6 years and a single CEO does not constitute a rebirth. When the next CEO is still doing the same thing, you can talk about what Microsoft is.
Microsoft is a company run by people, and those people have changed (the "they" you mentioned). Gates & Balmer are now nothing more than shareholders (Gates stepped down from the board in March this year). Believe it or not, it's people that determine how a company is run and the people running Microsoft today are not the people that were running it in the 80s & 90s.
Large business units with billions in revenue take years to change direction, and we've seen that clearly happen under Nadella.
I will admit that it says something that Satya was able to survive inside of Microsoft during the worst parts of this, but I don't know if that says more about how amazing Satya is, or that the internal toxicity is over-reported. We all know multiple people who have reported horrible things about Amazon too, and yet there are still people who enjoy working there.
Everyone has their own version of the truth, but once bitten twice shy, and I've lost count of the bite marks. Have your truth, just keep it outside of arm's reach of my nose, thank you.
And I'm sure it had zero benefit from exaggerating stories to increase readership. I've worked at companies that have been the ire of the press, and know first hand it's many degrees separated from reality.
> It wasn't just a despot at the wheel
Except it was. We've seen this consistently in leadership, including just recently WeWork, Uber and the U.S. government. When a nasty person is at top, it legitimizes nasty people everywhere else.
> We all know multiple people who have reported horrible things about Amazon too,
No, we don't actually know them. We read some news stories specifically centered around warehousing and distribution as Amazon grew from 34,000 employees in 2010 to over 1,000,000 in 2020.
Reminds me of when Visual Studio Code came out and some people denied themselves of what would end up being one of the best editors to come out in a while just because they refused to use something with such a Microsoft-ey name...
They aren't just a large company that people have an old grudge against. They're very specifically the people who kept us from having the option to not consider a particular company and still have any reasonable options at all.
Because this is all tangential to the fact that in a world that now moves one financial quarter at a time, six years is a lifetime.
MS's direction has been consistent and it's been good. If you're waiting for another six years to let MS prove themselves, it's on you, but again, plenty of other people will reap the benefits of not doing so