CEOs Who Should Have Already Been Fired

http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2012/05/12/oops-5-ceos-that-should-have-already-been-fired-cisco-ge-walmart-sears-microsoft/3/

by asto • 14 years ago

97 95 14 years ago

forbes.com

diminish• 14 years ago

"Oops! Five CEOs Who Should Have Already Been Fired (Cisco, GE, WalMart, Sears, Microsoft)"

Surprised not to see Steven Elop of Nokia in the list.

untog3• 14 years ago

He hasn't failed yet. He has pursued a risky plan to reinvent Nokia, one that might yet work out.

r00fus• 14 years ago

How many new CEOs get more than 1-2 quarters before they're judged? Why is Elop treated differently? Over 4 quarters of disastrous results after an equally disastrous abandonment of his suppliers customers and products.

Elop can legitimately be described as a disastrous CEO and should have been dismissed as soon as he uttered "burning platform". Even the similarly disastrous Apotheker who manned HP got less than a year and wasn't as bad by the numbers or employee sentiment.

Killswitch• 14 years ago

Ouch, that's kind of a kick to the ego. I do kind of agree with the article... Ballmer is washed up and making Microsoft hurt for it.

hobin• 14 years ago

I think that's nonsense. I don't like Ballmer, either, but nowhere have I seen any evidence that he's hurting Microsoft because of it. Look at NASDAG:MSFT, and you'll see that Microsoft is actually an incredibly stable company. This is very likely to change in the future, of course, but this has little to do with Ballmer, per se, and more with the fact that its flagship (i.e. Windows) is becoming less necessary for a lot of people.

http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...

asto2• 14 years ago

Windows 7 is pretty good in my opinion. I only run a linux box right now, but when I need Office/Photoshop/Games, I'm much more likely to go with Windows than Mac.

What's wrong with windows as of Windows 7? As far as I can see, not very much. It seemed quite stable for the limited time I used it. It's good to look at. It gets the job done. What more do I need?

I'm sure Windows 8 will be a decent move up from here. A better choice for worst CEO would have been the former RIM CEO or the current Nokia one. I STILL CAN'T BELIEVE THEY DITCHED MEEGO IN FAVOUR OF WINDOWS PHONE!!! AARRGGGG!

beedogs• 14 years ago

> I'm sure Windows 8 will be a decent move up from here.

I've used it.

It isn't.

It's well and truly a horrorshow. And I like Windows 7.

asto2• 14 years ago

I've tried out the consumer preview as well. Can't say anything about how it performs because I tried it on VM but it had some obvious flaws that affected usability. I don't think we should judge them before the final release though. (or maybe we should wait till SP1 :D)

freehunter2• 14 years ago

And there are people still using XP because they say 7 is a horrorshow. I've worked (in the last year!) with some salesmen at my company who still ask to be moved back to DOS because they can't figure out Windows.

Opinions are a funny thing: they're not always logical.

thewinuser• 14 years ago

I've been a windows user for a long time. Windows evolution is too damn slow and too profit driven. Being a Microsoft customer, feels like being subjected to a painfully slow usability experiment. Now they bring forward WinRT and Metro UI but I expected that with Win7 or even earlier. Whats wrong with win7 ? Its just a (more) stable win xp with a new theme and a new price. If I had a business, I would be scared to let Microsoft control me by the b*lls.

mbell• 14 years ago

> What's wrong with windows as of Windows 7?

1) The start menu is just terrible, 2012 and they haven't imposed a method to avoid it being a jumbled mess. Worst part, even if i reorganize it to be more gnome 2 like, next time an app updates it fubars it again. The only thing that makes it remotely usable is the search bar.

2) Explorer's file copy capabilities are really bad, get 3-4 transfers going to your NAS, a USB key, whatever and it crawls to a halt.

3) Explorer just completely goes to hell if you lose connection to a network drive. I have my home NAS mapped as a network drive, take the laptop somewhere else, tell it to resume, "oh no i have a folder on by NAS open when it went to sleep", now I have to wait 20 minutes while it decides it can't find the network drive, nor will explorer do anything while it waits. Also the using the "file upload" window in chrome is useless when the NAS drive isn't available, it literally crashes chrome on my laptop since chrome times out waiting for windows to decide the drive is unavailable, i have to use drag+drop to attach files to gmail.

4) Mouse scroll wheel only works on the window with focus, luckily there is an addon that fixes this called WizMouse

5) No virtual desktops.

6) No native mounting of iso files, seriously I have to install some third party program that installs a fake CD-ROM drive to access the file system of an iso?

I think that covers my major gripes, my only major gripe of linux, and why I stopped using it as my primary OS, is just terrible management of multiple displays, especially in multiple orientations.

davidw• 14 years ago

> 5) No virtual desktops.

http://www.welton.it/articles/windows_for_linux_users

There used to be one you could install, which made Windows slightly more tolerable.

eigenvector2• 14 years ago

2) and 6) are fixed in Windows 8.

pessimizer3• 14 years ago

I was pleasantly surprised by Windows 7, and it doesn't make me physically ill to use or support like Vista did. It's like a cleaner, stable XP.

But that's the problem, really. I didn't love XP - in fact I feel like I remember the inflection point sometime after SP2 where people were starting to say, 'XP isn't that bad any more - it's gotten pretty solid and isn't too much of a pain.'

That's not really attractive.

Innovating on UI is probably what they should be doing - because all three major operating systems are powerful enough when not intentionally crippled, but Windows 8 is pretty repulsive.

randomdata• 14 years ago

What's wrong with windows as of Windows 7?

If you are someone who invests in learning how to use your tools, nothing. Technically, I think they've done a great job in fixing the issues of Windows past.

It is still a system for experts though. Just the other day I used Windows (7) for the first time since Windows 2000 was all the rage and found it to be an incredibly confusing experience. I almost felt like I had never touched a computer before.

Since this article seems to be directed at consumers, most people there are not experts, and that is where Windows is failing.

rbanffy• 14 years ago

Windows may be an OS for experts, but only as far as those are experts on Windows.

Anyone who has used anything else for any significant amount of time would rather have a root canal treatment than returning to Windows.

bstar773• 14 years ago

As much as this pains me to say it, I don't think Ballmer is the worst by far. The reality is that MS's numbers are still great despite not having the stranglehold over the PC industry that they once had. It's still a very strong company. I don't care for their products, but many people still do.

Ballmer deserves the crap he's gotten for his prior arrogance, but I have not seen that behavior in a long time. I have a hard time criticizing him for his lack of clairvoyance of Apple's success, but who else had it in 2007? Only Google comes to mind.

This story is just out there to get picked up by bloggers and hopefully go viral. I actually think the man deserves more respect.

knowtheory2• 14 years ago

That's fine, but the problem is that his early mistakes means that Microsoft has been playing catchup, and will continue to play catch up. They've effectively coasted on their existing installed base without innovating. Nothing about the experience of Windows now is any different from what it was in 2000. There is nothing audacious about what Microsoft has attempted to do this century, save for the xbox & the kinect. My life isn't better because of Microsoft.

That despite the fact that Microsoft has had some awesome researchers and projects. They have by and large failed to bring any those tools and products to market (the kinect again being a notable exception).

bstar773• 14 years ago

You could say the same thing about the release of OSX. MS is playing catch up in the mobile sector, a place they never dominated. They still OWN pc marketshare.

Now make me stop defending these guys, I'm getting heartburn.

Retric2• 14 years ago

They have made a lot of progress on the Sharepoint side which will keep them in the enterprise market for a long time. .Net was released in 2002 and it's become a completely viable alternative to Java which was vital in the long term. Bing is an also ran, but it's still the #2 search engine in the US which IMO is not that bad of a place to be considering where they where in 2000. And Windows 7 was fairly good, heck Vista was fine on decent hardware far better than there old school failures like Windows ME.

With that said, I think they are in for a vary long vary profitable decline but IMO so is Apple. Honestly, that's just what happens to large companies.

freehunter2• 14 years ago

>Nothing about the experience of Windows now is any different from what it was in 2000.

Then when they change something, the world goes into a shitstorm because it's different.

xibernetik• 14 years ago

If you look at the latest Windows Phones (seriously, Apple and Android have virtually identical interfaces - the odd one out is Microsoft) and Windows 8 (yeah, it isn't on the market yet, but they released the beta), that's clearly not true. There was the Ribbon too in Office, which was radical enough a lot of users complained during release. They released the Surface and Surface 2.0 as well, though I don't know how strong their market is. Bing has done some interesting things, particularly with video search and maps. I've just gone through 5/6 divisions, 5/7 if you include Skype.

All of this aside, Microsoft hasn't needed to innovate to the degree of the other big players for a while. Apple needed to innovate in order to secure some set of markets in order to survive. Google wants to innovate since it needs to gather more data to boost its ad business. Amazon wants to be the retailer for everything, and anyone selling anything else (e-books, music, movies - notably) cuts into their profits, so naturally they want to cut into those markets first. Microsoft... had Windows and Office, no real issues there until Apple started to edge in on the consumer market alongside non-PC devices. Even prior to that, Vista was an attempt at innovation that resulted in major screw-up for a ton of reasons, Windows 7 was the fix. Is it really any surprise we're only seeing real innovation (in Windows) now?

edwinnathaniel5• 14 years ago

I think the main keyword out of your rant is "My life...".

Many small businesses or mom & pop shops may have benefited from Windows+Office (specifically Excel, Word, and Access).

They can also purchase Office 365 and have tight integration with their one and only laptop to run their small business.

Sharepoint Online + Office 2010 are extremely powerful and beneficial for those that don't have their own IT department.

Sure, people can keep pointing out Salesforce, Basecamp, Highrise, some random CRM, some random Time & Expense stuff, shopify and so on but if you can get SP Online + Office 2010 for less than $25/month... that's hard to beat.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/office365/compare-plans.aspx

malay• 14 years ago

Ballmer certainly deserves more respect. Microsoft is still growing and making significantly more money at higher margins than nearly every other company on the planet.

This article was published in a week where the CEO of a major corporation admitted that he was completely wrong when he called concerns about his bank a "tempest in a teapot" just 4 weeks ago. He called his own company "sloppy" and "stupid" on national television.

And Ballmer is the worst CEO?

Nelson69• 14 years ago

Shouldn't MS's numbers be base lined against Apple's?

Clearly the industry has had that kind of growth in it, Apple did it. While MS is printing money like no one's business, the growth seems to have stopped where as they are a very rich company, a very talented company, with tons of resources, why haven't they grown?

It's hard to say Ballmer is bad, the numbers to speak for themselves. At the same time, if you maybe spun Xbox out and let it run as a small nimble company, maybe it'd be dominating, not carving off a third. Same with windows mobile and maybe even bing. There does seem to be some level of market share they can win with incredible expense (what they spend to win that market share has to be way more than the competition) and then the machinery of MS sort of bogs it down and it's a far smaller number than "Windows Everywhere" would have you believe they are capable of, it's not a leader in the market. You have to wonder about the future, I don't think they're in trouble but the tides can turn rapidly. What's the end game for Windows 8 tablet? 15% market share? 10%? What's acceptable? Moreover, it just seems like bad news is coming out about it and it's going up against iPad. Short of the DoJ leveling some sort of charges on Apple, I don't see windows8 tablets getting out of the blocks, let alone "Windows Everywhere." And then the flip side, what would they have Apple do? Allow IE on iPad? Is that going to change any thing?

Androsynth• 14 years ago

I have a hard time criticizing him for his lack of clairvoyance of Apple's success, but who else had it in 2007?

Ballmer has done a lot to copy Apple in the past decade: Zune, Win7 UI, WinPhone. I wouldn't be surprised if they repackaged their old tablets in a sleeker Apple-esque style (which would be funny, because MS was genuinely first to that market) In general you get a very 'me too' feeling out their products in the past decade. (plus Azure and bing, which didnt copy Apple but other companies)

epynonymous• 14 years ago

this article is poorly written, microsoft is still a very profitable company with tons of cash in the bank and though ballmer hasn't innovated much over the past few years, they haven't fallen as much as the author likes to suggest (unless you're talking about stock price which is moot anyway since microsoft's a value company now). it takes different ceo's to steer a company through different times. surely you don't think companies are at the top forever do you? DEC anyone?

for the record, i am not a fan of (developers developers developers) ballmer or microsoft, but this article just pure stinks. competition has heated up and this is after all the technology sector where even things like social media can lead the industry.

giis• 14 years ago

I hope he continues as M$ CEO :)

randomdrake• 14 years ago

I am disappointed that there was not more direct information regarding the links between Ballmer and the directions the mentioned technologies have taken.

I can't help but think that there are other factors besides a single individual regarding Zune, Vista, CE, and so on. Can it really be true that one individual is responsible for every one of those going the wrong way?

Microsoft is still a valuable company and continues to be in millions of homes, businesses and schools around the world. Keeping a foothold in that market seems like a success, to me. Losing stock value is one aspect of the measurement of successes of a company, but is it truly the reflection of a single individual?

saddino• 14 years ago

In corporate culture, the CEO is, fairly or not, a proxy for the company, and thus, the individual held responsible for the success or failure of the corporate entity.

No different from firing the manager or head coach of a sports team (which may inherit a losing streak due to pure luck or regression to a mean from a spectacular run of winning seasons).

The buck has to stop somewhere.

bluedevil2k• 14 years ago

I submit Robert Nardelli for the Worst CEO Hall of Fame. CEO of Home Depot, drove customer experience at the store to the ground all in the name of profits, stock price was unchanged during his tenure (and his tenure saw the biggest run up in home prices in American history). CEO of Chrysler, drove it to bankruptcy.

shelf• 14 years ago

Aaand we revert to the usual correlation/cause confusion that usually surrounds leadership discussion. For all you know, Microsoft could have been much worse off without Ballmer. Fate and the actions of the collective other will always have this kind of unpredictable, mountain-moving power, and foolish men will always try to attribute it to something they can measure. Nothing is this simple.

megablast• 14 years ago

Everybody in history could have done worse. So what? We should never judge them?

gouranga• 14 years ago

Granted the guy is a holy grade prick, but he's kept Microsoft together fine over the last few years.

In fact they've improved as a company quite incredibly recently, bar the legal shenanigans...

alapshah• 14 years ago

Like others here, I think Nokia/RIM ceo's are worse. I liked this article about tech CEO's in general: http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/why-tech-ceos-seem-so-dumb

jroseattle• 14 years ago

This article is actually phenomenally ignorant of what it means to run an entity such as Microsoft. Ballmer is no gem, but the author suggests he failed because he didn't re-invent an inherited, gigantic behemoth constructed in the eyes of Gates, who hung around for years in a non-official capacity. Oh, and he lost to Apple.

Could he have done better? I guess. Could he have done worse? I'm sure.

andrewljohnson• 14 years ago

The buck has got to stop somewhere. Getting beat by Apple is not an "oops." If he can't do it, they should get someone else who can.

MSoft is becoming increasingly less relevant to my life, and I don't think I'm alone.

Tloewald• 14 years ago

Indeed, Microsoft under Ballmer has done far better than Sears (to which it is unfavorably compared in the article), Yahoo, RIM, etc.

But, it is a sign that Wall Street is starting to pile on Ballmer?

delinka• 14 years ago

I don't understand how anyone could have thought Ballmer was anything other than Gates choosing his friend to fill the job. He's always been completely out of touch with technology. He's completely a Suit and not a Geek, to put the stereotypes to work. What's worse is he's an egotistical suit that thinks he can just will the technology industry to follow his (Microsoft's) lead. He doesn't even want to understand technology or the end users' needs. He rode Gates' and Allen's coattails and he's comfortable in his riches. He has no motivation to attempt innovation and he's stuck in his comfort zone. Billions in residual revenue from Windows and Office upgrades? Good enough for him apparently.

They need a CEO with a strong openness principle and willing to listen two great advisors: a designer with strong UI/UX experience, and an engineer who knows how to implement those designs.

Summary: Drop Ballmer, get some Apple design sense, and keep shit open. That is how you'll move the industry forward with Microsoft leading the way.

loverobots• 14 years ago

Not exactly Forbes but a "motivational speaker" and a blogger. No doubt he has the experience of running a company the size of MSFT and crippled by anti-trust settlements on both sides of the Atlantic

By the way, Microsoft is still growing all while investing in xBox, Bing and Microsoft Research (PE of around 11 and valued north of $250 Billion.) They have returned tens of billions to shareholders via dividends and still have almost $50 Billion in reserve. This blogger should send his resume and ideas to the board of top companies if he can do better as CEO.

Microsoft is about to make a cool and predictable $25 Billion in profit this year. 25,000,000,000.00 in just one year. Not sure what will happen 5-10 years from now (no one really does) but it's a great achievement for a "dead" company.

brudgers5• 14 years ago

>"Microsoft is PC company, nothing more, as demand for PCs shifts to mobile."

I doubt Forbes serves its website from an iPhone.

B2C is a small portion of Microsoft's business (though massive on an absolute scale). From the days of their agreement with IBM, Microsoft has always been grounded in B2B relationships. The fact that the author can mention Dell, Nokia, and HP indicates a strength that companies to which they are often compared such as Google and Apple, lack - Michael Dell's B2B relationship with Microsoft helped make him a billionaire.

Under Balmer's tenure, Microsoft has become a stable mature company which has consistently realizes massive profits through established long term relationships with their customers. Microsoft started paying dividends a long time ago. It's not a growth stock.

Balmer remains CEO because he is not beholden to Wall Street. He's second only to Gates as a shareholder. They can look long term in a way that other companies cannot and direct Microsoft accordingly - because Balmer's job isn't at risk based on some two bit analyst's opinions.

roc7• 14 years ago

I'll agree there's a strange blind-spot in much tech reporting on Microsoft. It consistently misses Microsoft's stable, mature and solidly profitable B2B business. Even if worse came to worst, they could sail off into that land IBM pioneered, remaining happily profitable for decades to come.

But at the same time, Ballmer has made some horrible blunders. The XBox was nearly strangled by their obsession with beating Sony out of the gate with the 360. The Zune was a disaster. The years of utter denial regarding WinCE vs the iPhone and Android. Groove. Danger. Skype. The complete lack of a functional ecosystem between their own first-party products. [1] The critically successful Windows Phone being artificially hobbled by bureaucratic concerns [2]. Mismanaging the entire tablet sector for years, only to show up three years late with a confusing compromise...

In short, nothing but their B2B business (and you can lump much of their Windows licensing money in as part of that) has been run well.

[1] XBox Live vs Games for Windows Live, XBox Media Functions vs Windows Media Center, Zune vs XBox Marketplace (and don't get me started on the mess that they created when they tried to finally centralize media under the "Zune" service brand...)

[2] The name is absurd. Why not "Metro"? Why didn't they just put it on a tablet and call it a day? Why are they finally delivering a Metro-ish tablet, but under a different architecture and name and with some obtuse desktop metaphor lurking under the covers?

brudgers5• 14 years ago

>"Skype."

Microsoft owns it. They could build a worldwide phone network on top of it. They even have a hardware partner with deep penetration in the developing world.

And they're shipping:

http://blogs.skype.com/en/2012/04/skype_for_windows_phone_ha...

josefresco• 14 years ago

The 360, despite it's initial problems is a resounding success for MS. To include it in a list of blunders would be a mistake.

sixothree2• 14 years ago

Microsoft is terrible at naming things. I blame most of Bing's failure on the name, not the actual product itself.

btilly• 14 years ago

I doubt Forbes serves its website from an iPhone.

Based on http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://forbes.co... they don't use Microsoft software either. As for Microsoft's profits, anyone who has read The Innovator's Dilemma can see all of the signs of a late stage great company that has failed to address disruptive innovations. They will continue to have great profit margins as they bleed customers until they wind up with no business left.

edwinnathaniel5• 14 years ago

> They will continue to have great profit margins as they bleed customers until they wind up with no business left.

That could be in the next 10 years or 100 years. Nobody knows and I don't think anybody can predict that will happen sooner than later.

Just like IBM: they're not visible to our generation of IT workers but they exist in other lucrative market, embedding themselves quietly and nicely.

joelrunyon• 14 years ago

1 page article here --> http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2012/05/12/oops-5-ce...

joering2• 14 years ago

thanks for that. I couldnt get passed ridiculous "capital one" advertise that took over my screen. I gave up looking for X to close it down.

Ryan_Shmotkin• 14 years ago

How can anyone can seriously consider this article where the reporter constantly compares shares prices now to.. the height of the tech bubble of 2000 ?

How about comparing profits ? Oh wait.. didn't Balmer double that..

TDL• 14 years ago

Well said. I am no fan of Balmer, but using stock prices to my comparisons from one period to another is usually foolish. It's one thing to say that the price of a stock has plummeted in a short period (SHLD being a good example from the article) is indicative of poor leadership; it's another thing entirely to compare stock prices where they currently stand to when they were priced for perfection.

Tycho• 14 years ago

Xbox has been brilliant though.

rdl• 14 years ago

What happened to Cisco? Aside from crazy acquisitions, and their long-time strategy of having employees leave, build a company, sell to Cisco for a high price, work for earn out, then do it again, and again, what did Cisco do to fall from where it was to where it is now?

dragonbonheur• 14 years ago

I don't agree that Steve Ballmer should be in that list. Historically he has been responsible for Microsoft's massive expansion while Gates wanted to keep his company 'lean and mean', so in a way Ballmer is responsible for MS doing so much R&D, although he doesn't have the same ability as Gates to make his researchers focus on successful future products. OTOH the one CEO that I would put at the #1 spot is Stephen Elop, of Nokia. Nokia had a great OS, API and developer ecosystem and Elop gave all that away. Despite what the media is happy to report the Symbian OS is a perfect fit for mobile technology, touchscreen or not; a RTOS kernel (just like any kernel, as the Mach Kernel used in iOS) only needs the adequate drivers to handle multi-touch screens. There was no valid reason for giving all that to Accenture. Nokia is making a great range of devices, but now all developers will be coding for Android, thanks to Mr Elop.

slantyyz• 14 years ago

I'm surprised the CEO of Groupon wasn't on the list.

_rj• 14 years ago

Its kind of disturbing to see speculative articles like these make a quick huge wave and creates some kind of impact. Most of the logic behind picking these 5 are based on the stock price, on the other hand if some well known wall st person makes a stock pick, price shoots up. I think this article is little over the limit.

tzaman• 14 years ago

What a load of crap. All these CEOs are guilty for low stock values? I doubt. Cisco, for example makes top notch networking gear, and it's only so much they can achieve there - I've had my Linksys routers for years now and I doubt I'll have to change them anytime soon. I don't think they can revolutionize the market any further. And that is not CEO's fault - they merely stick to what they are good in. Why is that wrong?

adventureful• 14 years ago

There's little doubt that Ballmer has been a mediocre CEO in terms of innovating or at least properly catching the latest technology waves.

However, the Forbes articles ignores several important issues.

1) Ballmer has tripled the sales, and doubled the profits in the last ten years at Microsoft, while paying out $100 billion in dividends (and MSFT still has $60b in cash). This with a company that was already the most profitable tech company (2002). That is not a terrible performance, specifically because...

2) Had Microsoft gone with someone else, it's just as possible they could have ended up like HP, Dell or Yahoo. Microsoft is not in that boat however, and Ballmer has not destroyed the company. The article mentions Windows, but ignores server + tools, which has grown tremendously and is very profitable. Consumer Windows is not their lead profit machine any longer.

It's far more likely that someone would implode a company that is on top of the mountain, than that they would figure out how to create the first trillion dollar company. It's worth keeping that in mind: the only way Ballmer could have apparently succeeded by the article's qualification, is by creating a trillion dollar company out of a price per share ($60) that was derived from the greatest stock market bubble in world history.

There is a limit to how much money you can make at any given time in the global business eco-system. Microsoft had nowhere to go stock market wise, sideways from a stock market bubble price would have been a helluva accomplishment (just ask Intel or Cisco).

Everybody touts Apple today, but the most likely best-case outcome for their company is sideways (5% annual growth) for the next decade. Once you hit the top of the mountain, it becomes nearly impossible to keep soaring.

protomyth2• 14 years ago

On the sidebar is a couple of Warren Buffet stories and if his next 3 years are like his last three[1], he might make the list. Microsoft doesn't look so bad compared to his fund.

[1] http://www.investorplace.com/2012/05/where-did-warren-buffet...

Technically, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe purchase might yield well given the pipeline was killed.

mhartl• 14 years ago

As a thought experiment, imagine the change in Microsoft's market cap if tomorrow they announced that Steve Ballmer was stepping down and Bill Gates was returning as CEO. The result, at least in my mental model, doesn't reflect well on Steve.

CEOs Who Should Have Already Been Fired

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