>He failed in so many ways as the CEO of Microsoft.
>
>Ballmer Has Led No Real Innovation.
>Ballmer Squandered Major Market Opportunities.
>Ballmer has Overseen Dismal Product Releases.
>Ballmer has made horrible investments. (aQuantive, Skype, Yammer)
>Ballmer has accomplished very little.
>

Brandon, I don't deny that Nadella has some major challenges in front of him. I personally think he is a highly competent individual and many agree he has the qualities that can push MS aggressively beyond what Ballmer did.

The bad investments you cited are really minor in the grand scheme. (And I wouldn't slam the judgment door on Yammer, not just yet). As for "accomplished very little", that's a subjective statement.

There have been some good product releases and certainly some that became the punch-line of many jokes. They may never hit market opportunities like the mobile space the way they'd hoped (and that is probably Ballmer's biggest regret, along with the losses on the Surface), but certainly they've made strides with the Cloud and with Big Data.

But I'll say this. On your comment regarding dismal product releases, Ballmer resided over a timeframe where SQL Server became a real player in the database world. They've had 4 consecutive strong hits with SQL Server 2008, 2008R2, 2012, and 2014. Each release was great and the CTP period pretty well-executed. Some might say, "yeah, but you work with SQL Server all the time, so you're biased". That may be true - but I switched from full time .NET to full time SQL Server over the course of time BECAUSE of the product growth I saw with SQL Server. It isn't perfect, there are many things database developers still demand from it - but the growth during the period has been incredible. It's now beating Oracle and IBM in some vendor selection processes. You can't bash Ballmer without at least giving him some credit for presiding over the huge growth they've had in the database and business intelligence worlds.

At this point, someone might say, "OK, but what did Ballmer have to do with it?" I don't know. Maybe nothing - but if so, that's to his credit that he knew there was momentum with the product team and left it largely alone. That's a heck of a lot better than messing with it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad Ballmer stepped down. I think we will see some good things with Nadella over time.