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Comment by johnloeber | Hacker News Reader

I've had the same thought for a long time. I think this is spot-on. Ballmer is underrated in that he put Microsoft into a profoundly well-resourced position that a better product leader was then able to make productive use of.

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I'd love to have Ballmer back. The Microsoft products I use (Windows) have become increasingly crappified under current leadership.

Ballmer was there when Longhorn/Vista happened.

He was there when 7 happened as well.

Vista was good, just slow on the older contemporary computers. I bought a new properly specced machine when it was released and it was a significant improvement over XP.

Vista was utter garbage. It is historical revisionism to only blame it's failing on minimum requirements. Not only was it slow, it was a horrible clickfest eg with almost 20 clicks and almost as many windows to change wifi settings. At that time (and probably still today) do you know how many did you need to get to wifi settings on OSX? 3 or 4. That was insulting to a windows user and I've never used windows again as my primary choice of OS. Windows 11 is on a good path to become Vista as it's enshittified to hell and back.

I second that, and I don’t have a much better opinion on 7 and eight. I kind of like 10 and 11 on their corporate crapware-free versions.

Still would prefer a Unix like OS though. Windows is too complicated to debug.

Longhorn was a failure born of ambition.

W10-11's failures' are born of greed.

Longhorn was a failure born out of poor management. Vista what was left of Longhorn.

Consumer Windows doesn't generate enough revenue per customer and the consumer OS space is commodified, so I'd say it's getting the treatment it deserves.

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