That stratechery piece confirms that a number of Satya's "quick wins" were projects mostly developed under Ballmer but credited to Nadella... Which is exactly my point - that Ballmer doesn't always get the credit he deserves, for the sake of magnifying the contrasts between the 2 leaders.

I don't know about this. I think great engineers delete more code than they write. Perhaps something similar is relevant here.

> I think great engineers delete more code than they write.

...but someone has to write the code first, before some of it can be deleted by a great engineer ;)

If it wasn't there before, the great engineer could do something more useful than deleting code!