Steve Ballmer’s Retirement Could Unlock The Talent And Resources Now Dormant At Microsoft

Here’s the thing you’d never know about Microsoft under the 13-year reign of Steve Ballmer: Microsoft remains, just barely, an amazing company. Not “amazing” in the sense of ambitious or unique, which it is, or particularly well-run, which it isn’t. But “amazing” in the one sense that counts at a technology company: Microsoft is able to hire, or simply acquire, extremely talented people.

Their intelligence and willingness to experiment is in evidence throughout Microsoft’s products. The interface of Windows 8 is a radical departure—so radical that it’s been wildly unpopular with desktop PC users, but had it been confined to mobile devices it might have been hailed as the one true alternative to the Apple/Google mobile duopoly. (It’s still doing well in Latin America, where it’s now more popular than Apple’s iOS.)

Microsoft’s Kinect motion sensor, originally built for gaming, is rapidly becoming one of the first truly useful alternatives to keyboards and mice for humans to interact with computers. And despite the abject failure of Microsoft’s Surface RT tablet, which happened because Microsoft saddled the device with a new operating system that can’t run traditional Windows programs, the Surface RT tablet is yet more evidence that Microsoft does actually make excellent hardware.