For example he made the back then very-very brave decision to completely getting rid of Windows as the leading Microsoft brand. He had a very clear vision for Microsoft and the industry even if the outcome is not super exciting products for you and me. He’s not squeezing Azure - he was the person who made Azure into what it is now.

So he changed Microsoft fundamentally - a very difficult thing for such a large company.

I don’t see Pichai changing Google so fundamentally. I admire Cook though.

My point was more that MS hasn't had an industry changing product in a while. Google became joint-SOTA in AI and seems poised to take the crown with the next Gemini, and also in self-driving cars and quantum computing. They've kept their cash cows going while also being up to date on the tech that might upend their business model, so in a way they've cracked the innovator's dilemma which is definitely not an easy thing to do. A lot of HNers even wrote them off after ChatGPT and the disastrous Bard. Apple has a successful mass product in Airpods, a moonshot in Vision Pro and the insane Apple Silicon which they executed over more than a decade.

Nadella did well in the last decade to consolidate the MS stack (Teams, Azure, Office) and to invest in OpenAI when he realized MS's internal efforts wouldn't yield the expected output. He has protected their turf and made some strategic acquisitions like Linkedin and Github to keep their lead in enterprise software. From the POV of Wall Street performance and stock returns, he is a definitely a great CEO but so are Cook, Pichai even Ellison.