Look, as an ex-MSFT person I'm only glad to see someone shit on Ballmer. I didn't like the guy myself. But the pillars of today's Microsoft success were all created by him. Azure? Ballmer. Subscription services (and Office 365 in particular)? Ballmer. XBOX? Ballmer. Satya gets _way_ too much credit for what Microsoft is today. I feel that's mostly because he looks better on stage, and that's a very low bar. A raging gorilla looks better on stage than Ballmer.

Can you show me that Ballmer created XBOX?

The nerve of the CEO growing revenue and profit! When will they ever learn from the unicorns - success is all about revenue growth, not being profitable and going public.

There were several good responses to my message like yours.

A ceo of a tech company has to both grow revenue and cultivate new technologies. A major company working in almost every area like microsoft has to do even more, so they don't get usurped like endless other former leading companies. Microsoft was challenged in a lot of ways. Ballmer did very well on the bringing in more money area.

1. mobile phones (basically completely blew it here - they had all the pieces but couldn't put them together because of both poor execution and more nimble competitors). Ballmer did terrible here. Even buying nokia was a disaster.

2. web - they managed to keep it microsoft centric for a long time where it only rendered correctly on ie3, but it eventually escaped them. they do sell some web server software, but the days where it had to render correctly on windows, both preventing other platforms from being used and being used for hosting web apps are gone. He held the world at bay for a long time, so I'll give him 25% success here.

3. cloud - azure started under him, so I'd give him 50% success. Who would have thought amazon would kick Microsoft's butt so thoroughly. I saw so many good people go to work there, I never thought amazon would succeed with such a different philosophy, people leaving there so frequently after 2 years.

4. Money, growth - 4/4. So much money. Yet at the same time, people started looking for other companies, and the company felt more and more like it was missing out by forcing everything to reinforce windows and office.

Satya has at least changed the tenor of the company, attracting developers back. I do think Windows seems to have turned into a terrible mess, with unless beta releases with lots of bugs. They fired all the testers because they weren't doing anything? Satya was also leading the azure division, so I think he does get some credit for that.

If Microsoft had “won” in Mobile by licensing Windows Mobile, where would it have gotten them? Google “won over” OEMs and got a whopping $21 billion in profit over eight years for their trouble.

https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-generate...

There was speculation that Microsoft made more from Android for years from patents than Google made.

Besides, Microsoft is still making pretty good money on mobile by targeting developers with Azure and tools like Xamarin

Control of android or being the alternative safe choice that everyone builds apps for is worth a lot of money, but you can also use it to reinforce use of your core apps, like google's gmail and search. microsoft instead lost people from using office apps on android, as they market decayed. sure, they are huge and rich and can afford it, and eventually got to office 360 and android versions of office apps. But it would have been even better for them have never had to suffer loss of marketshare to google docs, and they were fortunate to not loose too much share.

I doubt that there are too many professionals using GSuite on phones in the place of Office and the high end and midrange Android tablet market is non existent.

I also doubt that too many people who are spending less than $300 on phones (the average selling price of Android phones) are the target market for Microsoft.

Statistically, Google has captured market share of people with less disposable income than Apple has. It’s at most Pyrrhic victory.

A large majority of "professional" software engineers use google email on their phones. And I've used gdocs etc at times on my phone continuously over the past 20 years, and many of them i was working at microsoft. Apples sales increased for a long time, even though google's sales increased faster apple was, i repeat was capturing most of the profit. We'll see if that happens. I expect several companies out of china to take the android market from samsung (still using android though).

That's great but you haven't provided any specific examples.

Ballmer did not 'squeeze lemons' - he multiplied the company by like 4x. The 'cloud' FYI was a big new thing. All MS products have evolved quite a lot and are not the 'same products'.

What new products / initiatives has Satya introduced that are lining up to be the future of MS? That will replace the core products sometime?