I disagree. Under Ballmer, Microsoft more than doubled its revenue, profits, and employee base. By standard measurements of CEOs, he did great. (Although the stock price didn't grow, but that may have had to do with the 2001 crash and timing more than anything)

In contrast to all of Microsoft's rivals: IBM left the PC Business. Sun literally died and got bought out. Oracle's products were eaten alive by Open Source.

Under Balmer, Windows 7, XBox and XBox 360, Kinect. Do remember that Windows Mobile 6 was a major competitor vs Blackberry through the early 2000s.

Ballmer tripped up in his final years with Windows8 and failing to bring the success of Windows Mobile 6 to post-iPhone markets. But I think he did good from 2001 through 2011 overall.

The problem is Ballmer point blank completely utterly failed to successfully transition Microsoft in the single biggest revolution in the Computing Industry in the last twenty years. He also utterly failed to successfully transition Microsoft in the second biggest revolution in the Computing Industry in the last twenty years.

Ask microsoft right now, they would probably trade 50% of their windows and office business to have a strong 25% share in the mobile market. They would also probably trade the other 50% of their windows an office business for 50% of the worlds cloud computing business.

He had no CEO vision, he was an excellent COO who streamlined and improved margins, but absolutely failed to make any of the moves necessary for Microsoft to continue to be at the top of the software industry over the long term.

CEOs need the vision to recognize, and the cajones to go after the big 'bet the company' moments...

Compare Microsoft with their 90s peers: IBM, Sun, and Oracle.

Tell me who you'd rather be among the major forces of the 90s. My bet? I'd rather be Microsoft.

The responsibilities of an enterprise-level deployment mean that Microsoft was ill-suited for the changes that occurred in the mid-2000s, just like its other enterprise competitors.

Still, despite being handicapped by Enterprise customers, Microsoft performed okay in the transition to cloud. I mean, Azure actually exists and arguably is a bigger platform than Google's Compute Engine.

Microsoft's track record is that it's 2nd best at a lot of things. Microsoft is 2nd best at cloud (Azure), 2nd best at Bing (remember: Yahoo uses Bing as a backend), 3rd best at web browsers (Edge / IE). 2nd best at gaming (PS4 > Xbox > Wii U in terms of this generation's sales).

They're not really in a bad position at all. They're just not a dominant giant.

Ballmer did a terrible job. Basically stalled the company for 15 years and put them far behind Google and Apple. "he did great" and "the stock price didn't grow" are the opposite of one another.

Ballmer ran the company after the fat part of the Windows rollouts was done. Microsoft was then an incumbent firm, not a growth company. He could have done great and the stock was flat at the same time.

Microsoft stock was essentially flat across his entire 14 year tenure, despite being the dominate OS and Office suite that entire time. By standard measurements he was not a success.

Double the revenue, double the profits, double the employees.

The CEO doesn't control the stock price. He controls employees, revenues and profits. Lets not blame Ballmer for having the unfortunate luck to become CEO at the height of the 2001 stock bubble, and instead look at the things he actually could control.

Wait. I was EXCLUDING the stock bubble. If you include that he's DOWN over his tenure.

sounds like a true comment from someone who's only seen some memes about "developers" and assumed he was smarter than Balmer. There's a reason Microsoft was used by every IT department in the world when he left. He may have had some weaknesses on the consumer front but he made MS into a juggernaut on the business side. I still don't see any other company come even close.

Not at all. I believe the largest thing Nadella did was get out of the way of the individual organizational units and let them do their job; that's why he had so much success in his first few months as he simply unstoppered a blocked up product flow.

Do you have any knowledge about what Balmer's initiatives at Microsoft were? What his goals and objectives were?

It is known he didnt successfully lead microsoft into the mobile computing industry, and its known he didnt successfully lead microsoft into the cloud computing industry... so whatever his initiatives, goals and objectives were, they were wrong.

No. But I know their stock was pretty much flat for 14 years.

The growth during those 14 years was factored in the stock... This exact thing was actually discussed on Martin Shkreli's stream a couple of weeks ago.

Maybe you shouldn't have such strong opinions about things you perhaps don't understand? And not even attempting to understand according to your own admission.