Did he really do that bad or was he stymied by anti-trust concerns. Major miss in terms of executing on Windows Phone a few years too late but in other ways he really could not use the strength of Windows too much for fear of the government.

The stock price remained stagnant, but under Ballmer, both revenue and net income doubled. He may have sucked at the PR game, but he was far from the worst CEO of the 90s.

Well, as a Clippers fan, Ballmer is such a step up (albeit such a low bar from Sterling). Being an NBA owner is a lot easier than running one of the world's largest companies: Be willing to pay for a few smart/modern execs, splurge on a few players, and the rest kind of runs itself.

Oh, and be in the second largest media market in the country.

Ballmer wasn’t CEO in the 90’s. He also essentially created their enterprise dominance which is why they are where they are today.

Ballmer was a great CEO. The company made record profits, completely dominated the enterprise market, started getting into cloud services before anyone else, and managed to break into the living room and the giant gaming market with the Xbox. He even invested in Facebook. He fumbled the mobile phone fight with Nokia against Apple and got pushed out for it, but overall the company did incredibly well through his tenure.

Now can they make a real VS for Mac that isn’t a rebranded Xamarin?

I'm a very happy Microsoft customer, both personally and in business. I have issues with some of their stuff, but I've had issues with my Apple and Google devices/services...so it's just part of it.

I think the big issue has been since he shifted focus off Windows the QA has fallen off. Thinking "Windows insiders" would uncover bugs that their former internal teams would have normally done...I think, just doesn't work as they planned. Supposedly this is being addressed. And despite Microsoft canning some projects their support for those things are well beyond what Apple or Google would do. But things like Azure Sphere, Hololens etc are very exciting. Their demos for industrial usage at Build/Ignite always amaze me. AWS/GCS seem to be media/consumption driven, while Azure is driven by makers/producers.

MS is really starting to get my attention back as a developer. ~6-10 years ago, Apple took over a large share of the dev community because of combination of iOS plus Unix but as of late they have not been delivering reasons to stay around. MS on the other hand has been working to get developers back. They have been getting out of the way and making it easier to get stuff done.