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Is Steve Ballmer the Most Underrated CEO of the 21st Century?

A reconsideration of the Microsoft CEO everybody loves to hate

Like any blue chip company, they also attracted several outstanding outside candidates like Alan Mulaney, who turned around Ford, and Pat Gelsinger, now CEO of Intel, and among insiders Tony Bates was considered the most likely option. It is the apotheosis of investments from the Ballmer era that bore fruit a decade later: it would not have happened without the cloud compute of Azure, without the distribution of enterprise sales, without the data crawled by Bing, without the staff at Microsoft research, without the GPU relationship with Nvidia that started with Xbox, and more. Microsoft had a defensiveness in its culture stemming from the beginning from its need to convince people that software was even worth paying for, going back to Bill Gates’s famous letter to the Homebrew Club.

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