Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

Azure's success was specifically set in motion under Ballmer. Owed to the fact that it was developed to Microsoft's strengths (enterprise support) that it didn't piss off too many of their partners and sales channels. Same with Office 365 and all of their other successful services. None are glamourous - but all are impressive with how not awful they are given their design constraints.

Even things like Surface, while considered a failure, did its intended job of getting hardware partners to get their act together and make better consumer products.

We should resist that temptation and judge him on the results he delivered. MS was the essential tech company, king of the world, and under his leadership their innovation stalled, they lost in markets where they were leading, the stock stagnated, and huge piles of money were vaporized on acquisitions that were poorly planned or executed.

He tried to buy Yahoo for $44 billion! Only Yahoo’s greater idiocy saved him from that gargantuan mistake. And that was just one of many.

Developing OSes and software was clearly an unsustainable business. It's obvious in hindsight that cloud infrastructure was the way to go. But at the time placing a lot of different bets to find a few successful product-market fits was the best you could ask for.

Cloud infrastructure has become a commodity though and you can replace your cloud provider easily (theoretically, lol). What moat can MS or anyone else build around cloud infrastructure? Compare to OS' where MS may never have had a competitor catch up if they'd kept up speed on their OS teams.

Same with video games these days. Adding in digital casinos may seem nice but now you're just the same as every other digital casino offering.