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Comment by cnahr | Hacker News Reader

The premise is wrong. Ballmer grew Microsoft profits but he did not maximize profits for Microsoft shareholders. In fact MS share price was famously flat for far too long, and jumped 8% when Ballmer announced his resignation. It's Apple and not Microsoft which delivered amazing shareholder profits. Some basic fact checking before writing an article would be nice.

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No, the premise is spot on. Steve Ballmer is possibly one of the worst CEOs ever, but one of the greatest employees in the history of the industry. He was the first product manager on Windows, and created one of the most profitable business franchises in history. The Windows empire was so important to economic activity that Thomas Friedman cited it as a major influence in globalization in his book The World is Flat. Throughout the 90s Ballmer led sales at Microsoft, as it became one of the fastest growing companies and took the lead in the software industry from Borland, Lotus and IBM. In 1998 he championed the cause of getting Microsoft into enterprise computing; few appreciate it today, but Microsoft was laughed out of the room in enterprise sales engagements at the time--today it's a multi-billion dollar market for them.

The reason Bill Gates gave him the reigns as CEO is that besides Gates he's the person most singly responsible for Microsoft success. Circa 1998 they were the most valuable company in the world with a market cap of $500+ billion. Early in Ballmer's CEO tenure, they returned one of the largest dividends in history. It was an economic event so large that the Federal Reserve cited it as affecting the macro economy.

And a quick look at the charts indicates Amazon.com has been delivering respectable shareholder gain, despite it famously being managed for the long term.

The author ignores that people price in their view of the future of a company, and Ballmer's Microsoft isn't viewed as having a great future. Very possibly not even a good future.

In fact, if this parody of how Microsoft was being managed was correct, all these billion dollar new market effort flubs wouldn't be happening and the stock just might be doing better. At the very least the unprofitably invested money could have been returned to the stockholders.

Are you thinking of capital gain? That's not profit per se.

I'm thinking of what the article said, "doing a good job for Microsoft's shareholders" as Ballmer claimed. He did in fact not do that. Please look up the share price, it has been flat below $40 during his entire reign. And MS isn't issuing some amazing dividend either.

I think the article does a pretty good job of elucidating why the traditional view that a manager's job is to generate the maximum profit for shareholders (narrow view or the Milton Friedman mantra) no longer works - yet the contemporary holy grail as taught in management schools that advancing a broad range of stakeholder interests and also pursuing corporate social responsibility agenda (broad view) does seem to work.

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