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I disagree, I think anyone the put in charge would have done well. Satya came in during one of the biggest bull runs in history and just surfed the wave. Even Ballmer would have had a hard time to stop that.

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

They are. Microsoft, especially under Ballmer, was notoriously anti-OSS (open-source). Not only did Satya make the decision to shift the company to be cloud focused, he represented a change of guard when it was critically important to make peace with the open-source community.

Ballmer: Called Linux "Cancer". Literally.

Satya: "We are all in on open-source"

Not just that, but their core business is strong. Even with the rise of Apple and Google OSes, Windows and Office is still a humongous market.

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.

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