He consistently increased earnings via Windows and Office during his tenure as CEO. He was a very good businessman.

He was not, however, a product guy. Witness their failures with the Zune, mobile, search, and early cloud computing. His problem was that he always tried to do what would be best for Microsoft first and not the customer. You can get away with this if you already have an entrenched install base (windows/office), but with net new products people will look at what's best for them first. Even with developers developers developers he tried too hard to get people to use pure MS tech and made developing for the web on MS ugly if you are using anything other than .NET. He didn't see the geeks learning to program in their basement or dorm rooms who ended up using free software instead of going through any "free" channels that may have been available to them (were they?). The result is a generation of developers on Macs and to a lesser extent linux. MS is only now catering to them.

Funny enough, thinking of the customer is what MS did with the xbox and it worked out well enough.