People usually don&#x27;t get credit for what didn&#x27;t happen, but in the case of CEOs, they deserve it. There are so many choices that <i>could&#x27;ve</i> been made, and would&#x27;ve been made by a worse exec, that would&#x27;ve destroyed MS. It takes effort to maintain the status quo in a competitive world.<p>Microsoft might not have been as hip as Apple or Google, but they became and remained the most significant software company in the world for <i>decades</i>. They&#x27;re <i>still</i> the number one desktop OS by a huge margin. Compare Steve Ballmer to Carly Fiorina, Jonathan Schwartz or Stephen Elop and tell me he wasn&#x27;t a good CEO.<p>I also think Ballmer deserves credit for .NET. &quot;Developers developers developers&quot; has been MS&#x27;s saving grace as OS X emerged, and Nadella is essentially banking the company on .NET-as-a-platform via Azure. It&#x27;s entirely possible that we&#x27;d all be using Solaris on SPARC workstations by now if .NET hadn&#x27;t existed.