Really? The Surface RT is what drove the board to finally act? If that's actually true, it's much more of an indictment of the board and their absolute negligence than Ballmer at this point.
Rewind three years: Microsoft ships the Kin, its lackluster pseudo-feature phone 'built'[1] from the acquisition of Danger, Inc. Microsoft spent $500mm acquiring Danger and then killed off all of their products, and managed to send all of their best employees running to the exits.
Microsoft spent two years building the Kin phones, only to cancel them within months of their release. They probably spent in excess of a billion dollars on the whole thing when all was said and done, and for what? Windows Phone 7 was always going to be the iOS/Android competitor. Microsoft would've been far better off hauling the original $500mm to the middle of one of their campus soccer fields and lighting it on fire. At least then they wouldn't have had divided focus on smartphone operating systems for two years.
And Computerworld thinks a $900mm writedown for a product that—despite its flaws—is really a decent v1 is the straw that broke the camel's back? If that's true, the board is the real problem.
[1] My understanding is that Microsoft acquired Danger, canned their entire technology stack, and then rebuilt everything from scratch
Two other Danger/KIN things they did which made them less attractive to future partners, which probably didn't help the Surface RT et. al.:
They tried to ignore Danger's contractual obligations to deliver more phone models to T-Mobile (hardly surprising from Microsoft). T-Mobile was sufficiently insistent they had to reverse course for a while, hampered by people lost or pushed out in the acquisition, and develop one more model using the original technology stack.
They suffered a catastrophic data loss: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_data_loss_2009 and I'm sure it didn't help that Ballmer denied it; per Wikipedia "Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer disputed whether there had ever been a data loss, instead describing it as an outage. Ballmer said, 'It is not clear there was data loss'. However, he said the incident was 'not good' for Microsoft."
Those sorts of comments echo the concern that he was not the right CEO for a company doing services.
(And of course they canned the original technology stack, Java on top of a BSD, with Oracle providing the back end fault tolerant storage they didn't spend enough money on to adequately back up.)
Getting back to your original question: maybe it's not so strange, KIN and Surface RT each represent a process so terribly broken it went all the way to the market and warehouses of unsaleable product after losing around a billion tangible dollars (much more in lost credibility and market, above kabdib estimates 40 billion for the RT). Ballmer undoubtedly claimed the KIN was a unique failure that he wasn't going to let happen again, and the Surface RT became the final straw when it showed he didn't have a handle on this.
Rewind three years: Microsoft ships the Kin, its lackluster pseudo-feature phone 'built'[1] from the acquisition of Danger, Inc. Microsoft spent $500mm acquiring Danger and then killed off all of their products, and managed to send all of their best employees running to the exits.
Microsoft spent two years building the Kin phones, only to cancel them within months of their release. They probably spent in excess of a billion dollars on the whole thing when all was said and done, and for what? Windows Phone 7 was always going to be the iOS/Android competitor. Microsoft would've been far better off hauling the original $500mm to the middle of one of their campus soccer fields and lighting it on fire. At least then they wouldn't have had divided focus on smartphone operating systems for two years.
http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2010/07/kin-fusing-kin-clusion-...
Even worse was the aQuantive acquisition. $6.2 billion flushed down the toilet: http://money.cnn.com/2012/07/02/technology/microsoft-aquanti...
And Computerworld thinks a $900mm writedown for a product that—despite its flaws—is really a decent v1 is the straw that broke the camel's back? If that's true, the board is the real problem.
[1] My understanding is that Microsoft acquired Danger, canned their entire technology stack, and then rebuilt everything from scratch