From an outside Windows user and admin perspective, I find it weird to blame Balmer here. I recall the era under Balmer as one where Microsoft made a lot of stupid moves, sure, but they were generally still pretty responsive to user feedback and I distinctly recall receiving our paid support on SQL issues from actual Microsoft-employed SQL engineers. Today all our paid support issues seem to go through clueless third party companies, and Microsoft very much seems to actively despise Windows users.