What I see, is that MS acted like a small-company startup for many years; ferociously competitive, fairly agile (not the Agile Manifesto kind; just flexible and responsive). That paid off for them (and it's arguable whether or not it was a good thing for the industry in general -it sank a number of companies, but also put Seattle firmly into the center of the tech world).
Then they became a blue-chip company, and all that startup-y stuff wasn't working anymore. Also, the consumer market changed a lot, with mobile overtaking desktop systems. For many, many folks, smartphones are the only computers that they will ever use.
He did have the right vision for a new corporate direction.
This. I feel like Satya brought in fresh eyes to the "project" (that being the running of the office of the CEO of Microsoft). Microsoft was locked into a certain way of doing things, and with Satya, they were free to pop their head up and look around at how the world was evolving without them. And you can see how that led them directly into bold new areas, such as WSL, Azure as it is today (highly Linux-and-kubernetes-focused), Github, Linkedin, lots of gaming companies (Mojang, Havok, etc.). It also allowed them to question areas where Microsoft probably thought it "should be winning", but just wasn't working, and might have poured billions into, such as Nokia phones, Skype, Bing, etc.
What I see, is that MS acted like a small-company startup for many years; ferociously competitive, fairly agile (not the Agile Manifesto kind; just flexible and responsive). That paid off for them (and it's arguable whether or not it was a good thing for the industry in general -it sank a number of companies, but also put Seattle firmly into the center of the tech world).
Then they became a blue-chip company, and all that startup-y stuff wasn't working anymore. Also, the consumer market changed a lot, with mobile overtaking desktop systems. For many, many folks, smartphones are the only computers that they will ever use.
He did have the right vision for a new corporate direction.