3 ms·
I feel bad for ballmer. his legacy is going to be pretty terrible because the stock price was flat from when he took over until now. nobody seems to take into a
by clarky07 13y ago
I feel bad for ballmer. his legacy is going to be pretty terrible because the stock price was flat from when he took over until now. nobody seems to take into account that he took over in the middle of the tech bubble bursting and msft was hugely overvalued at the time. I think profit has tripled since he took over or something like that. following gates was already going to be one of the hardest tasks possible. getting handed an overvalued company in the middle of a bubble bursting makes it all but impossible.
while i don't actually think he was a good ceo, i think he is much better than he gets credit for. they say he missed mobile, but i think windows phone is pretty good and new take on it. it was just a year or 2 late. xbox has been pretty fantastic overall. windows 7 was good. i think windows 8 has potential. azure is pretty good as far as i can tell. sure vista sucked (though not as badly as everyone says), and there have been other failures (kin anyone?).
People act like other good ceo's don't ever fail. Jobs had plenty of failures. Ping, mobile me, etc... Jobs had the "benefit" of taking over an almost dead company. making it thrive meant stock went crazy and he gets to be awesome. Ballmer just got in on the wrong end of the market. Tim Cook might have this problem as well, but at least Apple wasn't wildly overvalued at the time.