Balmer Leaving Microsoft

I read this article, Balmer Legacy, and found it really interesting. Perhaps I'm a Microsoft fan because I really hate being put into the one size fits all box that Apple products have created, but I think the article hits on the important points about Balmer. Balmer's success was in the behind the scenes arena.

"Looking through the small screen of a smartphone, it’s easy to miss the bigger picture. Microsoft is struggling through the downward cycle of PC sales, but it’s making small but significant gains in phones and search. Its cloud-computing platform is a serious contender and it’s gearing up to launch the next Xbox, building on the huge popularly of the current Xbox 360. ...

While Steve Jobs was winning with the iPod, iPhone and iPad, Ballmer was winning over companies with Microsoft servers and business software. Jobs tried and failed to break into the enterprise server business and nobody cared; Ballmer struggled with music players and phones and was mocked."

I'm not sure that Microsoft is winning the backend of devices either, but it certainly is in the top 3 with Amazon Webservices out in front. But the point is that most people who mock Balmer (at least that I know), really don't understand all the work that goes into running a dynamic website, a backend for a mobile platform, scaling VM across geographic regions based on loads, and all the other things that happen in the background to make devices work well with a cloud connection. 

I certainly think that Balmer has had some mistakes, but over all the general characterization of Microsoft as being backwards and lacking innovation (with Balmer being the poster-boy) is incorrect.