How is Jobs overrated because of Apple's marketing team? He was the CEO; it was his marketing team. Even if you want to argue that it was already great when he got (back) there, it's still to his credit that he built the company around making such good use of it. If you want to blame CEOs for everything that goes wrong with a company, you pretty much have to give them credit for everything that goes right, too. Normally I don't think CEOs are nearly that important either way, but in this case it's fair to give Jobs a lot of the credit, precisely because Apple's brand marketing was so effective and the company positioned itself and its products around that brand as well as it did.

That's exactly what Microsoft, and especially Ballmer, never did. As the author points out, maybe Steve Jobs crashing your party would make the other guests feel less cool, but the reality is that a lot of people want to be hangers-on and aren't sufficiently introspective to feel uncool about it. The completion of the analogy is that Jobs got a lot of your guests to pay him $300 for the privilege of following him to crash the next party, while Ballmer brought $20 worth of bad vodka, then robbed your apartment while you were passed out. They both made money without creating much value; the difference is at whose expense they did so.