By quitting.
If you start out with the right roommate in college and are not particularly brilliant yourself but are carried along anyway by association, due in part if not in the most part to loyalty of the one who really is brilliant, just straight up loyalty, carried along way beyond your abilities as the company grows despite your presence and in no case due to it, but because you own so much of the company stock it occurs when you finally do quit the entire global organization breathes a sigh of relief and the stock you hold increases in value phenomenally. Because you're gone.
Steve Ballmer quits Microsoft and instantly gets a billion bucks.
6 comments:
Ballmer ran the biz while Gates played robber baron.
Ballmer's "retiring" won't help, though the circumstances sure are funny.
Windows XP is pretty stable.
My machine was up solidly without reboot for over a year once.
Windows 95 automatically crashed after 40 days or some such number, if nothing got to it sooner.
We've passed peak usefulness in O/S design though.
Ballmer is a classic example of the Peter Principle in action--except maybe not because it can be argued with some basis in fact that he never really had any core competence of any kind in the first place..
It's always tough for any company to move past the "Charismatic founder" phase into being run by "just some schlub in upper management".
Ballmer was the epitome of that "schlub". It remains to be seen if MS can bring anyone on board who can light a fire under their butts.
rhhardin - Microsoft OSes are infamous for being the mirror opposite of Star Trek movies - only the odd-numbered ones are worth a wet fart. Although Vista eventually shook out into something worth running on a desktop, about the same time they rolled out Windows 7.
I think Ballmer maybe gets too much of the crap, and Gates too little. Gates got out before the environment for Microsoft turned really, really sour. People seem to like to blame Ballmer for not being Steve Jobs, but hell - Gates wasn't Jobs either.
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