ZDNet's Robin Harris: Steve Ballmer is Worst CEO Options

[Xbox-Scene]

ZDNet's Robin Harris: Steve Ballmer is Worst CEO Posted by XanTium | January 30 23:23 EST | News Category: Xbox360

From zdnet.com: [QUOTE] Steve Ballmer may be the worst CEO among large tech companies - now that Kevin Rollins got booted from Dell and Sanjay Kumar of CA is in jail. Put him in a room with Steve Jobs of Apple, John Chambers of Cisco and Mark Hurd of HP and he'd look like the bouncer, not a peer. He just isn't in their league and Microsoft is suffering for it. What hath Steve wrought? If he wasn't Bill's freshman roommate at Harvard - and Bill wasn't majority owner of Microsoft - any other board would have booted Ballmer years ago. He's cost Microsoft billions in profits while the stock price stagnated. Just to pick some of the most obvious fiascos on his watch: * The Netscape anti-trust fiasco. * The Google fiasco. * All the other product and market fiascos. Virtualization: late to the game. The Xbox - losing market share to the Wii - will never pay back its investment despite a recent Halo-fueled lurch into profitability. Vista's 5 year development cycle. The continuing security mess. The smart phone failure - a market they should have owned. Major resellers, like Dell, offering Linux. The steadily shrinking cash horde. Continuing anti-trust troubles. The current OOXML debacle. [/QUOTE] Full Story: zdnet.com

[g8crapachino]

hmm....Microsoft earnings have been on a steady increase for over a decade and they just annouced $4.7billion in earnings. They raised their projections for the next couple quarter and that's from a traditionally very conservative company. This is achieved while the supposedly "Worst" CEO is in charge and despite all their troubles.

The article smells of the usual anti-Microsoft bias most tech journalist like to write. It insures people will read their articles.

[TheDaFox]

What about the Developers, Developers, Developers!?

[Ken_D]

hmm....Microsoft earnings have been on a steady increase for over a decade and they just annouced $4.7billion in earnings. They raised their projections for the next couple quarter and that's from a traditionally very conservative company. This is achieved while the supposedly "Worst" CEO is in charge and despite all their troubles.

Yes, but the stock price hasn't shifted significantly in years, and the majority of their profits comes from two product groups. MS is hugely successful in terms of profit (and after all, profit is why a business is in business) but for some reason the stock price is stuck in a rut whilst Apple etc has double, tripled, quadrupled in the last decade.

What about the Developers, Developers, Developers!?

Exactly. Microsoft will never been seen as "cool", no matter how hard they chase the zeitgeist. "Welcome to the social"? Come on ... in an industry that's produced legendary figures like Hewlett, Packard, Jobs, Ellison, Gates, Wozniak, Noyce, Moore et al, Monkeyboy Ballmer isn't just a joke, he's a bad joke. You may not have liked Gates, but you respected his business (if not his technical) skills.

[hazyspartan]

yeah but its not hard for a company like apple to double, triple, and quadruple its stock if you are going from 2 share to 6 share to 8 share! Its not like they had anywhere to go but up!

[bucko]

What about the Developers, Developers, Developers!?

You mean http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMU0tzLwhbE

Yes he is a nutter, he needs to get some help, glad hes not taking over bill I thought he was.

& http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvsboPUjrGc...feature=related

This post has been edited by bucko: Jan 31 2008, 10:59 AM

[HotKnife420]

Exactly. Microsoft will never been seen as "cool", no matter how hard they chase the zeitgeist. "Welcome to the social"? Come on ... in an industry that's produced legendary figures like Hewlett, Packard, Jobs, Ellison, Gates, Wozniak, Noyce, Moore et al, Monkeyboy Ballmer isn't just a joke, he's a bad joke. You may not have liked Gates, but you respected his business (if not his technical) skills.

That's more than likely the result of the advertising firm/

[herkulease]

Last I checked. IE, netscape antitrust stuff happened while bill was still CEO.

Dwindling cash? Microsoft had amassed close to 56 billion dollars in cash over the years.

In 2004 they issued a 1 time dividend payment, that totaled 32 billion dollars. Followed by starting a 30 billion dollar stock buy back program.

You'd think someone would do a bit of fact checking.

[iwanttheagrocrag]

UBUNTU ROX

[tmushy]

Last I checked. IE, netscape antitrust stuff happened while bill was still CEO.

Dwindling cash? Microsoft had amassed close to 56 billion dollars in cash over the years.

In 2004 they issued a 1 time dividend payment, that totaled 32 billion dollars. Followed by starting a 30 billion dollar stock buy back program.

You'd think someone would do a bit of fact checking.

Exactly.... The antitrust stuff happened when bill was the CEO. The reason he was put his harvard buddy as ceo was because they were scared the company was going to be divided into different parts.