Hacker News Reader

Half-agreed. I still like him because he's the only rich and powerful person who would do that ridiculous dance on stage for the whole world to see, only in the name of people like me, me, me!

But "bad CEO"? Come on! If you look beyond the HN filter bubble, he has definitively diversified MS beyond its early Windows/Office shackles, increased revenues consistently and made (most of) the new divisions very profitable.

And if you think there's no "HN bubble", ask yourself why there's this huge front-page thread about MSFT tanking 10% but little talk about GOOG tanking 14%.

"developers, developer, developers" could be called a "behavior smell". Something is very wrong when CEOs are jumping that way.))

In a stable market with no big changes, he would be an excellent CEO, and he was generally considered a good one until the last few years (some would say after Vista, other after the iPhone).