Microsoft does a lot less anticompetitive in 2024 than they did in the nineties. It's actually quite a lot of progress. As much as the dark patterns are annoyi

Microsoft does a lot less anticompetitive in 2024 than they did in the nineties. It's actually quite a lot of progress. As much as the dark patterns are annoying, Satya also turned around Microsoft's complete inability to build software. It got so bad that virtually no progress was made on any Microsoft products from 2000 through 2010. Many of their developer tools today are... nice. The stock price was the same in 1999 as in 2016. Today, it's up almost 10x. No organization is perfect, and acknowledging everything Microsoft is doing wrong, it's a world of difference from Ballmer. Ballmer was on the far end of the incompetence spectrum, the abusive management style spectrum, and the hardball antitrust spectrum (which no longer even worked with real competition from mobile, iPad, and web apps). A lot of the reason you see so much praise is the comparison. It's easy to ignore Ballmer's contributions, since there weren't any. The ones you give are... a stretch.