Ballmer allowed opensource during his leadership, but employees would be more "targetted" when it's not the right direction and it hasn't has "intermediate"/"fast" results... It's a much slower progress.

I believe Nadella has a lot of thanks for the change that Microsoft made before he stepped up and "received" the fame. There was a short release afterwards of his stepup with a Office version for iOS and Android, you just don't do that within the month.

Some things he did within the first 12 months:

- Bought Nokia ( they already worked very together closely, this was probably been going on for years )

- Office for iOS and Android ( was created during Ballmer, but probably got approval during Nadella)

- Opensource .Net ( opensource started with Asp.Net MVC 2, which wasn't an all-in though, i think of it as a "test" internally)

- Cloudobile - connecting mobile with the cloud ;) ( this is definatly more Nadella's style, coming from Azure)

But it isn't all "that good", a lot of people have been layed off ( approx. 18.000 ). While Ballmer's approach is very "profitable" and "evil", i do believe that Nadella's approach is more in the line of "more penetration", "cheaper prices" ( free version of Office eg.), being more open... It does come at a cost ( i hope no one blames me for mentioning this ). I do suppose those 18.000 people where mostly freelancers, but i'm not sure.

I left a job where I facilitated meetings to discuss major incidents and tracked action items and wrote long form reports. I decided to use this opportunity to instead move to a job I really loved where being laid off sounded far less likely.

I became a software developer. Finally took charge to do something professionally that I'd done for a couple decades as a hobbyist. Huge positive. Completely the right move. Never would have happened if I hadn't been laid off.

That said, I recognize it's not a positive for everyone in that position.

Source? What changed his mind?

Either way, Nadella didn't orchestrate the Nokia deal, Ballmer did.

You're right, he wasn't an idiot; he was a well-educated and successful executive that made strategic decisions informed by 80's and 90's business thought and practice. Half a decade earlier he'd have done wonders. But in emerging technology markets those decisions cost Microsoft its industry superpower status.

In tablets, mobile that cost Microsoft early market dominance and possibly locked the company out of future hopes at regaining their title.

In Web servers, numbers from Netcraft[1] last summer showed that since Windows Server 2008 essentially what had been a healthy uptick turned disastrous for Microsoft's share of active web properties (half way down the page), and over the last 15 years a steady decline in Microsoft's market share in traffic volume handled.

1: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2014/02/03/february-2014-w...

source: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2014/07/31/july-2014-web-s...

More specifically, your "By design" start is common in these kinds of managed transitions: you want the new leader to come in with tail wind.

Hope you mean "embodied in Windows 8". I still remember the day I replaced my Vista PC with one running Windows 7, and wondering why the OS was booting so fast. I doubt "Vista" was strategic in any way, more incompetent management, but would agree "Windows 8" had strategic considerations behind it.

Tick.

Windows 7 was a refinement of Vista.

Tock.

Windows 8 was a new interface and a step toward multi platform, e.g. ARM.

Tick.

Windows 10 is a full on multiplatform assault.

Tock.

Running a big company is nontrivial. Microsoft's management has never been incompetent. The company has always been very profitable.

This is completely wrong in a couple of ways.

Vista popularized 64-bit Windows, and 16-bit WoW (responsible for running 16 bit Windows programs) never made it to 64-bit Windows. This was true for the earlier Windows XP 64-bit, and it has been true for every 64-bit Windows that followed. So there's always been some confusion on this point, but note: 16-bit WoW exists even today on 32-bit versions of Windows 8. Today you have to enable it explicitly, but it is available.

Also, the NT-based versions of Windows never included DOS. They were never "with" DOS such that they'd need to "break with" DOS. The last Windows that included a version of DOS was Windows ME. The last Windows that included a version of DOS which anyone ever willingly used was Windows 98.

> Windows 10 is a full on multiplatform assault.

It's a pretty modest number of platforms compared to all those supported by NT in the late nineties. Although it will probably end up running on a lot more devices...

The VP of Vista fled to Amazon before it was publicly released.

Steve Jobs on the other hand already learned in 2002 that the desktop GUI won't work on a mobile device and set out to create a new GUI for mobile devices that led to the iPhone and iPad that was different from the Macintosh GUI. I think Steve Jobs saw the Windows XP based tablets that Microsoft made and their Windows CE smart phones that basically used the desktop GUI and how it just didn't work out.

Microsoft has almost always bet everything on the new Windows version. It doesn't always work out for the best. Some companies still use Windows XP because their business software breaks in Vista and above because of API changes. Microsoft no longer supports XP, but it is still in use around the world.

They reversed most of these moronic design decisions in 8.1 and the 10 preview, but they kept some (hopefully they will be fixed before they release). Like instead of having notifications (like "An update is available", "Restart is needed") appearing discretely at the bottom right of the screen they now take up the entire screen. Since Vista they should know better than their customers are trying to use their OS to do things, to work. Customers are not fascinated with the system and having the system interrupting them all the time is a terrible idea.

It doesn't take a PhD in UX to realise that.

That effort made learning xmonad a breeze because I accepted the idea that I would have to spend time paying the dumb tax. It turned out to be only a morning.

Emacs on the other hand....

I do not dispute that keyboard shortcuts are faster than any mouse based UI. And I am sure that you became more proficient having to go around the Win 8 hassles using the keyboard. However if the UI can only be practical if a user learns by heart all sorts of commands and shortcuts, then it is a massive failure, it defeats the very purpose of a UI, particularly a UI targeted at consumers.

Picking tools based on first impressions, is in my opinion, a suboptimal strategy. YMMV.

I've been using Win8 for about 1 hour/day for the last few months. The flips between Metro and Desktop still drive me crazy. You might have learned to accept that, or to avoid those flips, but this schizoid mode of operation comes with unneeded cognitive overload for desktop work, even if you did master it.

The thing is, Win8 was optimized for Microsoft's benefit, not yours. Win8.1 gave up some of those things, because (a) it didn't provide the benefit it was optimized for -- windows phone acceptance, and (b) it did alienate a significant portion of the userbase that clang hard to their Win7.

"Using 8 meant you had to learn something", yes. But for what purpose?

There used to be a book on Windows Annoyances that told how to deal with them. The most annoying thing about Windows 8/8.1 is the Windows Update and having to restart the OS in order to update and not knowing how long it is going to take and watching the "Updating 12 of 64" with the dots in a circle loop and not being able to do anything with your computer while that happens. If only Windows Update could run in the background and not need to restart the computer or if it does restart the computer it can estimate how much time is remaining of the updates.

Sorry, but yes, the person who said this ( http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-what-steve-ballmer-thou... ) was, in fact, an idiot.

He should have had his walking papers from the board of directors by that Friday.

But both of us are just assuming.