[Fnoord]

By being unable to use his warchest on a changing market. As an example: missing the smartphone boat twice (once with Windows Mobile vs Symbian, and once with Windows Phone vs iOS/Android). Another example: Microsoft search / Bing.

Microsoft kept Office relevant though, made Azure relevant, and are reinventing themselves from a proprietary to a data company (like Google, Facebook, and Amazon) who also do a lot of open source (like the previously mentioned companies). But I suppose Nadella takes credit for that.

[CSMastermind]

Bing has proved to be one of the best investments that Microsoft ever made.

Ballmer's failure as it related to Bing was trying to build an advertising platform to compete with Google and failing.

[TheWiseOne]

Genuine question - how is Bing a good investment? Isn't it essentially a non-factor in the search market?

[warty]

It's a huge guinea pig for .net, windows server, and azure - a perfect example of eating your own dog food.

[alttab]

My guess is the algorithms and infrastructure serve search functions across all of their products. The "search market" is really the "Display advertising" market, and sure, they suck at that because no one goes to bing. But bing isn't worthless.

[can16358p]

I've lost trust on them the day they were busted copying results directly from Google (https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/)

[doitmw]

On the other hand there's not much evidence that MS could've won (or at least secured a place in) the smartphone wars with any other CEO. Many other big companies tried and failed miserably.