Ballmer on Investing

tulak

Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
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A short article in the WSJ: Steve Ballmer, the Non-Investing Guru of Investing.

WSJ: Can you walk us through your investment strategy?

Ballmer: I own an index fund. We moved it back to be just the U.S. and Europe. Keep it simple. Maybe we own Japan too. We’re mostly dialing out of private equity, but you can’t get out of that overnight. The only stock I really study still is Microsoft, because that’s still overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly the No. 1 thing that I own.

If you have Apple News, here’s a link: Steve Ballmer, the Non-Investing Guru of Investing — The Wall Street Journal

Except for his high allocation to a single stock, he’d fit in here well. But as noted in the article, it’s worked out really well for him (and he has less need to diversify).
 
I'm a fan of Steve Ballmer. I particularly like his USAFacts website, which provides a lot of data on immigration, government debt, healthcare, etc.

 
Never been a fan of his business acumen, he just happened to be friends with Bill Gates and both of them nearly ran MS into the ground with their being victimized by "The Entrepreneur's Dilemma" until they were fortunate enough to bring in Satya Nadella in 2014 who rescued the company from ruin. MS could have easily went the way to Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsytems and currently Intel. Nadella is a true visionary that Google is severely lacking now.

The one thing about Balmer is he was never boastful and never pretended to be intelligent. He had this certain amount of humility about him that Gates did not have. He was just Bill Gates' buddy who happened to be in the right place at the right time.
 
You underestimate Ballmer. He’s a numbers guy and was important to Microsoft success.

He was able to achieve impressive growth in Microsoft’s key businesses when he was in charge. And he created the foundation for Azure, which took off under Nadella’s leadership.
 
Never been a fan of his business acumen, he just happened to be friends with Bill Gates and both of them nearly ran MS into the ground with their being victimized by "The Entrepreneur's Dilemma" until they were fortunate enough to bring in Satya Nadella in 2014 who rescued the company from ruin. MS could have easily went the way to Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsytems and currently Intel. Nadella is a true visionary that Google is severely lacking now.

The one thing about Balmer is he was never boastful and never pretended to be intelligent. He had this certain amount of humility about him that Gates did not have. He was just Bill Gates' buddy who happened to be in the right place at the right time.
Balmer gave us Vista and Windows 8. Two huge failures.
 
I heard an interesting story concerning Paul Allen when Megyn Kelly interviewed Steve. It deals with having virtually unlimited money. It is only 90 seconds long.

 
Balmer gave us Vista and Windows 8. Two huge failures.
Revenue growth was due to two cash cows (win and office) which he ended up depleting due to so many missed opportunities. He missed out on phones, tablets, search, online advertising, mobile music, video and automotive integration. He totally missed out on these when they were well-positioned to take it on and dominate.

Gates is not innocent in this, either. Gates contributed to missing out on TCP/IP (pushing netbios instead), the Internet and browser-based apps. Google Office has put quite a dent on the MS Office dominance and it keeps chipping away for the "just good enough" crowd. One glaring miss was his failure to update the Windows kernel (this is propeller head stuff but worthy of mention). Steve Jobs changed the Mac kernel five times with H/W, porting 6502 to 68000 to Power PC to Intel to Apple Silicon. He changed the Mac OS by porting the kernel from the crappy unreliable Mac kernel to the Mach BSD kernel from NeXT. MS Windows is still stuck on this DOS-based registry-infested bloated monstrosity worthy of shame in CS circles.

They had a cash cow and he milked it. Nadella came in and rescued the mess.

Regarding Azure, Balmer was responsible for the original debacle attempting to feature Windows as the headliner OS when the rest of the public cloud space was using variants of Linux.

In addition to Vista we have Balmer to thank for the Zune and Bing, Zune dying an unceremonious death after acquiring 0% marketshare and Bing being more famous for the shopping debacle with Best Buy than anything else. He also bought Skype and Yammer.

There is plenty more but these are well-publicized highlights.
 
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