Ultimately the answer doesn't matter to me. The company has always been a bully, both in the marketplace and internally towards their staff. No one wants to see a bully succeed.

Edit: Wikipedia says "Since the 2000s, Microsoft used a stack ranking similar to the vitality curve." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve#Criticisms_of_ra...) Ballmer became CEO of Microsoft January 2000.