Satya reverted the course spectacularly - and most importantly, he did NOT miss the "once-in-a-lifetime" opportunity which he had. Unlike Billg (who missed the dawn of the Internet) and the chair-throwing dude (who fumbled Mobile), Satya is making sure Microsoft does NOT miss AI. Which is even more impressive as Google was kind of expected to be the winner initially, given the whole company's focus , mission statement ("to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful") and a considerable (at the time) lead, if not a moat.
I dare to compare his turnaround to Jobs'. Sure, MSFT wasn't weeks away from insolvency when he took over, and some of their current successes were indeed started before his tenure, but just look at where Windows 8 was going.
*Edit: Just as a clarification: Not an employee, I actually dislike them profoundly and would never join them. I'm not sure this move is the best outcome for mankind - but credit where credit's due, they were shrewd, smart and right on time. Hats off.
Bill missing the whole web stuff was more about their lawsuit because regulators believed that only through the browser on Windows people could access the internet. Which was a wrong prediction.
And Ballmer...Yeah. He fumbled hard with mobile. And thanks to the board stopping from buying Yahoo. Would be another AT&T merger fiasco.
With billg missing the dawn of the Internet, I didn't mean the IE integration fiasco and the resulting lawsuit - that's actually the part they got more or less right (in their own perverted 3E approach, not according to my moral compass), but too late to become dominant. They first wasted time trying to create their own MSN walled garden a la Compuserve .
To Ballmer's credit he did start Azure, although it doesn't feel it was a serious enough effort, until he was replaced. But between Vista, Windows 8, Windows Mobile, Nokia, Skype, Zune, Kin, etc etc... it's no wonder it's been called Microsoft's lost decade.