Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

I'm still somewhat bitter about the failure of Windows Phone and can't believe it even happened. The iPhone wasn't even that good at the time and Android was a total mess. Microsoft dropped the ball on their first party app dev, and several flagship phones had great hardware but terrible driver support.

Microsoft clearly wasn't interested in the consumer market anymore and it shows through to today.

I worked at Nokia Maps at the time the Microsoft acquisition of the phone business was being negotiated. I never met Ballmer but I heard some stories of people that did. Intense guy apparently. I was at two joint meetings with MS to discuss some of the details of things related to the thing I was working on. Ultimately that wasn't transferred to MS.

MS made a big mess of the whole windows phone project. First it royally screwed Nokia over by deciding to do a big overhaul of Windows Phone OS internals and effectively leaving Nokia dead in the water with now obsolete products that they just launched. I'm sure this was intentional on Ballmer's side: weaken Nokia and acquire their phone business. But he threw out the baby with the bathwater. The first generation of windows phone was basically windows CE repackaged. The second one was a whole new kernel (windows NT based, I guess). The transition took crazy long. MS announced early and this made the old generation of Lumia phones a really hard sell. There was a vague promise of upgrades that of course never happened. And then the acquisition rumors destroyed the OEM ecosystem because they'd be competing with MS on phones.

Then MS bought what remained of Nokia's phone division and it got busy demolishing it right away (including an actual Nokia Android phone that existed). When Nadella inherited this train wreck, he unceremoniously put an end to the whole thing and fired pretty much the whole team. At that point it very little hope of catching up because the OEMs and users had left. As much as I loved Nokia, it was the right decision at that point. All the good stuff had long been killed/cancelled already.

It was Ballmer's fixation on Windows that led to this. Nokia had a bonafide Android competitor in the form of Meego. Backing Linux would have been the right move. Nadella might have approached this differently.