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.

Of those three, the only one that drives revenue to MS is GitHub.

VS Code is also low-key keeping Windows relevant as a developer OS. If something else came along which was truly very excellent but was only working well with Linux, and VS Code was not there to be the de-facto go-to solution for most new devs, it could eat away more of Windows marketshare.

So I see VS Code as a slight moat, also in its promulgation of dotnet-isms. So I think VS Code drives some revenue Microsofts way in a pretty diffuse but real way.

How is VS Code a moat when it's platform agnostic? Plus the developer market is just a fraction of the overall market.

MS Office is the real moat, as is Windows XP/7. Everyone use MS Office because Google Slides/Docs/Sheets is a silly contender to the MS Office suite. Windows XP/7 because that's what a huge percent of the human population using computers grew up on today, so they're most familiar with it. And let's be honest, that's not going away, even as MS enshittifies Windows 11, simply because no Linux build can apparently mirror the Windows XP/7 UI (for some reason, not even Mint) while Apple is hell-bent on doing its own thing on the sidelines.

The day MS breaks Office suite is the day Microsoft goes down, but that's unlikely because the current crop of devs at MS don't even know how to get started. Microsoft could literally not do anything and still make tons in revenue.

> And let's be honest, that's not going away, even as MS enshittifies Windows 11, simply because no Linux build can apparently mirror the Windows XP/7 UI

Windows 10/11 does a really bad job at emulating XP/7 UI. It is about as foreign to XP users as Debian or whatever.

I made a XP VM the other month to run some insane software I had to run at work.

I felt so much at home. It was so nice. Everything was awesome. The control panel was awesome. The distinct buttons were awesome. The start menu was awesome. The 'My computer' at desktop root was awesome.

All in muscle memory, still.

Then I am back out to 10 and can't figure out where my app shortcuts are without knowing their name or what of the 3 or 4 different control panels I am supposed to use.