That's the Ballmer Doctrine and he's toast. His scorched Earth policies lead to things like the Zune, products like Bing getting almost zero traction, and the endless, futile struggle for Windows Phone to register at all on world-wide usage metrics.
Nadella has a different approach. He built Azure, a platform that could have been Windows exclusive but wasn't. I think he understands what open-source can do for Microsoft, and what Microsoft can do for open-source.
Gates wasn't an extinguisher, he was a hard charger that would try to make best-of-breed products. Where others slowed down or got distracted, Microsoft would stay focused. That's how Visual Studio beat out Borland C++, how Word prevailed over WordPerfect, how Excel trounced Lotus 1-2-3.
Once Microsoft had taken a commanding lead in those markets the influence of Ballmer started to be more severe. He was blood-thirsty, he wanted to crush anyone left. This became clear in the anti-trust trials where it was Ballmer that wanted to crush, kill, and destroy anyone in the way of Windows achieving 100% market share.
Remember, Gates was a programmer who happened to be CEO. He was driven to make products that people wanted, to win by simply being technically better: More features, more modest system requirements, more backwards compatibility.
Then Ballmer took over and that all went out the window.
Gates was quite a cut throat business man. He might be the warm philanthropist gates now, but he was quite the cut throat business man back in the day. How do you think Netscape market share went from like 90% to pretty much 0?
I think the point of having an Internet browser preinstalled when you bought a computer had some merits. I can't think of many consumer computing devices that don't come with a pre installed browser these days.
In retrospect the whole DoJ trial seems rather quaint to be honest.
Plus it wasn't as if you couldn't install Netscape and decide through personal choice to use that over IE.
Compare that with iOS where not only does it come with Safari pre installed, but if you install any other browser it HAS to run WebKit and cannot provide functionality Apple doesn't allow.
Objectively that seems to be a lot more protectionist and subject to anti-trust laws than anything Microsoft ever did.
He was a competitive person, he was driven to succeed. For a while there it was (sadly) the case that Internet Explorer 6 was the best browser.
Netscape dropped the ball, ironically they were slow to pick up on open standards. Their JavaScript implementation was notoriously buggy, that alone probably held back development of the modern web by almost a decade. They were also trying to monetize the browser itself which slowed uptake considerably.
Netscape dug their own grave on this one. Microsoft just pushed them into it.
Now don't get me wrong, Internet Explorer 6 turned out to be a serious scourge, and Microsoft has done some very, very dirty things, but their actions in that particular era did two things: Made browsers free for consumers and laid the foundation for AJAX because of their quirky XMLHttpRequest stub meant to help Outlook run in the browser.
Nadella has a different approach. He built Azure, a platform that could have been Windows exclusive but wasn't. I think he understands what open-source can do for Microsoft, and what Microsoft can do for open-source.
Gates wasn't an extinguisher, he was a hard charger that would try to make best-of-breed products. Where others slowed down or got distracted, Microsoft would stay focused. That's how Visual Studio beat out Borland C++, how Word prevailed over WordPerfect, how Excel trounced Lotus 1-2-3.
Once Microsoft had taken a commanding lead in those markets the influence of Ballmer started to be more severe. He was blood-thirsty, he wanted to crush anyone left. This became clear in the anti-trust trials where it was Ballmer that wanted to crush, kill, and destroy anyone in the way of Windows achieving 100% market share.
Remember, Gates was a programmer who happened to be CEO. He was driven to make products that people wanted, to win by simply being technically better: More features, more modest system requirements, more backwards compatibility.
Then Ballmer took over and that all went out the window.