I'm not sure if Ballmer is actively removing talent, but I'm willing to believe that he's simply created an environment so hostile to aggressive fast-moving types of people (the exact sort you need to work fast and catch up from behind in the consumer space), that they'll flee of their own accord.

IMO the loss of Allard (and consequently now, Pioneer Studios) is the worst mistake MS has made in the field of consumer products.

Spolsky had an "architecture astronaut" critique in part about how Ozzie keeps blowing years rewriting Notes: http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/05/01.html

Rereading that article, I had forgotten about this part:

"because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I'm sorry. It seems like it should be. But it's not."

I read that same bit again. Kudos to Dropbox - I would have agreed with that statement if Dropbox hadn't existed

That's because Microsoft is not familiar with the single most important principle when designing consumer products ... simplicity and exclusion.

Dropbox is useful because it's in essence a simple product. Every time Microsoft designs something, it has to include everything but the kitchen sink.

Remember though, Ballmer is the single largest shareholder of MSFT that is still actively involved with the company. He's pretty secure, and has a tremendous amount of skin in the game. He's also not an idiot.

Nobody doubts his motivation.

People doubt his talent and his cluefulness level.

Precisely. Perhaps most famously his total failure to foresee the successes of iPad, iPhone and then iPad. Ballmer laughing these devices off rather than seeing the future in them was painful to watch.

Another tangential favorite is when Mossberg asked Ballmer about the, at the time, new fangled "post PC" devices at the All Things Digital interview. Clueless is a very apt description.

Not only did he miss the wave of the future - we all do, sometimes. The problem here is that he missed the wave of the future - twice! (iPhone, then iPad) - while the entire rest of the world rightly recognized them as game-changers.

This guy is completely out of touch with consumer reality.

I'm not sure what kind of logic would cause a CEO to look at throngs of millions of people, lined up to buy the most hyped, most-published consumer electronics device ever produced. Then completely dismiss it altogether.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again. Maybe leave Ballmer in place for the enterprise products, but they need to give everything consumer-related to Allard and give him carte blanche and the entire MS fortune to do what he wants. There's a man who has a pulse on consumer products. He might be the closest thing to Jony Ive or Steve Jobs that MS has ever seen.