“MS products aren’t getting any better. Last years of Ballmer’s reign were a disaster of epic proportions; he was that close to killing the company.”
The company made record profits under the guy, despite 24/7 caterwauling from All of the Linux loons, Apple fanatics, and Android devotees that bash every single product and service that company has ever put out as being the worse thing ever created in the history of mankind.
I mean that was the longest screed of nonsense I’ve ever read about that company. It’s like listening to Democrats talk about the Tea Party.
Remember how the coyote runs past the end of the cliff, pauses in the air, and looks down? MS was very close to that situation. Otherwise you'd have to accept that Ballmer, the geniusest genius of all times, was "pushed" by the board to leave for no good reason. And you'd have to accept that the new people in charge at MS are foolish in their rush to undo the mistakes of Windows 8. Was the MS leadership wrong back then, or is it wrong now? It can't be "neither," but - for MS haters - it can be "both" :-)
I personally believe that Win7 was the best Windows OS ever. Win8 has a lot of good things under the hood, like very fast startup/shutdown times. However the ugly, counterproductive and inconsistent GUI (two control panels?) is killing the adoption rate. A marriage of the Win8 kernel and the Aero of Win7 would do wonders. Flat, pastel-colored, crude decorations of windows are easy to explain - MS wanted to reduce the GPU load, so that Windows can run on a tablet. But excuse me, this here PC is not lacking in the shaders department! Let the desktop be a desktop, and experiment with tablet GUI on tablets. Isn't that what everyone - except MS - does?
Balmer, sadly, replaced Microsoft's one-time pioneering spirit with a spirit of CYA and look goodism. Whereas Google employees spend 20% of their time innovating their projects on the company's dime, Microsoft employees under the Balmer regime spent that same 20% of their time preening to avoid being cut through Balmer's outdated performance management scheme.
Innovation is all but dead at Microsoft. They have become copycats because they have chosen to hire a certain type of employee and to build a certain type of culture.