Baller's consistent ability to create material losses no doubt had a large part in his downfall, see also e.g. the Xbox 360 hardware. And Intel is claiming tha

Baller's consistent ability to create material losses no doubt had a large part in his downfall, see also e.g. the Xbox 360 hardware. And Intel is claiming that Windows desktop screwups are in part costing it a billion dollars in 1Q15, people aren't upgrading from XP. Nadella I'm very uncertain about. To the extent he can terminate with extreme prejudice stack ranking and the poison it has suffused throughout Microsoft, he'll have much more people capital, including much less internal sabotage (part of why Kin failed). And he's completely changed how QA is done, although I don't know if for the better. On the other hand, he doesn't ... "feel" like the sort of person who can sufficiently directly change the culture for the better. We'll see. Ah, here's a bigger question: can Nedella change the perception of Microsoft's trustworthiness? That was bad under Gates, became catastrophic and frankly insane under Ballmer, and after so many have been burned by Microsoft has got to have an incalculable cost.