> I don't know who you'd buy it from, certainly not me. If that's what you've read into my comment, that is reflective of your perspective, not mine. IE was never that good. It was bundled with the predominant operating system, so had massive market share. As soon as Microsoft had to open the OS more and draw a line between OS and IE, it was pretty much inevitable that there would be other browsers. And too-aggressive positioning of IE would be highly legible to regulators.

I was not thinking about being more aggressive with bundling, but was commenting on the quality of IE. Not sure why you're giving a pass on IE sucking. It's not a coincidence that Ballmer, the Enterprise sales guy, developed an excellent enterprise sales machine at Microsoft. If he were a good tech guy he would've developed good tech there too. So yes, that Microsoft's tech sucked is on him.

There's a certain inertia to a huge company, if we're talking about executive wins I expect something above what I consider the bare minimum. For example everyone agrees that Intel is a failed company, but if you actually look at them they still have majority marketshare of x86 CPUs in both client and server. So would you say that they successfully defended their traditional business or would you call them a failure? I think it's pretty clear that if you strip away everything else about MS, and just look at Windows by its lonesome, it would be considered a loss today. It's only bigger by dint of the entire market being larger. But in the market it has lost a lot of power vs the day Ballmer started.

So

1. OS - Loss IMO.

2. Search - Loss, similarly to above Bing is a bare minimum for what I expect a company of this size to do. Look at Sogou vs Baidu in China for example for what other companies are able to achieve. But all in all I'm knocking Ballmer less for Bing than for how late Bing was. For 9 years of his time as CEO we had trash MSN as MS's search engine and the default through IE. Gave away all that time to Google to build incumbency, develop an ecosystem around gmail, etc, and grow their cash position. IE was a huge advantage for a long time... but by the time Bing came out it had eroded and Google Chrome was released. Microsoft was in a great advantageous position due to their Windows monopoly but acted too late to serve relevant products.

3. E-commerce - Loss, I wasn't thinking about competing with Amazon but more the Windows Store, bookings.com, airbnb, and steam. Why did the windows store take until the app store to come out to copy them? Why did steam come out in 2003 and Microsoft did nothing? It's because Ballmer isn't smart enough to understand how these things work. By the time windows store came out it was very late, and once again the software sucked. Owning the operating system was an advantage that a good CEO could've made something of, and he didn't.

4. Social - Loss, yeah MSN was a huge deal, along with windows to push it and later acquisition of skype, MS certainly did try. You can also consider something like Steam or xbox Live to be a social network. Regardless went nowhere and loss of opportunity. Certainly he made acquisitions too late and failed to make much of the social networks he had. Also anyone could've bought Instagram, anyone could've bought Youtube, he just didn't. Bought Skype instead. Sure after him there's more acquisitions but it has nothing to do with this discussion really.

5. Consumer devices - Loss, this one I'm most willing to give him a pass on actually. MS is mostly a software company, and partnerships are hard. But Zune was an alright product, and here is mostly a marketing fail. But wouldn't you place blame for bad marketing on the CEO? You can also imagine there's a lot more you can do with Zune. Microsoft had xbox too but never tried to get these parts together, letting Nintendo DS take the handheld market. Today zune is dead and xbox is not successful.

6. Enterprise Software - Unequivocal win, probably the best thing Ballmer did and most of his score.

7. Cloud - Win, acted not too late and was okay with it, Nadella fixed it though.

So definitely I would put E-commerce and social up into "advantaged but loss" and I tried to explain why I count search and OS as loss.