Fortunately, nobody has to care what Ballmer thinks anymore. IMO he, even moreso than BillG, was the animus behind the insanely cultish POV that MSFT had for a

Fortunately, nobody has to care what Ballmer thinks anymore. IMO he, even moreso than BillG, was the animus behind the insanely cultish POV that MSFT had for a long, long time. As recently as 2009, working there led otherwise smart people to say really dumb things for, I guess, political reasons. I'm in the project management space. We have a product that compliments Project Server, and early on we did lots of joint deals with MSFT's Proj Server unit. Even well after the introduction of the iPhone -- which, for most phone makers, was a serious wakeup call about what you could do with a phone -- they acted like it was a personal insult every time they saw a professional associate using something other than Windows Mobile. "Get one of these! It's just as good!" Keep in mind that, in 2009, WinMo was a complete dumpster fire. App availability was awkward (no built-in stores yet), but there were MONSTROUS gaps in capability in the devices out of the box. For example, the native mail client couldn't do IMAP. But sure, it's "just as good". iPods -- which were really ubiquitous -- set them off, too. And if you mentioned having a PlayStation, they'd want to know why you didn't have an XBox instead. They had "amnesty barrels" you could throw away your non-MSFT tech in. It was really, really, really goofy and rah-rah and honestly creepy. You notice how, today, MSFT actually understands they're part of a diverse computing landscape? Sharepoint actually works on non-MSFT browsers, for example. Office 365 runs like a champ in pretty much ANY decent browser, on any platform. I can run a real iOS build of Office on my iPad, and the Mac version is really great. ALL OF THIS is post-Ballmer.