Things were already going horribly wrong, and they put a despot in charge to soak up the blame for all of the terrible things his peers, subordinates and predecessors were already cocking up. The next person has a comparatively easy job of leading a Renaissance, assuming he didn't manage to run it into the ground in the interim. Which he nearly did.
I really miss http://minimsft.blogspot.com/ and not just for the schadenfreude. There was quite a bit of wisdom to be extracted from hindsight is 20/20 commentary, when you're an outside observer.
This is something that people keep saying but he way actually right and at this point this is just an Internet meme.
I remember that moment. The iPhone costed $800 with a phone plan. Insane. Nobody does that even today, so in that regard he was right.
Only after the iPhone 3 and $200 phone with a contract did it ever start selling.
Seriously, if price wasn't a problem and Ballmer was wrong, why did Apple even drop the price?
Truth is this wasn't that long ago, I still remember it, and the price drop was a huge deal to a lot of people.
Articles like these were everywhere.
Electricity, the internet, eCommerce, iPhone, even Bitcoin weren't obvious hits in the least. If the success of bitcoin was guaranteed or obvious, In 2009, I'd have bought 111,111 bitcoins for $100 at $0.0009 per bitcoin.
Now, I'd be a billionaire.
Lower prices definitely had benefits, but 3/4 of a billion dollars in revenue clearly shows that many people would buy such an expensive phone.
It was aleeady a success. Then it became a world beater.
Yes, I am sure it had nothing to do with him lacking the basic vision one would expect in any tech CEO and saying idiotic things like "no one would buy such an expensive phone" (about the iPhone).
If you look like a buffoon, you act like a buffoon, and you talk like a buffoon...