"MS was basically making money no matter what given the highly lucrative office + windows franchise that Bill Gates left behind. I wouldn't credit Balmer with t

"MS was basically making money no matter what given the highly lucrative office + windows franchise that Bill Gates left behind. I wouldn't credit Balmer with that too much he just basically kept on milking that. The problem by the time he left was that there was increasingly less to squeeze." No, this is not fair. Ballmer reconfigured sales channels, created an array of Enterprise offers including cloud - that's what enabled him to grow MS substantially during those years. "Office is now liberated from Windows and making a lot of money for MS again. " - it always was. The 'windows everything' strategy makes sense in the 2000's. iOS is pretty similar to MacOS - it worked for Apple. It even made sense early on in cloud. Satya is the right choice for the right time, and it was right in hindsight to go cloud-linux and other things ... But there's too much 'narrative' around this Satya thing.