Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

No he wasn’t haha. The only thing he did was slide the company sideways via pre existing illegal monopoly. In fact, they lost most of their monopoly under his supervision . At no point did the quality of their products improve, and that’s evidenced with this year’s massive massive Windows outage, or Garmins mega ransomware, out a hundred other people who’ve been hacked via Windows.

If you’re running Windows for anything, it’s only a matter of when, not if.

I remember when he retired and the MSFT jumped. Satya is underrated.

Satya's tenure has seen the fall of Xbox, the lost relevance of Windows. While moving to a services model is going to be very lucrative for them, they risk competitors offering swap-out models.

The fall of Xbox started with the Xbox One, which was developed and released while Ballmer was CEO. They put an enormous amount of investment into that console, but made some bad calls in both its development and marketing that put them in a deep hole that they've been unable to get out of since. The increasing backwards compatibility of modern consoles means that the current 4th generation Xbox is paying for the sins of the 3rd generation in addition to dealing with its own struggles. Really the only thing that can fix the situation is money, but the business is probably under pressure to show profits after two decades of heavy investment with minimal return.

I don't necessarily think you can blame Ballmer for the missteps the Xbox team made, but I definitely think you can't blame Nadella.

Yes, one can't blame Ballmer for the missteps of the Xbox team directly (that honor goes to Don Mattrick, VP in charge of IEB at the time of the Xbox One launch). Divisional VPs get a lot of latitude in how they run their org. However, Ballmer does have to accept ultimate responsibility for allowing Mattrick to head up IEB and how long he allowed him to stay there.