The Steve Ballmer Interview
Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal:
We sit down with Steve Ballmer, the legendary former Microsoft CEO and owner of the LA Clippers, for an epic conversation covering his 34 years at Microsoft. Steve listened to our Microsoft episodes and had some thoughts to share — and boy, did he deliver. Steve takes us point-by-point through the original IBM DOS deal that started everything, how he built Microsoft’s enterprise business from scratch, and offers his candid reflections on missing mobile and search. We also cover the story behind “developers, developers, developers”, the complexities of his relationship with Bill Gates (including a year where they didn’t speak), and why he ultimately decided to step down as CEO.
I found this really interesting. He has a few comments about Apple:
You might create something that goes nowhere. You might create what’s essentially a feature for somebody else’s business and get acquired. You might. I call that zero tricks. Then you get a one-trick pony. One-trick ponies are amazing. People should be in awe of one-trick ponies.
[…]
Apple’s two-tricks. […] Mac and mobile, if you want to say it’s high power consumption and low power consumption.
I consider [services] just part of the trick. […] It’s like us adding things to Office and redoing the EA. […] It’s an additional monetization model, but it’s not a new locomotive. A locomotive is the business that can pull the cabooses, and the locomotive remains the phone. The services business go away pretty quick if the phone volume fell apart. It’s additional, very important… […] I think Mac versus everything iOS is also uncorrelated.
There’s a common narrative that Microsoft was moribund under Steve Ballmer and then later saved by the miraculous leadership of Satya Nadella. This is the dominant narrative in every online discussion about the topic I’ve seen and it’s a commonly expressed belief “in real life” as well. While I don’t have anything negative to say about Nadella’s leadership in this post, this narrative underrates Ballmer’s role in Microsoft’s success. Not only did Microsoft’s financials, revenue and profit, look great under Ballmer, Microsoft under Ballmer made deep, long-term bets that set up Microsoft for success in the decades after his reign. At the time, the bets were widely panned, indicating that they weren’t necessarily obvious, but we can see in retrospect that the company made very strong bets despite the criticism at the time.
In addition to overseeing deep investments in areas that people would later credit Nadella for, Ballmer set Nadella up for success by clearing out political barriers for any successor. Much like Gary Bernhardt’s talk, which was panned because he made the problem statement and solution so obvious that people didn’t realize they’d learned something non-trivial, Ballmer set up Microsoft for future success so effectively that it’s easy to criticize him for being a bum because his successor is so successful.
Today is the 30th anniversary of the release of Windows 95.
Previously:
- Microsoft at 50
- Microsoft’s Resurgence
- Microsoft Is Ready for a World Beyond Windows
- The Triumph and Tragedy of OS/2
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Ballmer is a fool who only lucked out because he was a school friend of Bill Gates.
I recall him laughing at the prospects for the original iPhone.
Other than a job for a couple years in the '90s where the company I worked at used Windows 95, my life has largely been outside of the Microsoft world other than infrequent use of Word and Excel on the Mac. The Acquired podcast also did a two-part series on Microsoft last year. It's worth keeping in mind that Acquired focuses on the business angle in all its episodes—so things like, say, design or engineering will, even if discussed, be secondary to business results.
Even with that slant I came away impressed by how well and how much Microsoft has done in its time. I haven't listened yet to the Ballmer interview but I'm looking forward to it since I figure it should be a good combination of the hosts' curiosity along with Ballmer having the perspective gained from time away.
