Steve Ballmer and the Art of Managing a Monopoly

Steve Ballmer hasn’t been getting much love recently. On Friday, when he announced that he plans to retire as Microsoft’s C.E.O. at some point within the next year, the firm’s stock had its best day in years, rising seven per cent. Since that Bronx cheer from the markets, the critics have been piling on, describing Ballmer as the tech boss who somehow managed to miss search, social networking, and mobile—the three big trends that have revolutionized the industry in the past decade and a half.

Tim Bajarin, the president of the research firm Creative Strategies, told Bloomberg News: ”He stayed too long at Microsoft with a position focused on PCs, and didn’t really anticipate the dramatic impact of mobile computing.” MacDaily News called his thirteen years as C.E.O. “the luckiest dorm assignment in the history of the universe.” (Ballmer met Bill Gates, who eventually appointed him as his successor, when they were both students at Harvard.) My colleague Nick Thompson noted that Ballmer’s “reign has done more to defang Microsoft than the Justice Department could ever have hoped to do.” Even Paul Krugman took a day off from bashing the Republicans to weigh in, comparing Microsoft under Ballmer to a medieval dynasty that was too corrupt and complacent to fight off the barbarians.

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