It appears to be 2004. He indicates that he was hired in 1999, and elsewhere he talks about the number of managers he's had in five years.

The resume shows he moved to Yahoo in 2007, then Amazon, then went independent.

I wonder what a similar post would say about Microsoft today.

Well. I may not have any inside info but I'd wager that 2004 MS and 2015 MS are very different workplaces indeed.

They are/were. I worked there from Feb 2000 until Dec 2014. The company changed a great deal over that time. Without commenting directly on Ballmer I will say Satya Nadella is a great CEO and he is doing a great job transforming the company.

Hopefully he will take responsibility for cleaning up the app store and stop focusing on app count. I wrote Satya, the GM of the Windows Store, and various PMs on that team, but nothing.

Countless tons of crap on the store. MS paying for shovelware. CSRs defending fake versions of Dropbox. Fake Windows Updates on the store. Publishers pretending to be Microsoft or other big vendors. Smaller ISVs unable to get scam versions of their software removed. Hell, even Netflix had s tough time getting rid of fake Netflix apps.

Thanks, we've updated the title.

First cached by the Internet Archive in Feb. 2005 https://web.archive.org/web/20050208021807/http://www.qbrund...