Bill Gates built an amazing airplane. Steve Ballmer crashed it in the desert. Satya Nadella rallied the survivors, put it back together, and got it flying again. Yes, he absolutely deserves the credit just as Ballmer absolutely deserves the blame.
He was not, however, a product guy. Witness their failures with the Zune, mobile, early cloud computing. His problem was that he always tried to do what would be best for Microsoft and not the customer. You can get away with this if you already have an install base (windows/office), but with net new products people will look at what's best for them first. Even with developers developers developers he tried too hard to get people to use pure MS tech and made developing for the web on MS ugly if you using anything other than .NET. The result is a generation of developers on Macs and to a lesser extent linux.
Funny enough, thinking of the customer is what MS did with the xbox and it worked out well enough.
It seems paradoxical that trying to maximize shareholder value at all costs could have the opposite effect long term; but think of it this way: almost every company in the world is fixated on profit -- that's not a differentiator. What makes the company is amazing products that people need, even depend upon -- once you have that, it is very hard to fail.
Profit singlemindedness can definitely lead you astray, be fragile (of course, the 'user-oriented' robust strategy can be thought as ultimately also a form of profit seeking).
What Nadella seems very competent at doing is also pleasing his workforce as an additional important stakeholder.
Tim was the 2nd in command of Apple for years. Easy to forget this, but Apple's success in the 2000s is partially attributable to Tim as well (not to forget all the other brilliant folks at Apple).
I can imagine what happened with Zune, cloud, etc is that (an enormously successful) MS assigned senior engineers to head up potentially prestigious new projects as professional rewards, but what they should have done was acquire-hire startup founders with fire in their belly (and strong vision) about the space. Ironically anyone with that much belly fire probably would have left MS to pursue it, basically disqualifying everyone left. :)
Eight years post-Jobs, it remains to be seen what Apple's evolutionary thrust turns out to be, Amelio/Sculley. For now the market expectations (user desires) would seem to support innovation and design as a business priority.
But it certainly wasn't ordained that Apple would parlay that into the runaway success of the iPhone.
Contrast this with Apple, which (then) used MP3s and you could plug in the player and have friends copy the music; add in the premium pricing and you've also got a status symbol. "Sharing" mp3s was the modern equivalent of sharing CDs or cassettes, something the labels took way to long to figure out in their early attempts at strict online digital music.
I have no idea if Apple intentionally did this, but it mattered. MP3 players were in their infancy and when people compared, the ipod looked better.
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Diagnostic_Port....
His "everything has to be Windows" philosophy was toxic, too. (Then I realized that he didn't really care about the underlying technologies of things, and as long as you called your embedded system that had an event loop and some interrupt handlers "Windows Event Loop And Some Interrupt Handlers, Enterprise Edition" you would be politically safe).
Imagine a world where the "iPhone" was a Microsoft product and Apple was a company left buying out other phone companies in a futile effort to catch up. That would would look very different.
IMHO, there is an alternate universe where Ballmer was never Microsoft's CEO, and instead, they had someone who could envision a future of mobile and cloud offering years before the competition did. Which means a world where the Windows Phone outsells iPhones and Androids combined, where Azure has 70%+ of the cloud computing market, where the Microsoft store is streaming original video content to customers through Xbox Live, etc. In this world, Microsoft crested the trillion dollar market cap several years ago and is well on their way to hitting the $2T mark.
https://www.theverge.com/2013/7/12/4516806/one-microsoft-bal...
Ballmer was responsible for this blight upon humanity. How many human hour / lifetimes were wasted trying and failing to get things to work on Vista?
What on earth is this doublespeak? If he always did what was best for Microsoft, we would not be discussing what his problem was in managing Microsoft. That's not how "what's best for Microsoft" works.
“500$? Fully subsidized? With the plan? That is the most expensive phone in the world” [0]
Nah, not really. 2000 was the dot-com bust (which was the start of the death spiral for a lot of formerly high-flyers, including Sun Microsystems) and 2001 was the DoJ consent decree, which brought a lot of MS's attempts to expand to a screeching halt. Ballmer, while being thoroughly mediocre in a lot of ways, deserves at least some credit for not tanking MS in that era.