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He'll be remembered as a terrible CEO. Ballmer took over as CEO in 2000. In the 13 years since then, Apple has experienced an unprecedented resurgence. Google a

• anuragramdasan 13y ago
  Ballmer has always lacked the ability to see the future. Be it about him calling Zune the iPhone killer, or much prior to that claiming it in the media that no one would ever wan tto buy an iPhone. Also, really below par products.
  • davidw 13y ago
    > Ballmer has always lacked the ability to see the future. Maybe you meant 'envision' the future? Outside of Nostradamus, who, by the way, predicted not only Hacker News, Steve Ballmer's downfall, but also this very thread on the same subject, not many people have the ability to see the future, although some are better than others at imagining how it could be.
    • anuragramdasan 13y ago
      Hah. Okay didn't see that obvious mistake there. I meant 'envision'.
  • the_bear 13y ago
    To be fair, one of the greatest "see the future" CEOs has said similar things. Just off the top of my head, I know that Steve Jobs said that no one would want a larger screen than the original iPhone had, and he said that 7" tablets didn't make any sense. Now Apple has a larger iPhone screen and 7" tablet. That's not to say that Steve Jobs was wrong about the future, but he had to sell devices in the present which meant pretending that they were perfect even though they weren't. Ballmer may have been doing the same. It's likely that his failures occurred much earlier in the process, and then he had to try to sell doomed products which is where those silly statements come from.
    • anuragramdasan 13y ago
      Yes, probably. But then again, Ballmer failed quite often. Also I wouldn't really think of any CEO bashing another companies product just for the sake of rivalry and then fail. Its a huge risk to take. Also having to sell silly products again is the CEOs problem for having to decided to sell those. Its just that the past 10-13 years have been cluttered with bad products and I would assume the ceo had a major role to play in it.
    • prawks 13y ago
      Also don't forget Apple has had it's share of failures under Jobs (MobileMe, arguably AppleTV, their desktop peripherals always sucked, plenty of failed products, etc.).
      • gregd 13y ago
        I'm still pissed off about my Newton...
        • zeckalpha 13y ago
          That wasn't under Jobs. He put it out of its misery.
      • danieldk 13y ago
        Well, judging by the number of iMessages that arrive in a correct order on my iPhone/Mac and their inability to make iTunes Match stable, it's hard to believe that iCloud will be a success in the end. Under Jobs Apple made stellar hardware and good-enough software.
        • potatolicious 13y ago
          Ehh, I think Apple's software is pretty good - note that this is speaking as someone who writes iOS apps for a living. Where they fail is web services. Apple cannot engineer a decent web service to save their sorry lives. The Cocoa API is pretty well thought out, generally well-documented, and pretty well-engineered. Then you get into things where you have to talk to Apple via a network. StoreKit? [shudder]. iCloud? [terrified scream]. iMessage? Oh lord.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • bentcorner 13y ago
    > Be it about him calling Zune the iPhone killer, or much prior to that claiming it in the media that no one would ever wan tto buy an iPhone. Really though, do you think the CEO should say anything different? "Yeah, our Zune isn't too bad, but the iPod is still better."
    • ams6110 13y ago
      He should have said that, internally, and demanded better. Or said, if that's really the best you can do, forget it.
• leokun 13y ago
  No, I don't think he'll be seen worse than the CEOs of AOL Time Warner, Enron, Worldcom, or Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, but sure you go on with your hyperbole. It's turning into a staple on HN. Really raising the bar there. Edit: parent comment used to say "worst CEO of modern history"
  • lbarrow 13y ago
    You've got a point. I'll edit it to say "terrible". How's that?
    • kaonashi 13y ago
      They did tread water. I'd go with 'middling'.
      • deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
  • sampo 13y ago
    > parent comment used to say "worst CEO of modern history" What about Stephen Elop? "As of June 2013, Nokia's [...] stock value dropped by 85% since Elop's takeover." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop
    • simonh 13y ago
      That would have happened whoever they'd hired, their inertia towards inevitable doom was unstoppable. His failure was to not not see this and turn down the job.
    • danieldk 13y ago
      That probably would've happened anyway. Nokia was far to late in the post-iPhone introduction market. In fact, I get the impression that they are slowly recovering. They have a good hardware lineup and are starting to get traction in lower-income markets (e.g. South America). Also, the Lumia 521 and 520 are now topping the non-contract phones best-seller charts on Amazon.com.
• sz4kerto 13y ago
  If an MSFT share was worth 35 when he took over (at the top of the bubble) and it's the same now then it does not mean (at all) that he was a crap CEO. MSFT still remains one of the most important tech companies ever, that's not a small feat. I don't think that he's an extremely brilliant CEO, but tech companies come and go, and MSFT is still close to the top. Even if everyone in the media is 100% focused on mobile now.
  • stephencanon 13y ago
    $60 at the top of the bubble; it was already in decline when he took over; surely not (entirely) his fault. On the other hand, $35 in 2000 dollars is $47 today, so that’s a significant inflation-adjusted loss of value. On the other other hand, they paid out $7.69 in dividends during that time, which is a reasonable portion of what is lost to inflation. Where am I going with this? Oh yeah, share price is not a great metric for company or CEO performance, and when its used people rarely evaluate all the factors correctly.
    • bobsoap 13y ago
      Agreed, plus I believe they split 1:2 in 2003, which has to be accounted for as well.
    • zanny 13y ago
      This. Why is everyone caring about share price? Look more at revenue and market growth. Xbox took over consoles, Bing is the only search engine to capture whole percenetage points of search from Google, and they still have an ungodly monopoly on enterprise software from office to visual studio. Most public companies could give less of a crap about their share price after the IPO. What people trade shares for is really inconsequential as long as the company itself maintains 51% and stock market panics on them don't leak to their profit centers.
  • mikeash 13y ago
    I think it depends on what you mean by "important". If you mean big in the industry and making products on which a lot of people depend, yes. If you mean influential in the future, then I think not. Microsoft is a railroad company in the early days of the automobile. They're a typewriter company in the early days of the microcomputer. They're a sailing-ship builder in the early days of steam. They're important currently, but they're being left behind, and they have not positioned themselves to get in on the new stuff. It takes a long time for changes to happen. Microsoft can live fat off the PC for a long time to come. But they will slowly slide into irrelevancy if they stick with that.
• MatthewPhillips 13y ago
  Microsoft had already lost all of its momentum by 2000. The antitrust case was a major distraction and by the time it was over Microsoft had a badly damaged brand image that has never recovered. Gates overreached during his later years and made the company too insular, leading to them missing out on all of the advances to come.
  • eterm 13y ago
    Microsoft had lost all it's momentum before Windows XP was released? An OS which absolutely dominated for over a decade. Even more importantly SQL Server really matured in SQL server 2005, as did IIS leading to a large proportion of the server share too. .NET / C# was also post-2000, another very important strategic asset with Visual Studio. I'm not sure that it is fair to characterise MS post 2000 as missing out completely.
• fauigerzigerk 13y ago
  I agree that he will probably not be remembered for having more than doubled revenue and almost tripled profits. He will not be remembered for transforming Microsoft into one of the most important enterprise software companies. Not for introducing .NET, C# or Kinect either. All of that will be forgotten. He will be remembered for missing mobile. He will also be remembered for caring a lot about developers and about developers and about developers as well. The VB6 folks will still hate him ;-)
  • eykanal 13y ago
    And for missing search. And for missing social. And for insulting OEMs. And for his failed Windows Vista launch, and Windows 7, and Windows 8. For one man, he sure has a lot of failures on his plate.
    • fauigerzigerk 13y ago
      So has Steve Jobs missed social and search as well? No. All companies need not do the exact same thing. Missing mobile is relevant because it is eating into Microsoft's PC revenues, but social and search is a whole new business that Microsoft didn't need to get involved in at all. In my view, Ballmer's mistake is to not go after Oracle and SAP much more than chasing Apple and Google.
      • film42 13y ago
        Microsoft saw social and search and thought, "we must create our own!" While apple saw social and search, and said, "that's not our market, let's have google handle that for us." Edit: Apple did acquire ping, but that was social music, which is a bit different. They also introduced siri, which simply plugged in to preexisting search services (Google in iOS 6, Bing in iOS7) so it really is agnostic on that front.
        • JulieCompt 13y ago
          Apple tried social and search* with Ping and Siri. It flopped. But nobody holds it against Jobs
• wallygold 13y ago
  They've paid dividends pretty consistently over that time so if the price is the same (or close) hasn't it effectively appreciated? This article puts the cash value of the 2004 special dividend at 32 billion. (And that's not to include the quarterly dividends that they haven't missed a beat on.) http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/21/business/technology-microsoft-to-pay-special-dividend-to-stockholders.html http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/21/business/technology-micros...
  • gibybo 13y ago
    The dollar has inflated 40% since 1999, so the value of a MSFT share has decreased quite a bit.
    • wallygold 13y ago
      Is that still the case when dividends are taken into account? If I've held a share since 1999, in place of it I don't just have a share today: I have whatever I've done with the dividend payments that came in the interim.
• smackfu 13y ago
  MSFT pays a dividend. Just looking at stock price then vs. now is ignoring that. Very common mistake.
  • stephencanon 13y ago
    You need to consider both the dividend and inflation; $35 in 2000 dollars is $47 today. In the intervening time, they paid a total dividend of $7.69. I haven’t done the full inflation-adjusted dividend computation, but I would guess that it works out pretty close to a wash, but slightly in the red.
    • smackfu 13y ago
      Well, technically it's not inflation you should take into account, but a safe alternative investment, like government bonds. But that probably just makes things worse.
      • stephencanon 13y ago
        Agreed; I was hewing a bit too close to simplification. The risk-free rate of return is what you really want.
    • cma 13y ago
      The parent made a good point, this post is just a nitpick that might not even really apply: you don't need to account for inflation when you are benchmarking their performance against APPL and GOOG.
• bluedino 13y ago
  On the other hand, think of all the companies Microsoft used to compete with that are basically gone.
  • scholia 13y ago
    Such as Digital Research, Borland, Novell, Netscape, AOL, Sun, and Palm. IBM isn't what it used to be, either. Any more?
• silverlake 13y ago
  To be fair, MSFT revenue and net income has climbed steadily these past 10 years. AAPL finally overtook them in 2011-12. Microsoft very publically bumbles their consumer products, but their enterprise division is doing well AFAIK. And that's a steady reliable revenue stream compared to the fickle consumer market. AAPL is one bad iPhone away from getting beaten by Samsung.
  • deveac 13y ago
    >Microsoft very publically bumbles their consumer products, but their enterprise division is doing well AFAIK. MS is surprisingly well rounded regarding where its revenue comes from. More so than I had assumed reading a lot of the reporting. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/microsoft-apple-and-google-where-does-the-money-come-from/4469 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/microsoft-apple-and-google-wh... >AAPL is one bad iPhone away from getting beaten by Samsung. Look at how much of Apple's revenue is just iOS. Crazy. I'm not sure that Samsung is the threat, as they are just a hardware vendor like Apple, but without the profitable app and digital goods store (I'm assuming that App Store revenue is falling under iPhone/iPad in chart but could be wrong). I also see Apple more willing to change the business it is in if it needs to than some of its competitors. Apple got a lot of flack for the Maps "debacle," but it was a bold and decisive move. Apple couldn't come to terms with Google so they just built their own global mapping service. With so many eggs in one basket though, the revenue is certainly Apple's to lose or keep, depending on how it executes. The Google chart is just amazing. Everybody knows why Android is free, but this just hits it home. They're an advertising company plain and simple. Anybody, anywhere, that can build better storefronts (search, email, native apps, etc) is a threat.
    • rahoulb 13y ago
      This is Horace Dideu's take on Apple's revenue: http://www.asymco.com/2013/08/22/the-revenue-table-imperial-units-edition/ http://www.asymco.com/2013/08/22/the-revenue-table-imperial-... Profit-wise, Apple claim that their digital stores only break-even, but revenue-wise, the stores dwarf the Macintosh line, with music alone matching Macs.
• wnevets 13y ago
  why is stock price the only measure of a company and its CEO? Unless of course you're a share holder.
  • film42 13y ago
    Stock price is his comparison. His point, is that, Balmer let apple and facebook overtake Microsoft when the market was equally fertile for any company to explode. But what did the aftermath look like for Microsoft? Positive enough to adjust for inflation -- an equal stock price.
  • RogerL 13y ago
    The CEO's job is to make the company valuable. That's kind of a sociopathic view, of course (gee, I thought our job was to make heart valve replacements or whatever). But, that is the trade off you make when you go public. And, just in case it isn't clear, stock price + dividends over time should equal the cash flow generated by the company. So, looking at stock price over a ten year period is a decent proxy for evaluating a CEO's performance. Only decent, and only proxy. Say you worked the first 5 years propping up a dying business, and the next 5 years building a bunch of incredible value. The stock market may not have reacted to that, but your company is set to explode in value. Or you may have started in a bubble, or finished in a bubble, or... So of course it is not the only measure, but it is certainly an extremely large part of measuring a CEO, since it is his job to maintain and/or grow the value of the company. It will never tell you if the company is bettering humanity, good to its employees, or other very worthwhile measures.
    • seunosewa 13y ago
      The CEO's job is to make money (profits) for shareholders. Manipulating the stock price is not part of the job and is probably illegal. Besides, the OP failed to account for the dividends Microsoft paid during Steve Balmers tenure as CEO.
    • onebaddude 13y ago
      >Stock price + dividends over time should equal the cash flow generated by the company. So, looking at stock price over a ten year period is a decent proxy for evaluating a CEO's performance. So why are you completely ignoring dividends and a stock split? Looking at 10 years of stock performance while ignoring those factors isn't decent analysis, it's terrible.
• tocomment 13y ago
  That's exactly why I'm relectuant to short stocks by the way. Even when a company is slowly dying the share price won't necessarily fall?
• kiriljakimovski 13y ago
  "A MSFT share was worth about $35 dollars when Ballmer took over; it's worth about $35 now". Actually, $35 from 2000 would be much more than $35 now. The stock value declined while he was CEO.
• Tloewald 13y ago
  Well it could be worse. (Nokia, RIM.) I think he made one hideous strategic mistake -- deciding Microsoft was the Windows company instead of the Office (or "whatever makes money") company. If he had reacted to iOS and Android by selling Office for those platforms Microsoft would probably be making money off the mobile revolution instead of facing oblivion (or at least irrelevance). (Recall that Microsoft makes, or used to make, more money per Mac than per Windows PC.) Instead by emphasizing Windows over Office he made a whole bunch of people realize that they don't need Office to get through their days.
  • seunosewa 13y ago
    I agree with you, but I think that mistake belongs to Bill Gates and not Steve Balmer. Steve certainly would not have led the company in any direction that Bill disagreed with.
  • catnaroek 13y ago
    Well, in all fairness, consumer computing is increasingly moving towards entertainment, which would make Office rather awkward as the center of their whole corporate strategy. Betting on Windows was, I still think, the correct strategic decision.
    • Tloewald 13y ago
      So basically Ballmer did a heckuva job?
• at-fates-hands 13y ago
  >>>A MSFT share was worth about $35 dollars when Ballmer took over This is incorrect. In December of 1999 the shares were selling around $58/share. Even in March after he took over the stock still hovered around $53/share. By May, the price had crashed to around $30/share - which coincides with the first dot com bubble bursting.
  • flomo 13y ago
    IIRC the MSFT 'crash' was on the day they were found guilty of antitrust violations, and a bit before the bubble actually popped.
    • scholia 13y ago
      You are correct. Microsoft stock crashed twice. (It also went down when the bubble went down.)
• dagw 13y ago
  Microsoft beats out a number of other big name tech stocks over the same period (Oracle, Dell, HP, Sony, Nokia, Intel, AMD, CA), plus outlived a bunch of others. So while I'm not defending him, and I'm certainly glad to see him go, calling him terrible simple because there where other better performing companies in the same sector is a bit harsh.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• onebaddude 13y ago
  >A MSFT share was worth about $35 dollars when Ballmer took over; it's worth about $35 now. The world moved on, and Microsoft didn't move with it. Nonsense. There was a 2 for 1 stock split in 2003. Also, MSFT paid no dividend in 2000. Since then the dividend has gone from $0 in 2004 to $0.23 per share this past quarter. That's real value created and returned to shareholders. There's more to a company than share price. Ballmer was no Steve Jobs. But he was no Leo Apothekar either. He'll be remembered exactly as he should be; that is, barely remembered at all.
  • RockyMcNuts 13y ago
    not sure if your math is right. actual price on 1/1/2000 was $116, $43 adjusted for dividends and splits - http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=MSFT&a=00&b=1&c=2000&d=07&e=1&f=2013&g=m&z=66&y=132 http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=MSFT&a=00&b=1&c=2000&d=07&e=...
• macspoofing 13y ago
  No he won't. Microsoft may have lost ground in some areas that they wanted to be in, but the 2000s entrenched them in the enterprise, and now they are very well diversified, with multiple big revenue streams. It could have gone better for them, but overall they are doing very well. They may still pull out (big) wins with phones, tablets, search and internet in general.
• cma 13y ago
  You have to compare it dividend adjusted.
• ghshephard 13y ago
  "A MSFT share was worth about $35 dollars when Ballmer took over; it's worth about $35 now. " When doing this type of calculation, please adjust for Dividends, which have been substantial from Microsoft, and only recently started from Apple.
  • gibybo 13y ago
    And inflation. Dividends averaged 1.5% during this period, inflation about 3%. So really we're looking at a ~15% decline in value.
    • tedsanders 13y ago
      No, inflation is irrelevant to whether owning Microsoft was a good or bad decision. You want to compare to an alternative investment, such as treasury bills. Inflation is only relevant if you want to see how the purchasing power of Microsoft owners changed.
  • InclinedPlane 13y ago
    The more appropriate time window is from 2008 to now, since that has been when Gates was absent from the company and when Ballmer truly ran the show on his own. Over that time the stock went from roughly $28.5 to roughly $34.5, while giving out a total of $3.51 in dividends per share. Inflation has a slight but non-trivial effect (adjusting that $28.5 stock price to about $30.9 in today's dollars). Overall you get a total rate of return on MSFT stock of about 23.5% over that 5 year period (even adjusting for inflation of the value of the dividends). That works out to an annualized return of about 4.3%. That's better than a punch in the face but it's not that great compared to any other similarly sized tech company in any related industry.
• marcofloriano 13y ago
  Microsoft is a good company, it´s just not "cool".
• adventured 13y ago
  You're judging the share price coming out of the greatest stock market bubble in world history. 1) The stock was closer to $57 in January 2000 if you average the trading days, not $35 (high in Jan was $64 at the end of the month, low was $42 at the beginning of the month). 2) They generated $22.9b in sales and $9.4b in profit in the fiscal 2000 year. Ballmer inherited about a 45 PE ratio, which is a massive multiple for a company with a $425+ billion market cap. An impossible multiple to maintain at that size I'll note. Just ask Apple, their PE has imploded from 35 to 60 several years ago, down to 9 recently (now 12 or so). Does that make Cook a terrible CEO, the fact that it's very likely impossible for him to build a trillion dollar company? No, he inherited a growth monster that is rapidly slowing down. Welcome to the law of big numbers. 3) Sales have increased from $22.9b to $77b so far under Ballmer. And profits have gone from $9.4b to $21.8b for fiscal 2013. For a company that was already the largest software company in the world, that's a spectacular operating performance. Meanwhile they've returned 40% of their market cap in cash to investors. The notion that any company can dominate all industries simultaneously, such that Microsoft was going to own search, social and mobile is absurd to put it very lightly. The notion that Microsoft can just magically stop all future giant companies from existing, is equally absurd. I don't think he was a great CEO, but your bashing is completely off target. You're criticizing Ballmer for basically not being a trillion dollar company with $100 billion per year in profit by not being a combined MSFT + GOOG + AAPL + FB. That makes no sense.
  • scholia 13y ago
    Best post in the whole discussion. Sorry I have but one upvote to give ;-)
• geoka9 13y ago
  Being a terrible CEO at Microsoft is being a hero in my book. As someone noted below, "Microsoft used to control the future of computing". This was a very bad proposition, as we all know how evil they are in general, and incompetent whenever it comes to actually doing something new, as opposed to copycatting and driving out of business their competition. I will always remember and be thankful to Ballmer for making MS a nonissue.
  • marincounty 13y ago
    Yea--that's the best way to look at the argument.
• jericsinger 13y ago
  There are a few things worth noting when talking about Balmer and MSFT's share price. Since 2004, MSFT has returned over $164 billion [1] to shareholders in a ~50/50 split of buybacks and dividends -- on today's balance sheet, that cash would be worth an incremental ~$20/share (assuming $0 reinvested). Meanwhile, revenue and free cash flow have grown at a respectable 12.4% compounded, and it wasn't until 2012 that Apple passed Microsoft in terms of gross profit. I don't think anyone would argue that Ballmer's been the most innovative CEO of his era, but as a custodian of shareholder value, it's pretty hard to fault him. Could he have done better? In hindsight, we know the answer is yes, but the answer in hindsight is always yes. He managed to try and fail at big ideas without bankrupting -- or even significantly impairing -- his company. Not many CEOs can claim the same. What happened to Microsoft? It built and sold unsexy products that people were willing to pay gobs of money for. I'm sure many businesses would love to fail so successfully. [1] http://www.gurufocus.com/financials/MSFT#cs http://www.gurufocus.com/financials/MSFT#cs. For the sake of reference, AAPL returned ~$26 billion to shareholders over the same period.
• 300bps 13y ago
  A MSFT share was worth about $35 dollars when Ballmer took over; it's worth about $35 now. Holy cherry picked statistics. In August of 2000, the near height of the tech bubble saw the NASDAQ at 4,234 and MSFT at about $35. Today, the NASDAQ is at 3,652 and MSFT is at about $35. So the NASDAQ is down 14% while MSFT which is best benchmarked by NASDAQ is flat. From the most ridiculous tech bubble the world has ever seen.
• ripvanwinkle 13y ago
  There's a lot written about Ballmer's successes and failures and most focus on the tangibles - Like growing revenues by x and profits by Y and such and such product bombing or taking off. IMHO his legacy though, is the culture he leaves behind. Its an intensely competitive internal culture that has - employees jousting with each other in the rankings game - pressure across the board for businesses and individuals to deliver "results" in time for each annual and half year review which limited experiments and blue sky endeavors. - over the top status mails and visibility exercises to preserve and extends one's influence Everything else is a symptom of that - products that are kinda incomplete, or only incrementally better than the previous ones because it insanely hard to get everyone on board and ship truly game changing products in a manner that fit into the appraisal cycles. Note the incremental approach is extremely good for more risk averse sectors like enterprise software but not really for the wild west of consumer technologies.
• cabalamat 13y ago
  > A MSFT share was worth about $35 dollars when Ballmer took over; it's worth about $35 now. The world moved on, and Microsoft didn't move with it. It's a bit unfair to say Ballmer hasn't increased the MSFT share price -- just today he's put the price up from $32 to $34.5.
  • kale 13y ago
    What were the shares outstanding when he took over compared to now, are they the same?
    • cabalamat 13y ago
      I think you missed my point.
• slykat 13y ago
  The stock investor in me loves this attitude because while MSFT has done an impressive job of milking their cash cows (Windows, Server, & Office), Wallstreet & the press have been completely un-exuberant on the company, making the stock price very appetizing (until recently). But yes, the engineer in me laments with you. Microsoft has gone from an innovator to an optimizer very good at minting cash.
• return0 13y ago
  OTOH, Microsoft was a well established company at the time you are referring, while google/facebook/New Apple were startups. MSFT's competition was IBM,Oracle,Sun,Old Apple etc. Most of their generation are dormant names now, while microsoft's products are still popular.
• mtdewcmu 13y ago
  You can't claim that MS didn't try to jump onto every trend. I think it may be asking the impossible to expect trends to be predicted in advance. Consider that MS already had a business to run. It would be irresponsible to risk that business to bet all-out on something that might never happen.
• sk2code 13y ago
  Well said. I am 100% with you on this. At the time of the internet bubble MSFT share was around $60 and it been more than 13 years now and still no luck as far as shares are concern. I guess the best Microsoft product so far is XBOX/XBOX360. Windows was suppose to be huge but I guess gone are those days.
• rayhano 13y ago
  It's easy to criticise, and it may even be pertinent to point out on missed opportunities. However, you really should not quote Microsoft's share performance without detailing the dividends they have been consistently paying: http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/msft/dividend-history http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/msft/dividend-history
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• enupten 13y ago
  If you account for inflation, it has actually moved down :)
• xutopia 13y ago
  To be honest a lot of the damage had been done before Ballmer was CEO. The alienation of web developers was well under way, proprietary lock in was a major concern for enterprise and they had already painted themselves in a corner by eschewing the web in favour of a desktop only strategy.
• rickjames28 13y ago
  What happened to Microsoft? While the rest of the tech sector exploded and prospered, it stayed still. A MSFT share was worth about $35 dollars when Ballmer took over; it's worth about $35 now. The world moved on, and Microsoft didn't move with it. You've got a huge case of reality distortion field.