Ballmer's salary was $260K IIRC. Many of his underlings made more than that. He's still an un-inspiring billionaire (and a very talented businessman, which few people give him credit for).
He helped make the Microsoft Surface line. At the time it had some trouble starting out but now Microsoft has a portfolio of Surface products that can actually go head to head with Apple products while Google's hardware strategy just keeps on being more and more confusing and weird.
Plus "Developers, developers, developers", right? Hilarious antics aside, doesn't he get some credit for pointing in that direction? FFWD a few years to VSC, Github, MS as arguably world's leading contrib to OSS... I came of professional age being pretty anti-M$ (and w good reason), but things do, sometimes, eventually, change.
"Developers, developers, developers" was in 2000, around the same time Ballmer was saying "Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works."[1]
The context of the "Developers, developers, developers" thing was that MS was fighting against open source to try to attract developers to the Windows platform instead.
Visual Studio Code, Github etc only came after Ballmer left.
Thanks @nl, quite right -- and I do recall, having been there -- but my point was not that Ballmer had all the right ideas(!), rather that his emphasis on developers led eventually to the org (under Satya) embracing OSS which IMHO represents a logical (tho far from inevitable) progression or evolution.
