>"or something"

Ballmer is the second largest shareholder in Microsoft, after his friend and 30 year business associate, Gates.

To put it another way, there isn't a Wall Street analyst who works for a company or fund with a greater stake in Microsoft than Ballmer.

That does not necessarily mean that he has the right vision/skills to lead Microsoft.

In fact all it means no one can take it away from him. Which kinda proves my point.

The iPhone bashing was just pathetic, I remember watching the presentation and thinking that it was going to change everything and then Ballmer responded by talking like a delirious apple-hater and mocking the price.

It is hard to innovate if you are always one step behind and need to shoehorn everything into Windows and Office.

"Buffoon"

Disclaimer: I work in the same building as Steve Ballmer.

I'm sorry.

I hope you get paid well for your shame.

or is it "baboon", or an intentional mix of the two?

Whoever decided it would be a good idea to make a guy without any engineering or computer science education and just 2 years of experience working at a soap company before joining the company the CEO of Microsoft needs to be fired too.

As I mentioned elsewhere, I would love to see a charasmatic product guy like Scott Guthrie at the helm.

But, Ballmer had nearly 20 years experience running teams in a large and successful technology company before he was became CEO.

Furthermore, the dude has a mathematics degree (with honors) from Harvard. That means that he probably earned an 'A' in Math 55, the hardest undergraduate course at Harvard[1], which implies that he would have no trouble keeping up with most of the theoretical computer science stuff.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_55

I am almost certain that Ballmer did not take Math 55, though Bill Gates did (and supposedly got a ‘B’). Do you have a source citation for that? You don’t have to take Math 55 (a freshman course with 10–20 students per year) to graduate with high honors in Math/Economics. (Which isn’t to say that Ballmer is a slouch: he is clearly very sharp, and was even as an undergraduate.)

This is the only corroborating evidence that I could find: http://www.mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=4618

For some reason I had it in my head that Bill and Steve took Math 55 together.

They're both of the same age and both entered Harvard in 1973, but all it says on Gates' Wiki page is:

> While at Harvard, he met Steve Ballmer, who later succeeded Gates as CEO of Microsoft.

Theoretical computer science stuff has little overlap with shipping a quality product and a great customer experience. Microsofts success has always been a combination of "good enough" and cunning yet cut throat business practice.

In the age of the web though, the market will now continue to out step Ballmer and whatever Harvard theoretical math he could throw at his developers developers developers developers.

Dude, whatever you think of Ballmer, he started as the first business manager at msft in 1980 and worked there in roles of increasing responsibility until he was made ceo in 2000. There's not many people with that track record of experience.

In the sense that Microsoft's online division is losing tons of cash and seems to play second fiddle to Yahoo, and their efforts to have any meaningful traction in the phone and music player markets has been futile, then yeah, they're doing great.