Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

> Even Bing, widely considered a failure, on last reported revenue and current P/E ratio, would be 12th most valuable tech company in the world, between Tencent and ASML.

A tiny slice of the search market (4% IIRC) is worth this much? Incredible. Everyone knows Google is swimming in money, but I guess it never really computed for me that managing to grab a tiny slice of the search market would be so valuable. If I was making a guess prior to reading this, my intuition would have been that Bing was some kind of loss leader. Shows what I know! Hah

Bing Ads is big business. Digital marketing is enormous. Google and Facebook have larger portions of the pie, but a sliver of a huge pie is still a lot of pie.

There are a lot of services that just repackage and resell Bing! DuckDuckGo being probably the most successful example.

Which, to OP's point, is a testament to the particular style of business that Ballmer was good at - building enterprise and partner channels.