MSFT Market cap when Ballmer took over: $601B
MSFT Market cap when Ballmer announced he was leaving: $270B
That was the problem... even if the initial valuation was ridiculously inflated by the early tech bubble, post-crash, the stock was pretty stagnant throughout his tenure as CEO.
http://fortune.com/2013/08/23/steve-ballmers-market-cap-prob...
Balmer became the CEO right at the peak of the tech bubble. He couldn't (nobody could) possibly have maintained that sort of valuation. It was all hype and irrational exuberance.
It really wasn't the loss post-bubble that was Ballmer's issue, it was that the stock price was stagnant.
Re:Ending the cult of the CEO
by novembermike on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @11:02AM
(#14194125)
Balmer's reign also coincides almost perfectly with the anti-trust actions taken against Microsoft. He was given the worst Microsoft to do anything with.
> Under Ballmer's tenure as CEO, Microsoft's annual revenue surged from $25 billion to $70 billion, while its net income increased 215 percent to $23 billion, and its gross profit of 75 cents on every dollar in sales is double that of Google or IBM.
...
> Ballmer also built half-a-dozen new businesses such as the data centers division and the Xbox entertainment and devices division ($8.9 billion) (which has prevented the Sony PlayStation and other gaming consoles from undermining Windows), and oversaw the acquisition of Skype. Ballmer also constructed the company's $20 billion Enterprise Business, consisting of new products and services such as Exchange, Windows Server, SQL Server, SharePoint, System Center, and Dynamics CRM, each of which initially faced an uphill battle for acceptance but have emerged as leading or dominant in each category.
It doesn't exactly sound like tanking.