[bobobob420]

He botched Microsoft pretty bad.. windows 8 was his hallmark project no? And the beginning of surface was not that good. Once Satya took over Microsoft became a powerhouse again with their cloud/office integration + focus on azure.

[jjeaff]

And yet, azure and office 365 were both created under Ballmer.

[bobobob420]

So what they would have been created anyways. It’s satya’s business mind in propelling Microsoft’s business that made it a huge success, something ballmer was failing to do

[tapirl]

Windows 8 is the win OS I have happiest experiences with. It has far less bugs than windows 10, even today's windows 10.

It is windows 8 let me return from Linux to Windows, and it is windows 10 let me back to Linux again.

[phkahler]

Computers have been going back and forth between desktop and central servers for 40 years. When people tire of the cloud and shift back to local control, microsoft will no longer have an advantage over alternatives.

[rytill]

I can’t tell if this is a manufactured pattern, or if it’s true and I’m missing something because I haven’t been alive long enough.

From what I can tell, once upon a time we had mainframes and server rooms and big expensive computers, and there was no personal computing.

Then, we got personal computing and had very limited consumer connection to centralized servers on them. A lot of people barely had internet.

Then, we connected personal computing to centralized servers and many products were born.

Now, we have platforms built for creating centralized services because managing your own hardware was not necessary.

Where is the pattern there? It seems like you’re extrapolating a wave pattern from what could be a single datapoint. We got this, we got that, we connected them, now we’re here. Where is the back-and-forth you implied?

[phkahler]

After desktops came along like the Apple II and DOS based PCs, people had full control. Then we got networking to share printers, and IT started controlling things again. It's been a constant back and forth ever since. Not all the way to the extremes, and not every company at the same time. Not everyone ran Novell Netware for example.

[belltaco]

That makes no sense. You seem to be confusing Windows with ChromeOS.