At least we got the developers dance out of the Ballmer era. What do does Intel have to show for it right now?

Optan... er.. nevermind...

People keep parroting how bad Balmer was for Microsoft, without knowing that he's the one that invested heavily in Xbox and set the ground work for Azure and cloud services. Nadella continued this.

Ballmer’s purchase of Nokia was a tremendous waste of money, it’s taken a lot of effort under Nadella to right the ship. The scope and performance of (at the time) Windows Azure was not particularly good under Ballmer, but was repositioned under Nadella. The criticism of Ballmer is not unjustified, he lingered around for years after his effectiveness.

Personally, I don’t view Microsoft as a consumer company, and Xbox should have been jettisoned after the 360.

> Ballmer’s purchase of Nokia was a tremendous waste of money, it’s taken a lot of effort under Nadella to right the ship.

Was it the purchase that was the waste, or the subsequent management that wasted the potential?

Anyway, bringing Intel back into the picture; things would be a lot different if Intel hadn't canceled x86 phone chips around the same time Microsoft was hyping Continuum, the converged phone/desktop feature of Windows Mobile 10. If that was launched on x86 phones with win32 apps, it would have been really interesting. And, if they had that ready to go, maybe there would have been internal excitememt about WM10 and it wouldn't have been such a poor showing. Then again, maybe ending their massive QA program wasn't great for quality, either. I still miss windows phone, but there's no going back.

Xbox helps them maintain Windows as the gaming OS for PC (as they both use Direct3D etc., so porting from xbox to PC is easy/cheap). Gaming is not important per se, but is one of key factors when consumers select OS for their home machines (because kids insist on being able to play games). And whatever kids use at home, they'll want to use at work when they grow up.

Microsoft employee told me the biggest difference was that Ballmer encouraged competition between the different groups to the point where they would sabotage each other whereas nadala tried to keep people focused on delivering a product.