Sure, Gates looked like the archetype nerd any time he presented something. But not was lightyears better than the whole "developers developers developers" dance Ballmer managed to pull.
Sadly the tech media have over the years blended over into lifestyle media. No longer is the computer or phone something to get a job done and that's it, now its a indicator of how you see yourself and how you want others to see you. And that image goes all the way back to the company making them, and the people that are the faces of said company.
I wonder if Ballmer really got bad press outside of geeky circles until relatively late in his career, when hindsight showed that Microsoft was missing out on a lot of new products.
Funny video — thanks for sharing.
Doesn't that ignore the XBox and the dominance of Windows in the consumer market?
I'm not so sure. Imagine Microsoft had a lazy/disciplined CEO who said, "Windows and Office development only. No Bing, no XBox, no Azure, no Windows Phone, no Nokia". Would the shareholders be richer now?
Reasonably effective, but not inarguably, since investor basically care only about one thing only: RoI. Under Ballmer's reign, the stock generally remained flat. Microsoft paid dividends, so investors still got some RoI, but not even close to what they could get on Apple in the same era. Under Nadella the share prices went up by 50% (100% really if you count from when Ballmer announced he'd be leaving), so Nadella is inarguably a more effective CEO for short term investors by several orders of magnitude. Nadella's strategy may be slightly more risky, so Ballmer might be an arguably better CEO for risk-averse long-term investors.
I believe that the hypothesis of the article is that people hated Microsoft because of Ballmer.
However, it is obvious that we are talking about subjective things here, and establishing causality is certainly not easy.
He was the face of "bad" Microsoft, the unashamedly anti-competitive win-at-all-costs bully. Gates could win some people back with his nerd-cred and things like the mid-'00s "security push". Ballmer was first and foremost a suit, or rather a suit trying to pretend he's down with the nerds just enough to screw them as soon as they turn around, and his "fuck you" attitude wasn't exactly friendly.
> I'm don't think Ballmer's list of accomplishments at Microsoft is fully appreciated
Probably because they were accomplishments for Microsoft rather than for the industry as a whole. Apple gets a lot of leeway because the iPhone really made a difference for the industry, not just winning but drawing a path. Microsoft has not really done anything like that since the Win 95 / Office / IE 5 progression.
There are developers that actually do enjoy using Microsoft stacks, even though we also have experience using other systems.