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Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

There's a common narrative that Microsoft was moribund under Steve Ballmer and then later saved by the miraculous leadership of Satya Nadella. This is the dominant narrative in every online discussion about the topic I've seen and it's a commonly expressed belief "in real life" as well.

When people point to a long list of failures like Bing, Zune, Windows Phone, and HoloLens as evidence that Ballmer was some kind of buffoon who was holding Microsoft back, this demonstrates a lack of understanding of the tech industry. Again, as a very senior Microsoft employee going back to almost the beginning, he bears some responsibility for this, but Ballmer managed to clear the board of the worst bad actors so that Nadella didn't inherit such a difficult situation. Probably the closest thing was Visual Studio a decade before Paul declared Microsoft dead, but that never achieved the same level of marketshare due to a combination of effectively being Windows only software and also costing quite a bit of money Heath Borders notes that Erich Gamma, hired in 2011, was highly influential here

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