Nadella built new product categories for the company.
I think two more years with Ballmer would have made the the prophecy valid.
> Ballmer is a good used car salesman.
Ballmer was a very very good salesman. The reason Azure or all these new shiny MSFT products (e.g. teams) have a leg is because Ballmer already sold AD to almost every corp out there. Microsoft went from being 0 in enterprise to bigger than anyone else and that is now the main money printer and also the future of the company.
One thing everyone forgets is Nadella was nowhere to be found few years before becoming CEO. Ballmer made a very very good successor choice elevating Nadella quickly in few years.
On the other hand, Balmer would never allowed Windows development experience to be as bad nowadays.
These are all nice things for developers, but I don't think they are actually good for Microsoft in the long-term or their bottom line in the short term. At least not the way they've been executed.
If anything, the treatment of Microsoft's older cash cows under Nadella has been disastrous, essentially throwing goodwill and money away - e.g., the quality of and feature development in Windows.
See the Blazor amd Aspire push, WSL and XBox tooling on VS variants, versus anything desktop.
DevDiv is now under Azure as well, and is more than just .NET.
The rest of the office-for-iOS suite took heavy inspiration from that, and didn't take a decent shape until 2016-2017.
Off the top of my head, since Jobs death Apple has launched AirPods, Apple Watch, Vision Pro, Car Play, Home Play, M-series MacBooks, and they’ve greatly expanded their services business.
He may look and sound like a used car salesman but was anything but.
Yes, Nadella did end up removing Windows Phone but you had to give it to Ballmer for standing behind that thing even when it was, at times, very silly!
As an aside, that was something I think that is one idea Ballmer did ok on. The focus on developers as an admittance that Microsoft cannot do everything and that you need to help others work with them. Developers (x 3), may have been silly but it sure is a good stance to get behind.
By contrast, as much as Apple talks about the App store, they seem to be becoming more inward focused on a lot of things. For better or worse, we are yet to know.