Bethany McLean at Vanity Fair:
Embracing reality is also a huge change at Microsoft, where some joke about the “reality-distortion field.” As one explains it to me, life under Ballmer, and to some extent even Gates, was “‘Let’s get on I-90 and drive to Hawaii! We’ve got beer, we’ve got snacks, it’ll be great!’But then you say, ‘Oh, wait, you can’t get to Hawaii on I-90.’They say, ‘Yes, you can! It’ll be great! Let’s go!’” As this person says, “It can be really good but also really freakin’draining.”
This is a great piece on how Ballmer, Gates and Nadella all intertwined during Satya’s ascension to Microsoft CEO.
I can’t say they’re out of the woods yet, but I think everyone agrees that ‘retiring’ Ballmer was the right thing for the future of the company.