Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

Ballmer hated Linux & open source. He would've driven their cloud division to the ground trying to sell Windows servers in the cloud. It would've taken him another 20 years to accept that Linux was key to the cloud. VSCode (Visual Studio Code) - would never have taken birth. Microsoft survived and thrived once Ballmer had no option but leave.

In this era of Python development, Microsoft Windows still feels a step or two behind as far as using a Windows laptop for coding in the cloud. Python is the language of AI - not Asp.net, not C#. Ballmer would never have seen the writing on the wall. He would've pushed something wierd, like VBA .

I have as much disdain for the monkey man as the next OSS fan. But VSCode was always closed sourced crap at the arbitrary whims of a soulless zombie corp, and they never promised otherwise in a significant way. It's not relevant and not a good foundational signal or basis for any argument.

Actually there was a lot of open source happening under Ballmer - not because of him but in that time. VSCode’s beginnings were in an earlier similar product were from that time. He didn’t interfere or stop those projects. Attributing that to Nadella is just false.

... https://github.com/microsoft/vscode? It's MIT licensed. Or are we here to start GPL vs MIT for the 10,000th time?

oh please :)

the old ‘embrace-extend-extinguish’ model is what it _truly_ is, f.e. , you cannot take extensions from m$ store and use it.

there have been large number of discussions around this topic, and folks have highlighted these concerns more articulately than i could ever hope to do.

take your pick.

> they never promised otherwise in a significant way

It’s commonly promoted as „open source“ and this seems to be commonly believed. Pretty much everyone I tell that the official builds of VSCode are proprietary (and how proprietary they are) is pretty surprised.

You can run Linux servers on Azure (and Hyper-V), so it’s worth taking the ‘hate’ against Linux with a grain of salt.

There's a working build of just the open source part of VSCode (with basically all the same functionality) called VSCodium

Idk, I use cursor which is a proprietary commercial VS code fork and it just works. So clearly the license/OSS situation is very workable.

Ballmer didn't hate linux and open source.

He feared it as a threath to Microsoft's business model and revenue streams.

> ‘embrace-extend-extinguish’ model is what it _truly_ is

With this mindset, what could MS possibly create that wouldn't make you say this?

That is Code OSS, MS official binary builds of Visual Studio Code, as explained at the top of the Readme, include proprietary code. MS also has several very popular proprietary extensions. Some of those extensions, older cersions were open source.

That’s a distinction without a difference

That's just why he hated it.

This definitely seems like an unfalsifiable proposition for the MS haters.

Microsoft does something shitty? See, they're a terrible company.

Microsoft does something awesome? Well, we're currently in the "embrace" or "extend", so they're a terrible company.

I'm as (or more) pessimistic than the next guy about the state of tech and capitalism, but at least give credit when and where credit's due.

> He would've pushed something wierd, like VBA .

That was Bill Gates. Bill Gates founded the company on BASIC and seemed to remain a fan of the language even as the rest of the world moved on to other languages.

Ballmer wasn't technical so appeared to have no skin in the game of which language "won", so long it was Microsoft Developer Tools like Visual Studio developers used to work on it (and what would become VS Code, which as many point out did start under Ballmer's tenure). That "Developers! Developers! Developers!" meme was directly an "I want to support developers wherever they are and however they want to work". Sure he was a huge Windows cheerleader and would want those Developers working on Windows machines, but he really did seem to want to see Windows be the best platform for developers to code for anything (including/especially the cloud).

In terms of Python specifically, IronPython was active and interesting during Ballmer's tenure and Ballmer helped form a team that was actively contributing to open source projects like Python (and Node and Redis and others) to make them all run better (sometimes much better) on Windows. Ballmer may have been afraid of open source as a business model, but he also seemed to realize the usefulness of open source for bringing developers (back) to Windows and he did start efforts in that direction.

a previous discussion about something similar happened here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25719045

The destructive EEE strategy is replaced by a constructive poisoning the well strategy. That's arguably moral progress while there is no legal or financial incentive to do so. That's praise for Nadella, not Ballmer.

Support for linux was there, since the very early days of Azure. But at the time this was clearly Nadella's baby. AWS was running away with market share, and Azure gained some decent marketshare, at one point they said 25% of Azure revenue was on Linux, this was about 5 years ago or more, that can only have grown to now. No one lays that credit to Ballmer.

Microsoft's documentation wouldn't even acknowledge the present of Linux, I kid you not, till maybe 2012 or so. For example, pathnames like "My Folder" (spaces in folder names) - which are a no-no on any kind of server code (leave alone the block letters). This was as someone pointed out, Gates, since he was the tech architect (and hated linux or feared it ). In a sense, Linux rescued Azure, and Microsoft. Quite ironic, today we see Gates smiling (cluelessly imo), but Window's is still not a good environment for development - be it C# (a fine language), or Web. My colleagues on Windows struggle to run any Python code - all you need to do is git clone, followed by Pip install - that's still a challenge comparatively on Windows.