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Comment by InclinedPlane | Hacker News Reader

Ray Ozzie is not CEO material, imo, personality wise, that's why he didn't take the position (I'm sure he could have had it). Ballmer is CEO material certainly, but not good CEO material.

MS is in a bad place currently top-level management-wise.

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In the same sense, would you say Bill G was prototypical CEO material? No, but look what he built. Ozzie is awkward too, but he founded and sold two software companies for a fortune. Zuckerberg is introverted and awkward too, but look what he has built. The notion that a CEO, especially in tech, should be a business degree toting, people-person, non-technical CEO like Ballmer is wrong.

I don't care about prototypes, I'm just talking about results. Bill Gates was an atypical CEO, but he had a combination of business, technical, and personal acumen that worked effectively together. Neither Ozzie nor, so far as history has judged, Ballmer have anywhere near that same level of capability. At best they appear to do no better than J. Average non-tech savvy CEOs. In a world filled with folks like Larry Ellison, Eric Schmidt, and Steve Jobs that level of skill is a recipe for getting your ass handed to you in the market.

I think Ballmer is not CEO material for a tech company. However he may be good COO material.

Has Ballmer demonstrated a particular adeptness with numbers or the nuts and bolts of operating a massive corporation? We know he's not a product visionary, but from my seat he's really a mid-level salesman who is the epitome of the Peter Principle.

Over the past decade, Microsoft's problem (imo as a former employee) is that they tried to do too many things and grew too fast at a time when they were not able to attract the best employees.

This creates a situation for the (hiring) quality bar to go down and for politicians to thrive.

I think most of MS's biggest problems are symptoms of its size. MS has had empire-itis from the beginning. From their original mission statement, through their huge acquisitions, through their refusal to spin off substantial portions of their company, their approach to competition, etc, etc. If they had been organized differently or if they had been split up into different corporations as a group they'd probably be better off today. Not least because each group would have the freedom to make the choices they need to (free of the MS overarching strategy straight-jacket) and they'd have the motivation to build truly great and disruptive things, rather than the relying on the usual strategy of getting it sorta-kinda right on the nth try through sheer brute force (read: massive investment from Windows/Office profits of the past).

P.S. Also a former MS employee, for what it's worth.

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