I think opening up IE development and open sourced .Net and ASP.Net are directly related to Ballmer's departure. Linux on Azure was already happening. EF was already open source, but under a Microsoft license.

One other thing, let's not forget Office for the iPad that was well underway before Ballmer left.

>>Not only is IE much, much better now, the IE team is open to what they're doing. See http://status.modern.ie/. Statya Nadella is making big changes to how Microsoft operates. We've seen most of .Net, all of ASP.Net, and office file formats go open source in the past few months. Even before Ballmer left, we saw more openness and support of competing technologies with EF being open source and 30% of Azure servers running Linux. You can provision Sales Force, Oracle, Linux, and other non-Microsoft products. And, they're fully supported.
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>That IS big news. Is Ballmer's departure the cause or an excuse? I.e. is it that this was long in the works but previously not allowed to happen, or long on the wishlist and now possible?
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>Perhaps this is the way for Microsoft to reinvent itself. Of course, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes...