No, the premise is spot on. Steve Ballmer is possibly one of the worst CEOs ever, but one of the greatest employees in the history of the industry. He was the

No, the premise is spot on. Steve Ballmer is possibly one of the worst CEOs ever, but one of the greatest employees in the history of the industry. He was the first product manager on Windows, and created one of the most profitable business franchises in history. The Windows empire was so important to economic activity that Thomas Friedman cited it as a major influence in globalization in his book The World is Flat. Throughout the 90s Ballmer led sales at Microsoft, as it became one of the fastest growing companies and took the lead in the software industry from Borland, Lotus and IBM. In 1998 he championed the cause of getting Microsoft into enterprise computing; few appreciate it today, but Microsoft was laughed out of the room in enterprise sales engagements at the time--today it's a multi-billion dollar market for them. The reason Bill Gates gave him the reigns as CEO is that besides Gates he's the person most singly responsible for Microsoft success. Circa 1998 they were the most valuable company in the world with a market cap of $500+ billion. Early in Ballmer's CEO tenure, they returned one of the largest dividends in history. It was an economic event so large that the Federal Reserve cited it as affecting the macro economy.