Ballmer was also an okay CEO, he missed mobile but he didn’t miss cloud and made MSFT a crapton of money.

Definitely no star, heck back in the day he tried to convince Bill Gates to stop investing in this dead end “Windows” project because OS/2 was obviously the future. But certainly not a train wreck like Baker.

He also killed the Microsoft courier duel screen tablet as he didn't see it as integrating well with office. Killing possible the best designed consumer tablet at the time allowing Apple and Google to own mobile.

IIRC he did mosrly miss cloud. Microsoft stagnated under Balmer[0] and only picked up after Nadella started really pushing cloud.

Edit: actually revenue did increase a lot under Balmer just not stock price.

[0] https://www.statista.com/chart/1399/microsoft-stock-under-st...

Azure started under Ballmer’s tenure as CEO, years before Nadella became CEO, and now is the second biggest cloud company in the world. I wish I could mostly miss something like that.

Not to say Nadella doesn’t deserve most of the credit but it speaks well of Ballmer that an internally promoted employee like Nadella who replaced him did so well.

Again I can nitpick but he grew revenue and did not fatally injure MSFT. He was mediocre but not terrible is all I’m saying.

Mitchell worked on Mozilla 20 years before becoming its CEO. MS is a company, Firefox is a product. Doesn't seem like you're making a lot of sense.

Mozilla is a company