Have a look: [1] [2] - what changed really was simply the price/earnings multiplier, not really the underlying fundamentals. Though this is very important, I don't think it's the most important part of the Ballmer culture era.
Revenues and product line expansion grew phenomenally, Ballmer brought huge new business lines and the cloud into the fore.
The culture may have been perceived as toxic by some, but it's debatable if that's just hearsay or if it had a real effect on productivity etc..
That Ballmer failed on a few points (slow to embrace Linux) is fine - no big companies win everywhere and neither will Satya. MS failed at search? Well Google failed as social as well. Neither of them are hard done by it, there are other unassailable market leaders who do it better somewhere else anyhow,
Satya is obviously a welcome shift, and culture change was probably timely along with embrace of open source etc. (right man for the right time) - but Ballmer was good for MSFT. He was the right man for the right time as well, and probably good that he left when he did.
My experience is that it's really, really hard to judge culture from the outside - and literally different buildings/groups have completely different culture.
Amazon will be a case study in that stage of growth however - it may have a lot to do with how much Bezos cares to deal with it, or play with rockets all day like Larry and Sergei. I wonder how very few companies have done that really well - i.e. gone from 15K -> 100K and maintained dynamism. Probably few if any.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267805/microsofts-global...
[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/sto...