I think Microsoft's depressed stock value and stack ranking are both symptoms of the fact that Ballmer was a clown.

And one of his biggest clown tricks, bigger than "Developers Developers Developers" or throwing chairs, was messed up HR policies.

Microsoft my hire PR folks but under Ballmer, office would never appear on ios and Android. I was there when a clean built application was rejected only to be approved by Satya governance.

We would not have seen open .NET, open vscode, Typescript, Ubuntu subsystem, Powershell.

Even in the cloud, Linux would have never made to Azure. Ballmer saw Linux as threat, Satya saw it as a platform to build things on.

It was a night and day difference when the shift happened. Every team built their own hacked version of Jquery and suddenly we could just use a pre-built one. Code was cleaner, teams moved faster. Open-source was encouraged. No stack rank.

Stock doubling is not a coincidence. Ballmer just didn't understand developers.

Messed up HR policies, squandering opportunities to enter the phone market, doubling down on an unwinnable war against open source... His management gaffes are many and varied.

Stock valuation is an incredibly bad way to measure company performance.

Their stock started climbing about 8 months before they got rid of stack ranking. I wouldn't chalk up Microsoft's stock growth to "they suddenly figured out how to treat people better."

I suppose you're free to believe what you want, but the microsoft renaissance is literally the companies marketing/PR.

This is what they pay people to say on websites like Hackernews/Reddit, etc so that people like you and I start repeating it.

It's not that cut and dry for me. I do see objective differences in the Microsoft of today.

* Visual Studio Community is now free.

* Visual Studio Code is free and surprisingly awesome, IMO. It's now my default text editor, having replaced Sublime Text.

* I think what they're doing with .NET Core, VS Code etc. is great, they've realised after completely missing the boat on mobile that they can't control all the platforms anymore, they've been forced to think cross-platform. They've been forced to think beyond Windows for the first time in their history really, and that's a good thing.

* Their traditional allergic reaction to anything open source seems to have been given a strong dose of antihistamines. They've open sourced a bunch of their own stuff and they're now #1 for open source contributions on GitHub.

* I like Azure, I like that they're making their own hardware - I used a Surface Pro 4 as my main machine for a while and it was pretty good, "devices and services" as Nadella has said.

Bear in mind that I hated Microsoft back in the day. I only ever begrudgingly used Windows, I stayed well away from any of their development tools, preferring open source languages and frameworks even when working on top of Windows. If I needed to run a server, it was Debian (this is still more or less the case for me today). I used to run Debian as my main desktop OS for a few years. Today a Mac is still my main machine. I say this because I want it to be clear that I'm coming at this topic from a place well outside the world of Microsoft. I am well acquainted with the alternatives.

Besides Ballmer, there has been a generational change at Microsoft. Is the publicity around this change somewhat marketing driven? is there still plenty of room for improvement? Sure, no doubt. But I think it's a bit disingenuous and overly cynical to 100% attribute it all to marketing/PR spin.

Forgot the crucial point.

* Rampant spying in Microsoft's products is at an all time high.

And it's not going anywhere.

Windows 10 and so on. Yeah I know, I get it and it's not OK. They're obviously not alone in the exploitation of their user's data, however. I say that not as some kind of equivalence-based excuse but because it's a problem involving multiple organisations and industries. And while my main point is that Microsoft has - in some ways - changed for the better, in most cases, at the end of the day, the nature of a public company will always be to make profit measured in quarterly periods. And much like the proverbial scorpion (and frog), a public company will keep trying to make profit measured in quarterly periods to the potential detriment of its own long term viability and that of the greater societal context within which it exists. My point here being I don't think it's realistic to expect that anything other than external pressure will change the privacy situation you highlight.

And when the majority doesn't seem to care about loss of privacy unless maybe it's about their dick pics[1], I think you're right in that the privacy situation as it currently stands is not going anywhere.

Perhaps a little more on topic, the HR practices of Microsoft may have improved somewhat, but I have some acquaintances that work there and it's still not all roses in that area either from what I hear.

So I can commend Microsoft for what they're doing better while still recognising where they suck. It doesn't have to be a binary all or nothing situation. At least not for me. It ceased being a religious war for me a long time ago.

1. https://www.wired.com/2015/04/john-oliver-edward-snowden-dic...