If you looked at historical p/e, the low for msft was the last year of ballmer. I think their p/e was 8... it was never a dog stock but an 8 is kind of like what you get if your p&g or coke. It’s not a growth stock anymore. That was about the time we started seeing the precursors to office365. So good things had started back then, but to assume a the role it has today where it’s equally a peer to Apple and google and not just relegated to be a waning player with a solid book in the enterprise (ie, sap, Oracle, etc) is quite an accomplishment. It’s as if msft finally did what gates and ballmer both failed to do: Become cool and strategic to an emerging / now dominant tech paradigm. It’s hard to give credit to one person ... credit goes to everyone there who not just went along with the pivot to cloud but took it to a whole new level.

Doesn't MS pay dividends? Stock price alone isn't the whole story.

> Go look at the stock history, the moment Ballmer became CEO in 2000 the price stopped growing

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.

Correlation does not imply causation