ZDNet's Robin Harris: Steve Ballmer is Worst CEO

Steve Ballmer may be the worst CEO among large tech companies - now that Kevin Rollins got booted from Dell and Sanjay Kumar of CA is in jail. Put him in a room with Steve Jobs of Apple, John Chambers of Cisco and Mark Hurd of HP and he'd look like the bouncer, not a peer. He just isn't in their league and Microsoft is suffering for it.

What hath Steve wrought?
If he wasn't Bill's freshman roommate at Harvard - and Bill wasn't majority owner of Microsoft - any other board would have booted Ballmer years ago. He's cost Microsoft billions in profits while the stock price stagnated.

Just to pick some of the most obvious fiascos on his watch:
* The Netscape anti-trust fiasco.
* The Google fiasco.
* All the other product and market fiascos. Virtualization: late to the game. The Xbox - losing market share to the Wii - will never pay back its investment despite a recent Halo-fueled lurch into profitability. Vista's 5 year development cycle. The continuing security mess. The smart phone failure - a market they should have owned. Major resellers, like Dell, offering Linux. The steadily shrinking cash horde. Continuing anti-trust troubles. The current OOXML debacle.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=283