and my impression was that all good things that started under his regime (Azure, more openness)
I think a lot of that was Ray Ozzie. I guess Balmer deserves some credit at least for hiring him?
MS under Ballmer lost couple of generations of programmers
A lot of younger programmers may not realize this, but in the 90’s, all roads led to Microsoft. If you were a programmer and you didn’t know at least some of the MS acronym soup of Win32/VB/ATL/MFC/etc/etc, you weren’t getting paid. Microsoft and Windows completely dominated commercial software development. And then what happened?
Balmer tried stupidly to kill the web. He redeployed the IE team and assumed that the web would stagnate without his attention. He’d killed Netscape and the threat had passed. In the meantime, Mozilla and Apple and Google were forming the whatwg and architecting the next generation of the web. And MS was not only not a part of it, but had lost all credibility in the eyes of web and browser devs.
And then of course he also got caught flat-footed by the iPhone. Balmer was a serial failure as a CEO. Maybe he deserves some credit, a little bit at least for Azure? But he’ll always be remembered for all of those stupid quips he made about how Apple wasn’t going to be able to make headway in the smartphone biz.
The comment about the 90's is simply not true. I've been a successful (e.g., getting paid) developer since the 80s and have never been in the Microsoft stack. With the exception of a small bit of VMS-hosted development in the 80s, everything I have done in my career has been hosted on some sort of Unix. And I'm not some outlier. Sun Microsystems dominated the 90s for problems of just about any scale beyond the small workgroup.
I make this point because many of us (both engineers and customers alike) pushed back hard against Microsoft. They actively fought against open standards and interoperability. We literally thought of them as the evil empire. Even as late as the mid 2000s, when I was at Yahoo and there was talk of a Microsoft acquisition, I would have quit rather than work at Microsoft.
Economics aside, changing that toxic culture is what I appreciate most about Nadella's time as CEO. He has (it appears) made Microsoft into a citizen.
You jumped from ship to ship while you could have just been a Windows developer the whole time. Not that you wouldn't have had a bunch of ships to jump between in Windows-land.
I think one factor was at some point Microsoft stopped trying to make the desktop and web one platform (which was distinctly Microsoft controlled) which seemed to be the push with ActiveX, VBscript, and HTML Application technologies. I think the relentless plague of security holes in ActiveX was a factor here. This is idle speculation, but that is my sense of things.
I think a lot of that was Ray Ozzie. I guess Balmer deserves some credit at least for hiring him?
MS under Ballmer lost couple of generations of programmers
A lot of younger programmers may not realize this, but in the 90’s, all roads led to Microsoft. If you were a programmer and you didn’t know at least some of the MS acronym soup of Win32/VB/ATL/MFC/etc/etc, you weren’t getting paid. Microsoft and Windows completely dominated commercial software development. And then what happened?
Balmer tried stupidly to kill the web. He redeployed the IE team and assumed that the web would stagnate without his attention. He’d killed Netscape and the threat had passed. In the meantime, Mozilla and Apple and Google were forming the whatwg and architecting the next generation of the web. And MS was not only not a part of it, but had lost all credibility in the eyes of web and browser devs.
And then of course he also got caught flat-footed by the iPhone. Balmer was a serial failure as a CEO. Maybe he deserves some credit, a little bit at least for Azure? But he’ll always be remembered for all of those stupid quips he made about how Apple wasn’t going to be able to make headway in the smartphone biz.