Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

If you want to learn more about MSFT during Ballmer era, i highly recommend the acquired podcast:

https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/microsoft-volume-ii

They come to the same conclusion as Dan - that Ballmer did a ton of things right and he was actually a much better CEO than the credit he's given today.

Part 1 of the podcast focuses on Bill Gates' era - both episodes are super engaging, the research and preparation they do is remarkably good.

Great podcast and I really enjoyed their MSFT episodes.

I thought their pro-Ballmer angle was interesting at the time too (it was the first long-form defense of his tenure that I had heard), but I wasn't sure how much of that was due to him being a primary source for the podcast's material.

Second this podcast. Ballmer basically setup Microsoft as the enterprise software company. From the first episode it seemed that Bill was actually more interested in the consumer side of things and wasn't that interested in the enterprise, but it was Ballmer that basically setup that entire business line in the first place especially with him managing the OS/2 with IBM and later NT.

I think a lot of fails for MS during the Ballmer era was them toeing the line post their anti-trust.