The comment about the 90's is simply not true. I've been a successful (e.g., getting paid) developer since the 80s and have never been in the Microsoft stack. With the exception of a small bit of VMS-hosted development in the 80s, everything I have done in my career has been hosted on some sort of Unix. And I'm not some outlier. Sun Microsystems dominated the 90s for problems of just about any scale beyond the small workgroup.
I make this point because many of us (both engineers and customers alike) pushed back hard against Microsoft. They actively fought against open standards and interoperability. We literally thought of them as the evil empire. Even as late as the mid 2000s, when I was at Yahoo and there was talk of a Microsoft acquisition, I would have quit rather than work at Microsoft.
Economics aside, changing that toxic culture is what I appreciate most about Nadella's time as CEO. He has (it appears) made Microsoft into a citizen.
You jumped from ship to ship while you could have just been a Windows developer the whole time. Not that you wouldn't have had a bunch of ships to jump between in Windows-land.
I make this point because many of us (both engineers and customers alike) pushed back hard against Microsoft. They actively fought against open standards and interoperability. We literally thought of them as the evil empire. Even as late as the mid 2000s, when I was at Yahoo and there was talk of a Microsoft acquisition, I would have quit rather than work at Microsoft.
Economics aside, changing that toxic culture is what I appreciate most about Nadella's time as CEO. He has (it appears) made Microsoft into a citizen.