Whatever bad things you can say about Ballmer, he wasn't out to gut Microsoft. He simply made decisions that were short-sighted and insular. Well, and the review system (which caused a bunch of good people to leave for Google in Kirkland, and some other places).

Once, I was doing an embedded system for a consumer product in the Xbox group. We started out trying to using Windows CE, and after three months of pushing that horrible mess up a hill [holy Toledo, what a steaming pile...] we ditched it in favor of something really simple that could actually do the job, instead of the politically correct thing that we'd been "encouraged" to do. (Honestly, words fail me at how badly designed and buggy the the whole WinCE code base was).

At the time, Ballmer was all about everything having to be Windows. "Windows Foundation" for TV, "Windows Auto", Windows This-and-That. I joked that we wouldn't be allowed to ship our firmware until we named it something like "Windows Just An Event Loop And Some Interrupt Handlers".