Steve Ballmer Interview

> 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.

>I don’t feel Meta has brought anything technically brilliant to the table lately

I was pleasantly surprised by Llama.

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)

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 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

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.

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...

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

> 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?

Interesting because he also tried to kill Xbox internally before it was an initiative.

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.