Of all the things that Ballmer was wrong about... I guess this is one of them.
Please please stop with this "if he's rich he must be smart" argument. Please?
Ballmer was a top salesman and a notorious workaholic. Of course he needed luck, but I doubt most in his position would have netted the same billions.
Billions of dollars less than it could have been, not just for Microsoft, but all Windows users combined.
If he's rich he must be fortunate, have to find out if he's smart some other way.
I worked on Windows Mobile at the time the iPhone came out. We were all shitting ourselves.
It was a practice that Jack Welch brought into the corporate world and Microsoft was just guilty of following what were thought to be best practices at the time.
Source: worked at Microsoft before Windows Mobile was a thing.
As an aside, Windows Phone was my favorite phone OS and Ballmer seemed like the one who actually cared about it a lot.
Tangent: I love that phrase. Anytime I hear someone make that statement I think about the 9,000 things that have been considered "best practice" until we actually understood that they weren't even "good practice". It gets thrown around as if it's been studied and confirmed when in reality it means "a bunch of people are doing it"