Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

This article doesn’t understand what was fundamentally wrong with Ballmer’s leadership and what Nadella actually changed.

The specific technologies that were successful is irrelevant. Microsoft has and continues to invest in nearly every computer related technology that may come around the corner or they got late on.

The problem with Microsoft was everything went through Windows. The entire company was designed to promote Windows.

This was the fundamental flaw with Microsoft that Nadella changed. He quickly not just made Windows just another part of Microsoft’s business, to a great extent he actively devalued it.

The fact that Ballmer invested in Azure, etc before Nadella would all be irrelevant because under Ballmer Azure would have remained a red headed step child to Windows, so it’s unlikely to have seen much success under him anyways. Same goes for pretty much everything else Microsoft is doing right now.

Well since Nadella I have been using less Microsoft products and probably won’t be using Windows anymore once my Windows 10 LTSC stops working.

I keep hearing praise for Nadella but all he is doing is alienating a lot of customers with his terrible decisions.

With GitHub, TypeScript and VS code I'm probably using more Microsoft products than before.

They bought it. If Microsoft had developed it, we would get something like sourcesafe (was that the name?).

Sure, the investment was quite sensible, although I don't think they can change it for their ambitions too much.

Microsofts conquest against open source was of course a wrong strategy of Balmer.

this is the funny thing about microsoft

they are way better at buying and selling software than ideating and creating it.

successful microsoft products are acquisitions.