Forbes Names Microsoft's Steve Ballmer Worst CEO

New submitter _0x783czar writes "Microsoft haters gleefully have latched on to the latest scoop that a Forbes columnist has named Steve Ballmer the worst CEO. It seems that the article has leveled some strong accusations of irresponsible and ineffective business practices; claiming that Microsoft has not progressed over the last 12 years of Ballmer's leadership. (Full disclosure: I'm not a Microsoft fan myself and tend to agree with this piece.)"

Comments

Re:Worse?

[vlm]

But even given that many of the banks would have imploded if not for the bail out, GM would be gone if not for the bail out and plenty of marginally successful companies have gone through quite a bit of economic turmoil that MS has avoided

That is the failure mode. The way "leadership" is defined, MS should have dumped a multiple of their net worth into the Zune, then paid millions in campaign contributions to politicians to get billions in bailout funds. Heads we win, tails you lose.

The landscape is quite a bit different for big companies operating under a corporate owned government, than it is for, say, a cupcake store. In the world of cupcake stores, the MS strategy IS more intelligent than the GM strategy, but this article was talking about the big companies that own the govt and order it around, not a scrapbooking supplies store or other small operators like that.

MS could have paid millions to politicians to force the .mil to buy MS licenses for every Iraqi owned PC in Iraq, that would probably have a pretty good profit. Or they could have purchased politicans to declare linux distros as hacking tools and have border control sieze any laptop with linux installed, or sieze any linux install media. So many kleptocratic ways to turn billions into trillions, and instead they ... failed.

In a way, its bad news, if they get rid of Ballmer and but someone competent in his place, then the public will suffer greatly.