Comment by GuB-42

I think you are giving executives too much credit. All the people you cited are just business managers. Multi-billion dollar public companies are not startups, decisions are the result of comities, shareholder meetings, and consequences of choices made a decade later. Who is at the head now matters, but to a limited extent. Steve Jobs may be an exception, but mostly because he was a founder, so he led the company when it was small enough to support a true dictator.

As for Ballmer vs Nadella, what did Microsoft do under Nadella that wasn't started under Ballmer? The big things: 365 and Azure were both started under Ballmer. Bing, the only real competitor to Google search, which is also profitable, was made under Ballmer too. Essentially, Nadella continued Ballmer's job, as expected from a MBA CEO to another MBA CEO. The shift from Windows-first to cloud-first was already in the making when Nadella took over.