The worst CEOs in corporate history
growthbusiness.co.uk
growthbusiness.co.uk
Laughing at failure isn't good, but talking about it more is. Apart from CEO compensation, which I still find ridiculous, I find the difficult question is "were they doing their job?" Not if they were doing it well, but were they doing what is usually expected of a CEO?
Hindsight is 20/20, and it seems to me a lot of failure and success can be luck. So is there anything other than calling the market/future wrong that makes these CEOs bad? E.g. with Miller, shutting down the acquisitions seems like the quickest way to dissatisfy devs, and I'd argue an awful idea in any case.
E.g. it might have emphasized how much COMPAQ's PC quality dropped during that period, e.g. two computers with the same model number and consecutive serial numbers could have significantly different insides, which was a nightmare for people trying to prepare for Y2K. So why continue to pay COMPAQ prices for worse than Dell quality? (As I recall, Dell maintained a higher degree of commonality in their PCs, although peripherals were just as or more mix and match.)
Chasing after something different while gutting your core business is a common failure mode. Apple was said to suffer from this to a degree in the period mentioned, as was implied from the mention that Macs weren't selling that well. The Apple II side of the company was not happy about being a neglected and scheduled for termination cash cow.
As for Mayer, she just seems to be terrible at managing people in general, not just devs. Besides really notable things like the meat axe taken to all remote workers while setting up a nursery adjacent to her office, Tumblr's failure as a successful acquisition is said to be in large part due to the precipitate folding of its sales organization into the general Yahoo one, which had no idea how to handle its rather different market.
And wasn't development neglected as well? One common fate of acquired units, which I've seen first hand, is that their technical development plans get canceled when they inevitably lose budget allocation battles to much more politically powerful incumbent units in the company.
So, I say that unless a company has developed a skill at doing this, which Cisco was said to have a long time ago, despite losing all that wonderful synergy and eliminating duplicate cost centers, integration of a new company that's successful into your company should be done with extreme care and without rushing. "Successful" to distinguish from e.g. acquihires where acquiring a successful team, but little or none of their previous products or services, is the goal.