Thinking back to Satya Nadella's book, I still think its incredible that he was selected, and even after it was incredible that he the impact that he had. I guess where I'm getting with this is that to have been able to see and recognize that he had the potential to take Microsoft in the right direction and that he actually was able to take them there is pretty awesome. They could have hired someone from outside, or someone who might fit the look / character of a mega corp CEO but they took a risk with him and I'm glad that it paid off.

for what its worth, Ballmer was apparently a massive, massive sponsor of Satya all the way to the top. Satya wouldnt have happened without Ballmer. for all his flaws as CEO, he did one thing right.

I can see that happening in the second half of this decade as Google continues to grow and absorb more and more of the Internet.

Guessing you meant cease to exist here, but also seizing the intellectual property of Bell Labs seemed to work out in the 1956 consent decree:

The Bell System was obligated to license all its patents royalty free, and it was barred from entering any industry other than telecommunications.

...

Although the 1956 consent decree was not effective in ending market foreclosure, it permanently increased the scale of US innovation.

https://voxeu.org/article/how-antitrust-enforcement-can-spur...

Surface, Azure, Minecraft, Github, VSCode and the whole renewed developer focus... those seem like pretty strong shifts and not just 'surfing the wave'.

You don't become a $1.2T company by surfing a wave. Its stock price has more than quintupled. IBM's stock price is almost flat over 10 years. GE is down over the decade. Changing direction for a ship that large is very, very hard--a seemingly intractable problem but not for the model Microsoft has provided.