Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know if he is an idiot but it is under his watch that someone signed off on windows 8, thinking hum, customers are going to love that.
The problem that Ballmer made in Windows 8 and Windows RT was in making the GUI for desktops and mobile devices the same. Steve Jobs on the other hand already learned in 2002 that the desktop GUI won't work on a mobile device and set out to create a new GUI for mobile devices that led to the iPhone and iPad that was different from the Macintosh GUI. I think Steve Jobs saw the Windows XP based tablets that Microsoft m…
They reversed most of these moronic design decisions in 8.1 and the 10 preview, but they kept some (hopefully they will be fixed before they release). Like instead of having notifications (like "An update is available", "Restart is needed") appearing discretely at the bottom right of the screen they now take up the entire screen. Since Vista they should know better than their customers are trying to use their OS to do things, to work. Customers are not fascinated with the system and having the system interrupting them all the time is a terrible idea.
It doesn't take a PhD in UX to realise that.