Windows is only a small part of MS.
Nadella gets a lot of/all the credit for Azure which is the only legit competition to AWS.
O365 has been great for their adoption too.
And then there’s all the “free” dev tools like GitHub (acquisition), typescript, vs code etc. which bolsters their image.
I can’t even imagine ms under Balmer giving away that much shit. Hell, I wanted to build apps for lumia and they wanted to charge me an arm and a leg just to get started. This was at a time when their store didn’t have anything going for itself.
Not “great novels” but great “great world building”. I’ve seen some absolute bangers out there where the concepts, characters and even the overall plot blew my mind away. However, the authors couldn’t write decent dialogues or a coherent chapter of their life depended on it. So, most people wouldn’t be exposed to their ideas.