On the other hand, Balmer would never allowed Windows development experience to be as bad nowadays.
These are all nice things for developers, but I don't think they are actually good for Microsoft in the long-term or their bottom line in the short term. At least not the way they've been executed.
If anything, the treatment of Microsoft's older cash cows under Nadella has been disastrous, essentially throwing goodwill and money away - e.g., the quality of and feature development in Windows.
See the Blazor amd Aspire push, WSL and XBox tooling on VS variants, versus anything desktop.
DevDiv is now under Azure as well, and is more than just .NET.
The rest of the office-for-iOS suite took heavy inspiration from that, and didn't take a decent shape until 2016-2017.
> Ballmer is a good used car salesman.
Ballmer was a very very good salesman. The reason Azure or all these new shiny MSFT products (e.g. teams) have a leg is because Ballmer already sold AD to almost every corp out there. Microsoft went from being 0 in enterprise to bigger than anyone else and that is now the main money printer and also the future of the company.
One thing everyone forgets is Nadella was nowhere to be found few years before becoming CEO. Ballmer made a very very good successor choice elevating Nadella quickly in few years.