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Microsoft

Since Steve Ballmer Retired 10 Years Ago, Microsoft's Valuation Has Increased 10X (cnbc.com) 93

Posted by EditorDavid from the road-ahead dept.
"When Satya Nadella replaced Steve Ballmer as Microsoft CEO in February 2014, the software company was mired in mediocrity," writes CNBC, noting that Microsoft's market cap was just over $300 billion.

"A decade later, Microsoft's valuation has swelled tenfold, to $3.06 trillion, making it the world's most valuable public company, ahead of Apple." (And it's also "firmly entrenched as a leader in key areas, such as cloud and artificial intelligence.") As Nadella marks his 10-year anniversary at the helm, he's widely praised across the tech industry for changing the narrative at Microsoft, whose stock fell 30% during Ballmer's 14 years at the top. In that era, the company was squelched by Google in web search and mobile and was completely left behind in social media. Many tech industry analysts and investors would say that, thanks largely to Nadella, Microsoft is now set up to be a powerhouse for the foreseeable future...

In a 2020 interview, Pat Gelsinger, then CEO of VMware, said offering his company's software on Microsoft's Azure cloud was akin to a "Middle East peace treaty...." In the Nadella age, Microsoft has also contributed to open-source projects, released software under open-source licenses and released a version of its Teams communications app for Linux... In 2018, Nadella came to believe in the idea of buying GitHub just 20 minutes after Nat Friedman, then a Microsoft corporate vice president, started pitching him on it. Right away, Nadella suggested that Friedman become GitHub's new CEO, Friedman said. Microsoft paid $7.5 billion for the code-storage startup...

While Nadella may not bring as much entertainment value, he's proven to be more effective than Ballmer when it comes to dealmaking. In addition to GitHub, Nadella has made pricey acquisitions such as LinkedIn, Minecraft parent Mojang, and Nuance Communications that have contributed to Microsoft's top line. More recently, Nadella helped Microsoft land the $75 billion acquisition of game publisher Activision Blizzard...
The article also adds that Microsoft "looked at buying TikTok in the U.S. in 2020, but nothing came of those discussions."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Since Steve Ballmer Retired 10 Years Ago, Microsoft's Valuation Has Increased 10X More

Since Steve Ballmer Retired 10 Years Ago, Microsoft's Valuation Has Increased 10X

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  • There's a lot of talk about money here, but who wins the title of most quote-worthy?

    • Yeah, when will Satya Nadella yell, "Developers, Developers, Developers" ??

    • Yeah... the profits might be up, but the memes aren't nearly as good.

      Fair tradeoff if you're in investor, kinda lame if you're a Microsoft hating Slashdot user.

  • ...because in trusting index (with the forced updates that might break your system and change the UI) I'd say it's at its lowest.

    • Pointless changes to the UI, which seem to be driven by some need to keep graphic artists engaged pursuing weird stylistic trends disconnected from the purpose of UIs (when they're not UIs designed for dark purposes, at least) are annoying but this has been a constant with MS. I remember the screams when the XP UI came out and was compared unfavorably to the NT 4.0 UI. I think only the adoption of the NT UI by NT Server was about the only time it wasn't widely panned.

      Forced updates are bad, but honestly,

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Junta ( 36770 )

        The biggest driver of 'distrust' would be telemetry and turning the Windows platform into an ad platform (both first-party by pushing users to buy some office365, onedrive, or azure capacity).

        The UI changes can be annoying, but generally not 'untrustworthy' (except the file management has done a lot to steer away from local disk usage and toward their cloud service). I don't recall a lot of controversy going from NT3.5, to NT4, to 2k, to XP. XP got a bit of ribbing for 'playskool' looking plastic skin, bu

  • Pointless metric not attributable to CEO (Score:5, Insightful)

    by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Monday February 05, 2024 @06:01AM (#64214762)

    Since Steve Jobs died Apple's evaluation has increased 10x as well, so Steve Jobs was a useless CEO right? Zuckerberg also took Meta's evaluation 10x higher over those 10 years so he is an exemplar CEO too right?

    The tech industry in general has experienced massive gains over the past 10 years, especially in company which provide cloud services. None of this is attributable to individual CEOs. It's a general industry trend. That said all these companies are doing better than NASDAQ which has only had a 5x increase in the same time period.

    • Re:Pointless metric not attributable to CEO (Score:5, Insightful)

      by christoban ( 3028573 ) on Monday February 05, 2024 @06:45AM (#64214858)

      Ballmer was the idiot who lost the mobile market.

      • Re:Pointless metric not attributable to CEO (Score:5, Interesting)

        by misnohmer ( 1636461 ) on Monday February 05, 2024 @07:25AM (#64214902)
        I was there. Windows Mobile was gaining market share against BlackBerry and Nokia. I witnessed Ballmer personally kill the idea for a Windows Mobile app store with a stupid argument - "People are used to buying software in a box at Best Buy, they will never buy some virtual downloads. There will be no more discussions at Microsoft about any online software stores!". iPhone and Apple App Store came but a few months later.

        • I was there. Windows Mobile was gaining market share against BlackBerry and Nokia. I witnessed Ballmer personally kill the idea for a Windows Mobile app store with a stupid argument - "People are used to buying software in a box at Best Buy, they will never buy some virtual downloads. There will be no more discussions at Microsoft about any online software stores!". iPhone and Apple App Store came but a few months later.

          Yes and no. While Ballmer was wrong about that the fact is that after this nothing changed. Nadella tried to make mobile a thing as well, and he also miserably failed, and not because he was anti-app store. MS's failures in the mobile world span decades and multiple CEOs. Ballmer's mistake is just one of many here.

          • Nadya didn't try very hard, but Ballmer had already pretty much lost it by moving very slow and investing little in app development, even late stage. Nadya was too obsessed with Azure, though, and he put the nail in the coffin of their awesome Windows Phone product right before walking out on stage at some big presentation. But it's hard to blame him.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Junta ( 36770 )

            By the time Nadella was CEO, the ship had sailed. There was *no* path to create a pure in-house Microsoft mobile OS to achieve any market penetration. Windows Phone 7 was arguably too late already, and that was firmly under Ballmer's era.

            On the UI front, between Apple and Android the general concepts were covered well, and 'Tiles' didn't add anything that Android didn't have via 'Widgets'.

            One thought would be to look at maybe doing for phones the way they did for PCs: Being the neutral vendor for a nomina

        • I was there. Windows Mobile was gaining market share against BlackBerry and Nokia. I witnessed Ballmer personally kill the idea for a Windows Mobile app store with a stupid argument - "People are used to buying software in a box at Best Buy, they will never buy some virtual downloads. There will be no more discussions at Microsoft about any online software stores!". iPhone and Apple App Store came but a few months later.

          Lack of the app store was not what killed Windows Mobile. Not getting the phone interface right is what killed WM. Apple and Google did, and when two players take a massive lead, it's all but impossible for a third party to really build mindshare.

          As an insider, you yourself know that Microsoft invested early in mobile tech and tried to be on the train from the beginning. Balmer was part of that. Hell, Bill Gates had been pushing tablets since the late 90's. The problem was while the Windows interface was po

          • Lack of the app store was not what killed Windows Mobile. Not getting the phone interface right is what killed WM.

            Are you talking about the ancient stylus based Windows Mobile interface, before the awesome Windows Phone rewrite (the WinRT API) which they then confusingly renamed again back to Windows Mobile?

            The whole story was SO Microsoft.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Junta ( 36770 )

              awesome Windows Phone rewrite

              That is... awfully generous to describe the 'Phone 7/8' era of Microsoft. I'd say they went from atrocious to about as serviceable as iOS/Android. Unfortunately for Microsoft, 3 years too late. Yes 'awesome' without the context of the competition embarrassing them, but with the context it was merely table stakes.

              • Define "serviceable."

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by Junta ( 36770 )

                  "fulfilling its function adequately; usable."

                  As in "the UI of Windows mobile prior to 7 was utterly useless for the handheld market" versus "it's good enough to be used when compared to Android or iPhone, but not anything particularly better either, just somewhat different"

                  If they came out with something like this in first half of 2008 they might have even owned the handset market. But since Apple had effectively a 4 year head start and Android had a 3 year head start with the latter out-microsofting Micro

                  • WP 8 was gorgeous and fast, with a nicer UX than Android and iOS. Especially when compared to Android, it was incredibly snappy. It had tiles instead of a sea of icons, which looked amazing and had nicer functionality without consuming extra power compared to Android widgets.

                    I really miss the aesthetics and how responsive it was!

          • Actually, quite unusually for most things that rise out of the pit of Redmond, I actually liked the windows phone OS. It was only really good enough to be a feature phone, not a full smartphone like they tried to sell it as though. So they definitely overpromised and were hit bad by the lask of an app store. Where I thought it could have shined, though, was on tablets as controllers for a smart home, and possibly as an OS for smart TVs.

            And I have to give props to Microsoft for, also unusually for them, f

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Junta ( 36770 )

              It was only really good enough to be a feature phone, not a full smartphone

              Problem being that market segment was dead before they were even ready with that product. Why settle for a limited 'feature phone' when, for the same price, you can have a more unfettered experience? I'm sure there are some minimalists that might appreciate that, but it would likely be a niche of a niche that could just as well be served by a more minimal launcher on a more featured platform.

              Sure, they can get credit for trying to be different, but when that fell short they tried to bolster it by tanking t

          • No, what killed Microsoft Mobile devices was changing the system used for developing apps three times in what, three years? Maybe four? They drove away the developers! Developers! Developers!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by _merlin ( 160982 )

          That's pretty stupid considering there were already very successful app stores for other mobile platforms (e.g. Handango for Symbian in Europe, and the i-mode store in Japan).

        • Well, it was nothing they could buy out, so of course it didn't work out.

          Let's face it, when was the last time MS really developed something themselves? 99% of what they sell today is either a derivate of an old product or something they hoovered up along the way.

        • Yeah, I had one of the late phones and it was actually pretty good. The bizarre thing is how many years they dumped money into xbox for very little gain but gave up almost without a fight with the phone, a much more important market.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          It wasn't just mobile - Microsoft after Ballmer stopped pursuing Linux as an enemy that must be stopped to embracing Linux. They decided that rather than try to fight off Linux, take advantage of its strengths and build upon its weaknesses

          Especially with the rise of cloud services, why not let Linux people access Office documents? Office 365 makes it possible. Azure has Linux as a first class OS. Heck, Windows runs Linux way too easily.

          And heck, even Microsoft started open-sourcing stuff (MIT license, at th

      • Could have left it simply at Ballmer was the idiot !!

      • Ballmer was the idiot who lost the mobile market.

        No Microsoft fundamentally failed to capture mobile at every step regardless of who is CEO. I remind you Nadella couldn't capture the mobile market either despite trying, and despite coming from ... *checks notes* ... the once world's largest mobile phone company.

        Blaming this on one person doesn't work. Everyone likes to think of the CEO as an all powerful being whose very essence gets turned into reality, but the fact is large companies have serious inertia and culture embedded that prevents many desired c

        • Ballmer was CEO. And during the important years. By the time Satya had taken over, it was lost. Satya was focused on Azure, and while the company had been putting out an awesome mobile OS by then for a few years, Ballmer had invested so little in app development and refused to subsidize their phones or pay to get them in front of customers.

          Google and Apple also used their duopoly powers to very aggressively ensure Gmail and GMaps would not work on the new Windows Phone OS.

          Satya had no chance.

    • Re:Pointless metric not attributable to CEO (Score:5, Informative)

      by Entrope ( 68843 ) on Monday February 05, 2024 @07:46AM (#64214932) Homepage

      Steve Jobs returned as Apple CEO in 1997. Between then and his death in 2011, Apple's valuation went up 100x. That's not what most people would call "useless".

      • Steve Jobs returned to a company that was going bankrupt otherwise. Apple had a year max before they were Novel.

      • Steve Jobs returned as Apple CEO in 1997. Between then and his death in 2011, Apple's valuation went up 100x. That's not what most people would call "useless".

        You missed my point. Firstly Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy. It's easy to look good when you're gifted highly undervalued resources. And if Apple wasn't on the verge of bankruptcy it also would have seen a price increase under an incompetent CEO too. Virtually every company which survived the tech bubble pop saw their valuations skyrocket.

        My point is that absolute valuation change is a stupid metric when comparing CEOs. What you need to do is compare valuations against competitors within the same mark

    • The problem with this comparison: it's apples and oranges. (Pun unintentional.) Tim Cook is a penny shaving, greed maximizer lacking in all vision who will ultimately snatch defeat from the jaws of success while Nadella moves the needle more than Gates or Balmer ever could. Apple lacks a succession plan to anyone who will ultimately innovate and lead, while Microsoft is forward-thinking and being flexible as megacorps go. I suspect Mark Russinovich will likely be the next CEO.

      • By forward thinking, I assume you mean buys any and all competition he can get away with.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by HBI ( 10338492 )

          He's a figurehead that hasn't had a new idea in years. You could watch it at the annual Ready addresses. Less and less engaged as time went on.

          Really, this 10x valuation thing is across the market, more or less.

        • In all fairness, though, when has MS done anything but that ever since the inception of Windows?

          Care to point to ANYTHING MS developed themselves? Hell, even MS-Dos is a derivate. The only thing they can claim for themselves is the MS version of fdisk, and frankly, they shouldn't brag about that atrocity.

    • Since Steve Jobs died Apple's evaluation has increased 10x as well

      The lesson in all this is probably that tech is much overvalued once again, and will probably have a nasty crash at some point, when the current sugar high wears off.

    • Since Steve Jobs died Apple's evaluation has increased 10x as well, so Steve Jobs was a useless CEO right? Zuckerberg also took Meta's evaluation 10x higher over those 10 years so he is an exemplar CEO too right?

      Where are my mod points?

      This is Slashdot, though, so this is really just a chance to remember the old days when Micro$oft seemed more clearly villainous and almost any other tech company was a white night in comparison. These days even Slashdot is divided along political lines. We have no shared villains.

  • Developers Developers Developers (Score:5, Funny)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Monday February 05, 2024 @06:15AM (#64214782) Journal
    Developers Developers Developers

  • Yeah. What a crappy situation. (Score:3)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Monday February 05, 2024 @06:30AM (#64214816)

    Because their product quality did not improve and is going down in some pretty important areas.

  • So the rest of us can all fuck off with our opinions now. Thanks.

    • why do you hold billionaires above scrutiny? they certainly wouldn't give you the same thought.

    • Why? I don't give a fuck how much money someone has.

      I care about what's between someone's ears, not what's in his wallet. Anything someone can sit on is not worth mentioning, it may as well be shit.

      • Why? I don't give a fuck how much money someone has.

        I care about what's between someone's ears, not what's in his wallet. Anything someone can sit on is not worth mentioning, it may as well be shit.

        No, but he does.

  • So it is only a 3-4x in actual pre-inflation money, and most of that is derived from forced revenue due to forced Windows 10/11 upgrades and ads.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Entrope ( 68843 )

      https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/c... [bls.gov] says inflation has only been 32% over that decade, not the 150% to 230% you suggest.

      The NASDAQ index has gone up by about 3x over the last decade, DJIA by 2.5x.

    • McForceface. (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      So it is only a 3-4x in actual pre-inflation money, and most of that is derived from forced revenue due to forced Windows 10/11 upgrades and ads.

      (Oracle Litigation Department) "You say 'forced' as if to imply that's some kind of bad thing. Not so. After all, it's in our charter, our mantra, our fight song, and our motto. Hell, our mascot is Fucky McForceface! You can buy him in our gift shop. Looks like a stuffed asshole."

  • Activision Blizzard executives are running for the door......and with a new lady president who doesn't have a clue, we'll see how this turns out !!

  • Balmer was an absolute buffoon (Score:3)

    by sinkskinkshrieks ( 6952954 ) on Monday February 05, 2024 @08:13AM (#64214966)
    Just one anecdotal example of his unscalable, business-slowing micromanagement: He would personally get involved in all M&A activities >10M USD. Needless to say, he didn't accomplish much on this front and Microsoft lost out on countless deals during his tenure.

  • Utter tripe (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bloodhawk ( 813939 ) on Monday February 05, 2024 @08:24AM (#64214992)
    What a load of shit. While the stock price was stagnate under balmer, the profit and revenue sky rocketed, PE plunged from stupid levels, basically the stock price only a financial illiterate would use that as a basis for evaluating his success or failure. Basically he was wildly successful. Office 365 and Azure are both his gambles and they have paid off in dump trucks full of cash.

    • Ballmer was a slimy used car dealer with a substantially larger car lot.

      He literally did not understand a thing about the product he was selling, but he knew full well that he could squeeze you for every last penny if he lied to your face so hard even he believed it. The Microsoft under Ballmer is fully the Microsoft many of us still do not trust all these years later. Everything under Ballmer's Microsoft came with a big gotcha, but you signed the purchase orders anyway because people were used to the pro

  • It's a billboard for advertising and a tracking engine. At this rate, without artificial cut offs, Windows 11 is going to reach Windows 10 market share in (apparently) 100 years. Check the graphs. People do not want that mess of an OS.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rykin ( 836525 )
      Follows the Microsoft trend of (roughly) every other OS release being trash, right?

  • and released a version of its Teams communications app for Linux

    And dropped support for its Teams communications app for Linux.

    • Which is hilariously sad, considering that the "native app" is just using Electron, anyway.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by g2racer ( 258096 )

        Teams and the rest of O365 is still supported on Linux via the progressive web app (PWA), which IMHO is the smarter way to go for MSFT. I assume that if it hasn't happened already, consolidation of other non--Microsoft operating system to this is already in the works, where the "app store" versions are simply wrapped web apps using Electron, as donbemad has pointed out. Linux was just an odd bird since there is no universal app store...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Junta ( 36770 )

          Yes, it works as a PWA, but they aren't all-in on the concept, and it manifests in annoying ways.

          Oh, someone started a Teams share and want me to control their screen. Sorry, I'm using PWA, I'm not allowed to control a screen, for some reason. Guess we can use Zoom which will happily do that. I could understand not allowing remote control *of* my screen (web apps generally aren't that empowered), but controlling someone else's screen should be no big deal.

          Admittedly, muscle memory and applies to the non-P

  • Sure, Steve wasn't an actual founder like Allen or Gates, but mostly he was because of when he started and his role as business manager.

    At some point in any company's growth, the founder becomes more of a liability than an asset, or they at least hit the limit on their ability to grow the company often through perpetuating values/ideas that have become obsolete.

    In the case of Natella, he kind of had it easy in some ways. Microsoft had an enviable market position and largely just needed to jettison some of

  • What is Bill Gates' percentage share holding of Microsoft these days ?

  • Windows under Ballmer's watch was at least a useable piece of software. Modern windows sucks assholes and breaks itself regularly. As someone who uses software which requires windows to make money, it is an insult how unreliable windows is today. I don't give a fuck about valuation of the company.

  • Address your comments to the chair! [theregister.com]

  • PE went from 10 to 30 and Microsoft now owns billions in data centers. x6 is the expansion of PE and the footprint. x2 is the acquisitions and compounding of cash on hand So balmer was a 50% drag at worst...2010 stock prices were down from 2000 valuations by about that amount. https://www.macrotrends.net/st... [macrotrends.net]
  • I miss seeing Balmer throwing furniture about...
  • MS buying TikTok would have made it instantly unpopular. What a shame!

  • Hardly surprising (Score:3)

    by RUs1729 ( 10049396 ) on Monday February 05, 2024 @02:06PM (#64216208)
    He may have been a top student all right, but in essence he is little more than a bully and a used-car salesman.
  • I bought quite a bit of stock when I saw he retired, it's almost enough to pay for my retirement.
    • Then you probably owe most of those gains to Balmer as MS growth has come on the back of cloud growth which would not have existed in MS without him as he was practically the only one that believed that was a good strategy for MS at the time, everyone from analysts, tech pundits and most certainly investors were screaming at him for being an idiot and wasting resources and money on the cloud. So without him no Azure and no Office 365 which is where all your profits have come from.

      I would have thought as a

  • delusional (Score:3)

    by gravewax ( 4772409 ) on Monday February 05, 2024 @04:45PM (#64217020)
    Seems the author of this badly researched article is clueless. Much of the money Nadella is rolling around in is directly related to controversial decisions Balmer made to invest heavily in Azure and Office 365, Everyone poo pooed these investments (myself included). A very large portion of that 10x growth has come from those investment decisions. Last year alone Azure was a $75b business and still rapidly growing. Office 365 took away the rollercoaster inconsistent problems with Office product revenue (even though everyone said people and Enterprises won't do subscriptions). Cloud revenue passed $100b and is growing at double digit growth rates

    This is not to suggest Balmer was a good guy or got everything right, he royally fucked up mobile. Still, I wish I could be as mediocre as he was, would be able to retire a billionaire like him.
  • Microsoft never released Teams for Linux, at best, and being very generous, it released a preview, beta build of Teams for Linux. It then killed that build, having never released a full version, and today Teams is not supported on Linux. Oddly enough, Skype is also not supported on Linux, but they do have a full build of it, it's just based on an out of date framework that lacks Wayland support, effectively making it useless (unless you use workarounds for screen sharing).

    Microsoft is valuable, but that

  • obviously its the weed (Score:3)

    by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Monday February 05, 2024 @06:57PM (#64217570)

    Weed became legal in Washington state shortly before Ballmer retired and its been uphill ever since.

    I'm sure there are lots of other things we can make up too.

  • Isn't he the guy who came up with the conjoined triangles of success? You have to appreciate the serendipity of the coincidence.

  • Wait a minute. Everyone fails to mention Steve Ballmer's post-Microsoft success story, the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team, which he owns. Oh wait, this is Slashdot. I mentioned sports.

    Behold, The Intuit Dome [youtube.com] , introduced by the man himself. "It's all about the hoop! It's all about the hoop! Hoop hype I guess I should say!" -Steve Ballmer

    • Ballmer looks like he is about to pop a blood vessel in his neck talking about his cool stadium. Intense guy.

      I used to have friends with Clippers season tickets, so they could see all of the other teams on the cheap. That might have been per-Ballmer, its been a while.

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