When Steve Ballmer stepped down as CEO of Microsoft last year, he made it clear in his exit interview to The Wall Street Journal that he’d had a certain amount of nudging from the board. He came to the conclusion that he couldn’t make Microsoft move fast enough to make the board happy.
Besides its financial might and massive workforce, Microsoft had failed to catch up with Apple’s iPhone or even Xiaomi’s less advanced and cheaper version of it. And the company had no shortage of critics when it came to the Xbox game console or search engine, Bing.