually deliver better products, services, and profits.
> In fact a successful socialist state (if they ever existed) would be indistinguishable from a huge pension fund that swallowed the whole economy.
I've long believed that's the only way to make the welfare state numbers (in any country) work in the long run. Not the whole economy but like substantial proportions of the stock market. You can't tax labor to fund retirees when capital captures most of the returns and there are fewer and fewer workers. And you can't renege on promises already made to people who have been contributing throughout their careers. This can work: sovereign wealth funds are an example. Rising productivity is an updraft that pension funds should capture.
> Is Intel unique or is it common? Does Novick have this position due to pension funds specifically, or index funds in general?
I'm not a market guru, just happen to know about Intel because I worked there between 2009 and 2015 and it was sad for me personally to witness the downfall. The company started to rot around 2012, but the stock prices shot up and kept rising for 8 years. The strategy was "higher CPU price, less R&D, less people budget, no risky bets like mobile", this drove the earnings up to the pleasure of shareholders. You can't even call this strategy "shortsighted", it's "medium-sighted" because of the huge momentum that took years to dissipate, but the company's fate was sealed then. I don't know details of what happened to Boeing but suspect it was something similar.
> AIUI index funds own large stakes in many public companies so if this is true, they are all effectively run by Blackrock and Vanguard (or should be).
They almost never have the majority so control is determined by the presence of other figures which smaller investors could follow during the vote. A founder even with a partial control is often enough to steer it. When there's no one left but the funds they run the show.
> As opposed to other investors? Outside of founder-owners you've described 99% of retail and institutional investors.
Well first of all in this thread we are discussing precisely the question of how to redistribute the shares of the founder. OP says that the "policy" should have taken them away. "And who to give them?" I ask.
Second, I don't think 99% of investors (measured by volume of investment) have no strategy.
> Why do you believe pension funds specifically lack "talent"?
Because they're not backed by anyone in particular. Talent is always risky, systems that try to please millions of stakeholders are inherently risk-averse.
> I've long believed that's the only way to make the welfare state numbers (in any country) work in the long run.
I do realize many people think like that and that's why it's so scary for me. I don't believe this system could work.
> The company started to rot around 2012, but the stock prices shot up and kept rising for 8 years
thats some rot! they should teach other ceos how to ruin a company into the number one spot lol
TIL that Ballmer built their enterprise division from scratch.
Figures. It was a highly profitable division that nobody could figure out what it did or how.
He also saved Xbox from death [0]. More specifically the RROD (red ring of death) which afflicted most xbox360 consoles back in the day. I for one replaced my console three times before learning how to adjust the DVD drive's potentiometer after an insanely long disassembly process. Oh the good ole' days.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/07/hear-how-steve-ballme...
Interesting because he also tried to kill Xbox internally before it was an initiative.
Steve Jobs tried to kill the Macintosh before he took over the division building it and became its champion. Sometimes an exec doesn't see the value of something, until they do. It's the nature of working and leading in a corporation, when you're just one human with limited visibility into what's going on.
What they were building under Raskin, before Steve took over the team, was nothing like what the Mac became.
It was text only, no mouse or GUI, and used some weird automatic mode switching UI that Raskin tinkered with for decades after but never really went anywhere.
Ballmer was hard-working, smart, and incredibly lucky in many ways. (Fairly or unfairly, I always have a soft spot for someone who survives Math 55 freshman year at Harvard—which Steve did!)
But he was also enthusiastic about weird non-tech marketing initiatives like trying to partner with big paper companies to launch “MS Office” branded paper for higher margin paper sales. I think this was a few years before the US version of The Office. But it sounds pretty Dunder-Mifflin to me! Whatever his flaws, I don’t see Satya going in this direction.
Source: I spoke directly with someone who worked with Ballmer on this.
Since Steve was the guy who single handedly recruited David Cutler and his gang, I figured he has a lot of tricks in his bag.
Truly a legendary man for finding himself in the right place at the right time.
He's legendary for being Bill's bulldog, and aggressively convincing people to buy Bill's solutions. Whether he was qualified to lead a technical organization like Microsoft on his own, as Bill's successor? Ehhhhh... maybe?
You know that "used car salesman" persona that he had in that internal Windows 1.0 video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgJS2tQPGKQ)? That's kind of his business strategy -- sell, sell, sell, push, push, push. Don't let potential clients say "no" to Microsoft products. And when you're an aggressive company like Microsoft, you want that in an exec -- but not necessarily a CEO who's in charge of managing the technical developments also. So I think he was really competent and essential to Microsoft's success, even if he didn't make such a good CEO.
(Fun fact: I used to think that the character Palmer from Final Fantasy VII, a member of Shinra Company's executive leadership, was a parody of Steve Ballmer himself based on his name, appearance, and goofy mannerisms. I'm no longer convinced this is the case, but it's a pretty funny coincidence.)
That's honestly a bit dismissive. You might not like him because he's loud and "not an engineer", but you gotta give him credit for tripling their revenue under his watch.
Not the person you just spoke to, and I don’t have any skin in this game, but technically speaking we don’t know if it tripled because of him or despite him, right? The truth is likely somewhere in the middle, but who knows where exactly.
Or if another CEO could have done better. While Microsoft was a mature company at the time, it's still part of a very high growth industry. He was CEO for 14 years, so just tripling the revenue (and that's in nominal terms, not counting inflation) isn't exactly spectacular.
Well, there's the CEOs of IBM, Sun, Yahoo, HP, DEC, Compaq, AOL, Palm Computing, and other formerly high flying competitors to compare against. I'm sure people could suggest a few others. Whatever else might be said about him, he didn't crater Microsoft while on the job.
That is true, objectively he didn’t fuck it up I suppose
Nay-sayers will justify their low-cost, unfounded pre-conceived notions to the death, I swear.
Okay but we do know it did triple under him which in general is pretty good.
Fair
If you take the time to listen to this excellent interview, you will definitely be able to form your own opinion.
Interesting interview in general, but I thought this was interesting framing on selling stock where you're ahead:
> Why would I sell, so we have less to give to philanthropy someday, unless I really think Microsoft’s going to underperform the market by essentially the capital gains rate.
> We were trying to get our browser to be a platform, embrace and extend I think is what we said. We’ll embrace the Internet and we’ll extend with these ActiveX controls.
Haha, yeah, I think you've forgotten the last third there Steve.
"Embrace and extend" was how Microsoft publicly described its strategy wrt web standards, or really open standards of any sort in the 90s. They were savvy enough not to say the quiet part out loud.
Popping back into this thread because I just heard a clip of Steve Balmer introducing a new player to his Clippers basketball team in very much a classic Balmer way. (re: Developers! Developers!...)
And he's in the news for it because the team might have used a sketchy tactic with a fake endorsement company to lure the player in. https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6595033/2025/09/03/kawhi-le...
Same ol' Balmer. haha
You guys know Steve Ballmer is worth more than Bill Gates and owns a bigger share of MS? Gates diversified and donated to his foundation.
Direct link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYC49_aeop0
I was disappointed that Ballmer didn't give Ray Ozzie more credit. Azure was incubated inside Ray's org and Cutler worked for Ray. I remember Ray telling me that he had to go to the board and ask for $1 billion to build a datacenter. This was in 2005, I think, when that seemed like a crazy amount of money.
Ballmer sort of acknowledged Ray's role when he said that Cutler would not have wanted to work in the Servers and Tools org. But I think Ballmer undersells how much of the Azure strategy actually came from Ray.
maybe it's Ballmer's salesmanship, but the interview really really enlightened me and increased my opinion of Ballmer.
due to the capitalistic nature of america, they lost a brilliant mathematician in ballmer, yet also gained an excellent salesperson / executive.
guess end of day - money is a scale not an item to be measured.
I always thought Ballmer was an underrated CEO. He knew who was really important for the success of his company. What other billionaire tech leader is ever going to get up on stage all sweaty and rave and chant and dance for people like me, me, me?
Even when it first became a meme, I realized that "developers, developers, developers" was not just a chant or a slogan but an integral part of Microsoft's platform strategy. Get third-party developers on board, lock 'em in, convince them that it was worth their while to build on and for Windows specifically. The mire developers loved and wrote fir Windows, the more valuable Windiws became and the stronger Microsoft's positi(n was. Every release of the MSDN library had a new API to get excited about. Keep iterating on their development tools, culminating in Visual Studio, which trammelled everything else in the marketplace. Even John Carmack, Miguel de Icaza, and Larry Wall thought Microsoft's platform was pretty much best of breed. To this day the debugging situation on Linux is still stone knives and bearskins compared to what VS offers.
It worked, too. Every enterprise shop in the mid-late 90s was all in on Windows NT and ActiveX, until Java could get enough of a toehold in the enterprise space.
Yes, Visual Studio 6 was a mind-expanding experience. Nothing else came close until I tried IntelliJ a decade later, and even that is still missing a ton of advanced features.
Microsoft gets a lot of hate for being anti-open source, but they really did treat developers very well -- as long as you stayed within their ecosystem.
Another interview about the story of Microsoft, who skillfully managed to avoid any mention of Mary Maxwell Gates :-)
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/05/how-bill-gates-mother-influe...
That was well covered in another episode.