Steve Ballmer: The. Worst. CEO. Ever.

Gross market cap lost during a CEO's reign is a poor measure of performance for a variety of reasons:

* stock prices often get de-linked from the underlying value of the business (and the starting point for Ballmer was the height of the stock market bubble)

* percentage drop seems far more important that gross amount dropped - quite a number of CEO's have led their companies to bankruptcy, and therefore a 100% drop in stock price.

* business forces outside of a CEO's control are responsible to a great extent for business performance. I would argue that Leanard Riggio (Barnes and Noble) was one of the top performing 50 CEOs in the last century in the face of very challenging headwinds but you'd never know that from the way the business (and its stock price) performed.

* dividends are another form of value returned to shareholders - and Microsoft has paid some over the years.

Also - it turns out that GE's Jeff Immelt presided over a drop of approximately $350 billion (601 billion Aug 2000 --> 246 billion today), and John Chambers even more (557 billion March 2000 --> $125 billion today)

So if the point of the article is to write about the CEO who presided over the largest market drop in U.S. history, the article should have been about Jeff Immelt or John Chambers.

Note: Intel's market cap also decreased more than MSFT during the same period but had more than 1 CEO.

edit: typo, added mention of John Chambers

Kenneth Lay didn't do such a great job either.