A Tale of Two CEOs

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26 points·erikpukinskis··11 comments

The scaling on the graph makes it difficult to tell, but it looks like the stock price fell soon after Balmer took over and has gone up and down since then, but mostly held steady. Why would he be sacked now, if he's survived almost 10 years with similar performance?

Because investors' patience isn't infinite?

In Ballmer's defense, MSFT has outpaced NASDAQ over the past 10 years, and has been paying dividends the whole time, so the performance isn't quite as bad as the flat-to-sinking stock price suggests.

Pedantic note: MSFT started paying dividends in 2003, 1/3 of the way through the Ballmer period.

Maybe Gates simply timed his exit and Microsoft's stock price was going to fall anyway. Classic endogeneity problem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogeneity_(economics)

A more accurate title might be "A tale of two eras."

The stagnation in Microsoft's stock price has more to do with the market changing and the company maturing than with who's at the helm.

I'd argue that who's at the helm has a direct influence over whether a company follows a changing market and grows with it or stagnates (or fails).

The Y axis on this graph isn't labeled. Moreover, it's scaled so that the rise for Bill Gates looks huge compared to everything else.

There's a Y axis on the right. From the numbers there it's clearly logarithmic. The rise in the Gates era is just as striking, if not more so, with a linear scale.

I'd love to see the NASDAQ on graph as well

Perhaps Gates shall return, Jobs-like, as the founder-savior for MSFT?

He's saving lives now.

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