Can't Microsoft do better than Elop ? Gates and Balmer were visionary founders in their time. I am not sure Elop will measure up ; he seems to be only looking out for himself.
Hatchet men are useful, well paid, but definitely not high-profile, except to knock down and make their successor look better by comparison (see HP: Apotheker and Whitman).
All this talk of MS needing a forward-thinking visionary with ideas is just wrong. Just look at the environment these tech companies inhabit. You have Google, Samsung, and Apple all declaring patent war. That's how it has always been. Go back to Sun and Microsoft. Or Netscape. Or what MS did to IBM. It goes on and on. Oh, sure, on the consumer side all these companies appear to be innovating and everything is peachy. But that's marketing. In reality it's a cut-throat, winner-takes-all game they are playing.
Want Microsoft to succeed? I don't think most people on HN have the stomach for it. You like open source. Open standards. Playing fair. When Microsoft was good, they were really bad.
Microsoft squandered their lead in smartphones, you can blame them and Ballmer for that, but the particular video people love to continuously bring up has nothing to do with where MS made mistakes.
I think this video very clearly shows how Ballmer managed to not take the iPhone seriously, and that has everything to do with why Microsoft made mistakes and were slow to respond from 2007 onwards. The same thing happened with the iPad as well. From everyting he said, you could see that he regarded them as toys.