People are quick to focus on the few consumer missteps of Ballmer while ignoring the huge strides MS made in the corporate/business space during his tenure.
The real problem was Microsoft under ballmer completely utterly missed the biggest computing revolution of the last 20 years.
Mobile.
That put Microsoft so far behind everyone in the industry that it forced the board to remove him...
He actually did a GREAT job in the enterprise space and efficiently maximizing profit in the other old school Microsoft sectors...
Put it another way... When Ballmer took over Microsoft owned +70% of computing OS market, when he left they owned something like 30% and were stuck on a trajectory where today they are at like 15%... Microsoft was primarily an OS company... He more or less sunk the company
I believe it's about potential. They could've been the second or third big mobile OS provider. They did incredibly well in enterprise (and now cloud computing) but they still left the field of mobile to Google and Apple. And there's no reason they couldn't do it, they had both the money and expertise to create something like Android.
But did it? There was technological evolution in Microsoft products for sure (Windows Servers actually became viable), but that was going to happen when you run a company with thousands of engineers. Outside of that, what were the strides MS made? They started off with enterprise/desktop dominance, and by the end of Ballmer's term, they still had enterprise/desktop dominance but missed out on pretty much every other tech trend - from digital music, to cloud, to browsers, to smartphones, to search, and on and on.
Ballmer took over Microsoft at the height of the dotcom bubble valuations when pretty much everything in tech was overpriced. Any expectation that Microsoft's revenue would catch up to its inflated valuation in a short time frame was a great way to feel disappointed.
