Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

What’s undeniable in the article is that Ballmer literally built what remains Microsoft best asset even before being a CEO there: it’s incredibly good relationship with its corporate customers. Honestly, it’s really what sets Microsoft apart for me. When you do deal with them as a corporate customer, you really get the feeling that they understand the way things work in a big corp IT department and will be reliable and predictable.

Just got done negotiating our E5 license last year and omfg is this laugh-out-loud untrue. Don't even get me started on how we have to check the Azure websites before every meeting with our M$ counterparts to figure out what Azure services they've changed the name of since the last call.

But yes, completely agree it's the corporate customers that are the wind beneath their sales. But it's because they understand that for almost any large corp IT department on the planet, telling the 85% of their employees who don't give a steaming crap what the nerds think about Windows or Ballmer, "you have to dump Excel & Word and learn something else"[1] is not a hill any of them are willing to die on. We have people that won't use Excel on a Mac because once they found a place where it didn't work exactly like the Windows version.

[1] No. LibreOffice is not the answer.