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"Thirty-three years after joining Bill Gates at Microsoft and building the Redmond, Wash.-based company into the listing giant it is today, Steve Ballmer is retiring. He won\u2019t leave immediately; the search for a new Microsoft CEO has begun in earnest, and Ballmer will be there throughout. In other words, we'll have ample time to digest the meaning behind his announcement and to examine the Ballmer legacy.\nBallmer was never the perfect fit for Microsoft CEO. Even though he was No. 2 at the software company for decades, his personality, perspective and expertise were nothing like his predecessor, Bill Gates.\nGates, a true genius, visionary and, back then, oddball, was an excellent foil for another genius, visionary oddball: Steve Jobs. Their rivalry and relationship was legendary. Steve Ballmer, who notoriously appeared at sales events as a hyper-enthusiastic, sweaty cheerleader, had no obvious counterpart in the industry and none of Gates\u2019 vision.\nDecisions in the Steve Ballmer era, from 2000 to the present, seemed guided largely by each individual division or product group, rather than by one cohesive plan. Certain successes, like Windows XP, Xbox 360 and Xbox Live and Microsoft Office, were real moneymakers for the organization. But much of the rest of the decade-plus is dotted with spectacular failures, miscues and lost momentum.\nA Checkered History\nUnder Ballmer\u2019s watch, Internet Explorer, which had roughly 70% browser share in 2000, tumbled throughout the aughts, losing momentum first to Mozilla\u2019s Firefox and then to Google\u2019s Chrome. Microsoft released the panned Windows Vista, a costly misstep that led to many users holding onto Windows XP for more than a decade. \nThe Ballmer era saw Zune music players rise into the sky like brightly colored flares that extinguished almost as soon as they hit the atmosphere. No one bought those iPod competitors and the company was forced to euthanize the brand.\nMobile Miscues\nBefore he left Microsoft, Bill Gates, then the company\u2019s chief technology architect, tried to jumpstart the tablet market. The wrongheaded hybrid approach can mostly be laid at Gate\u2019s feet, but as the leader of the company, Ballmer did little to steer Microsoft down the right tablet path. \nEven the Surface reboot, which Ballmer can fully own, has not gone as planned. Despite the quality and usability of these devices, Microsoft is having trouble moving Surfaces. No matter how you look at it, the company has simply not created a viable iPad competitor.\nThese and other issues often seemed to stem from Ballmer\u2019s inability to produce a collaborative effort across groups and divisions. I could never discern, at least until very recently, a grand plan. Back in 2008, as Microsoft was unveiling the much improved Windows 7, I asked then-Windows lead Steven Sinofsky how the Windows group had been working with Windows Mobile. Sinofsky, who left the company last year, told me they hadn\u2019t. \nI didn\u2019t blame Sinofsky for this oversight: It was Ballmer\u2019s job to ensure that his groups were sharing information and, when possible, working together. Allowing the desktop and mobile groups to essentially ignore each other at that crucial time was a huge mistake and probably set Microsoft back more than a few years in the all-important mobile race.\nBallmer\u2019s acquisition track record has been similarly hit-and-miss. He smartly bought (and did not ruin) Skype, but missed out on the opportunity in 2008 to grab Yahoo. Of course, I\u2019m not certain Ballmer would have had a Marissa Mayer-level impact on the once-moribund online company.\nGetting It Right\nThough Ballmer has never been a technologist, he certainly, in recent years, has wised up about synergy. A consistent design language spans across Windows, Windows Phone, Xbox and online services; very solid connections let you move effortlessly from one platform to another. If you have not used Office 365, SkyDrive, Windows 8 or Internet Explorer in years, you might want to take another look. \nBut it took Ballmer far too many years to achieve this level of cross-platform interactivity. Instead of leading, Microsoft is still playing catch-up in mobile and search. And on the social front, it\u2019s pretty much nowhere, though Microsoft\u2019s friendship and investment with Facebook has paid some feature dividends. It\u2019s a shame Microsoft didn\u2019t invest more heavily or buy Facebook outright when it had the chance.\nIf this industry is a relay race and Gates handed Ballmer the baton in 2000, he\u2019s basically run in the middle of the pack while companies like Google and Apple grabbed their sticks and dashed ahead.\nWhenever someone asked me about Steve Ballmer, I always described him as the ultimate salesman \u2014 usually high praise for a CEO. Yet at Microsoft, that rarely seemed to work in Ballmer\u2019s favor. Maybe it\u2019s because Microsoft was built by the ultimate nerd. Perhaps the best CEO would have been someone like Ray Ozzie, super smart and technical, but maybe a bit more business strategic than Gates (owing to the fact that he worked at Data General, Lotus and Groove Networks before joining Microsoft). Sadly, Ozzie left the company in 2010. \nBallmer\u2019s recent decision to radically reorganize Microsoft is a recognition that, maybe, he had it wrong all along. The company could not ably compete in its current fashion; Ballmer was just too late to realize it. More telling is the fact that Ballmer wants to leave before the transition to \u201Ca devices services company\u201D really gets under way. Could there be any clearer indication that he knows what must be done, but not exactly how to do it?\nI wish Ballmer well in his retirement and thank him for all his Microsoft has given us during his tenure, including Windows 8, Surface RT, Bing and Xbox 36.\nImage: Kimihiro Hoshino/AFP/Getty Images"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2013/08/23/microsoft-steve-ballmer-legacy/>