Steve Ballmer, Stop Beating Yourself Up Over Hardware (Premium)

Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer this week expressed regret that he didn't make the software giant a "world-class hardware company." Steve, please. You did the right thing.

Our desire to rewrite our personal histories is natural: We all have that one moment we wish we could take back or handle differently, that one retort we wish we had summoned at just the right time.

For many of us, this moment is something truly tragic and personal. For Steve Ballmer, it is apparently his time as Microsoft's CEO.

But count me among Mr. Ballmer's fans. He was bombastic and fun, and you will never meet anyone who loved and cared about Microsoft more than he. But some see Ballmer in a more critical light for whatever reason. Granted, he once tried to buy Yahoo for over $44 billion, and, yes, he did orchestrate the disastrous purchase of Nokia.

The bigger issue, perhaps, is that Microsoft's stock price waged a miraculous battle against change during Ballmer's tenure, and it sat, unmoving, for basically that entire time period. This is a legit complaint, I guess, but I don't see what Ballmer could have done to have changed that for the better.

But whatever your feelings about Ballmer, whenever he discusses his history at Microsoft, we will, of course, sit up and pay attention.

Before getting into this, here's a warning: Ballmer's comments about his time at Microsoft came during a horrifically painful Recode interview which I strongly recommend you do not watch. The interviewer is awful, and appears to know very little about the topic. I took this bullet for you, folks. Don't be a hero.

(Most of the interview is not about Microsoft. If you do want to skip ahead, jump to about the 27:00 minute mark. But seriously. Don't.)

OK, here's what Steve Ballmer said. And why he shouldn't beat himself up about the past.

Taking a cue from an "Interviewer 1.0" YouTube video, Ballmer was asked about the one thing he did wrong as CEO of Microsoft.

"I'd say I have more than one thing I regret," he starts off. "Companies get successful with an idea, with talent around the idea, and with capability as a company to execute on that idea."

Here, he is clearly talking about Windows, the economic engine for Microsoft's hyper-growth between 1990 and the antitrust ills of the early 2000s. Windows wasn't just big as a single entity, it fed innumerable side businesses such as Office and Server, which have major implications for Microsoft's future (in the form of Office 365 and Azure).

More to the point, Microsoft's single-minded approach to feeding the Windows economic monster was correct. And you can see this same sort of network effect driving other tech giants like Apple (iPhone) and Google (Search/advertising). You do that one thing right and then you just milk it to death.

"But it turns out, if you want to have a second idea that is different from the first," Ballmer continues, "you may need new talent, but you also need new capability. And ...

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