I wonder why the board of directors left him as CEO after Gates’ retirement.
Also reportedly Ballmer was disagreeing with Gates about how important the market of smartphones and tablets is, with Gates wanting to invest heavily in it. Oops!
As an outsider it seems to me that all Microsoft did during Ballmer was to milk the cash cows created during Bill Gates and at the same time destroy the good will of developers and the morale of their employees.
I’m assuming any big company acquires a certain inertia and will keep producing money for as long as there is demand and the supply can meet it. Just look at Apple.
So what did Ballmer do that can be praised?
Also Bill Gates was "chief software architect" during the Longhorn/Vista thing so he's hardly absolved of blame.
I have a feeling that even now Windows XP is more popular than people think and that they aren't reporting the real number of Windows XP installs in the wild.
So they were competing against themselves, against a previous version that has been wildly successful, enough so that virtually nobody upgraded it. I mean, besides people capable of assembling and upgrading their PCs, component by component, I'm pretty sure that everybody bought into Windows 7 and later via new PCs. And PCs becoming good enough to keep around for years, I think the writing was on the wall that Windows's revenue will eventually go down.
We'll never know. But Satya seems to be doing very well indeed with a combination of better technical direction and removing Ballmer-era toxicity.
[1] On one project I worked on was an embedded system, and I joked that the only way that Ballmer would let it ship (if he'd known about it) would be to rename it "Microsoft Windows, Event-Loop-and-Some-Interrupt-Handlers Edition," whereupon it didn't matter what the heck the software looked like on the inside. As long as it said "Windows" somewhere on the outside, he'd be happy.