Ballmer to Leave Microsoft Within 12 Months

The man must have wielded enormous personal influence over Board Members for them to have not applied standard performance evaluation/consequences procedures to him for this long.

The details of how he accomplished such influence over them, what was used, how he did it, that would be a historical story of value. The people who could have removed him earlier didn't just wave their fist and say 'Gosh, Steve will do better next time, we know he will, you'll see...'

So who were the people that kept him in for this long in full view of numerous consecutive failures, what did they get out of it? That would make a good investigative story.

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Win 8 and Surface were bad, to say the least. But Ballmer has been a good CEO overall.

Anyone who describes outgoing Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's tenure as a "failure" is wrong. An annualized growth rate of 16 percent in a large, established company, selling into mature markets, is nothing to scoff at. Revenue tripled under his leadership; profits doubled. That's some failure.

Source: http://arstechnica.com/information-...ft-needs-a-new-ceo-who-probably-doesnt-exist/

It remains to be seen if somebody else can actually do better with current market situation. Microsoft is a gigantic ship to command and it just can't turn around on a dime.

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Sun CEO once asked us to imagine if a single company owned rights to the letters of the alphabet and got a royalty each time they were used. That is the situation Microsoft is in when it comes to software, he said. I am paraphrasing but you get the point.

When we talk about the economy in Iran for example, even with gross incompetence and with people at the top having utter inability to run anything, the oil dollars make up for those missteps so much that they stayed afloat even with mismanagement for so long.

So it would be pretty hard to do much worse than he did because of the monopolistic nature of their business. Saying Mr. Balmer did well where he did not have competition to speak of, is one thing. If he failed where they did not have a monopoly, and he did fail where he did not have a monopoly, then that is a true measure of his abilities.

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