Real Foresight Sometimes Looks Wrong
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  By Philipp D. Dubach
  https://notes.philippdubach.com/0003
  Note #0003

Dan Luu wrote a piece in 2024 about [Steve Ballmer being underrated](https://danluu.com/ballmer/). The bets that made Nadella look like a genius—Azure, Office 365, the enterprise sales machine—were placed by Ballmer. He took criticism for years while building infrastructure his successor would harvest.

Jensen Huang spent years building CUDA when GPUs were for gamers and obscure researchers. Analysts questioned the fixation on parallel computing. Sam Altman pushed OpenAI toward scale when the AI safety community wanted caution and the tech community saw transformers as interesting but not revolutionary.

If a bet looks obviously correct at the time, it's consensus. Consensus bets don't produce outsized returns.

This creates an evaluation problem. Leaders making good long-term decisions often look bad in the present. They're spending resources on seemingly irrelevant projects. They're ignoring what everyone says they should focus on. The feedback loop for strategic bets operates on a different timescale than quarterly earnings.

Ballmer cleared the worst political actors from Microsoft's board before he left. Nadella inherited a cleaner organization. That's not a decision that shows up in headlines.

The comments on Ballmer's retirement were revealing. Pundits kept saying "he should have done X" where X was only obviously correct in retrospect. Should have bought Google. Should have killed the iPhone. This is not analysis. It's hindsight dressed as strategy.

Foresight isn't prediction. It's positioning. Ballmer's Azure bet wasn't "I predict cloud will be huge." It was "Microsoft needs to compete in whatever the next platform is, and cloud infrastructure gives us that option."

We can't evaluate foresight in real time. The best we can do is notice who makes bets that look wrong but have internal logic—and who makes bets that look right because they're following consensus.

♥
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