Ballmer pushed hard for Xbox, was a big proponent of cloud and, most importantly, placed a huge emphasis on enterprise customers. A lot of the fruits of his labor were reaped under Satya's tenure.
More interestingly, it could be argued the biggest cloud evangelist in Microsoft at the time was neither Ballmer nor Satya, but rather Bob Muglia (the SVP of the servers and tools division). Muglia was notoriously hated by Ballmer and prevented his probable rise to CEO (he was fired by Ballmer and his position was filled by Satya).
Ballmer pushed hard for Xbox, was a big proponent of cloud and, most importantly, placed a huge emphasis on enterprise customers. A lot of the fruits of his labor were reaped under Satya's tenure.
More interestingly, it could be argued the biggest cloud evangelist in Microsoft at the time was neither Ballmer nor Satya, but rather Bob Muglia (the SVP of the servers and tools division). Muglia was notoriously hated by Ballmer and prevented his probable rise to CEO (he was fired by Ballmer and his position was filled by Satya).