I'm no Microsoft fan, but... that was a beautiful moment!

Yup! All u need is just a little back ground info on the guy and you'll get emotional :)

Love the Windows 1.0 commercial especially the except Nebraska ending.

The lack of sweat in the goodbye video is disappointing.

He is a buffoon,and it's hard to respect somebody like that.

And yet, you seem to be ignoring the fact that msft's financial perdormance which you just referenced, is poor enough to make investors kick Baldy out of the company.

I remember how hurt he was back when Jobs said Microsoft had "no taste".

He's the whole deal, Ballmer.

But..but.. Steve jobs.

Wonder who's the next CEO going to be, hell of a shoes to fill in terms of corporate performance.

Dance is what we loved Ballmer for!
...Hey, MS could celebrate him with a Kinect Ballmer dance game for XBOne! It would sell MILLIONS!

About business, he was a giant in some things, he screwed others, but Windows and Office are and always were, even before him, such cash cows that they make it very difficult to evaluate his skills as a CEO. He's a great accountant, but he hasn't the tech talent of Uncle Bill and his greed makes him sometimes suck at human relations with the employess (he had the face to cut benefits to MS employees, amongst the most productive in the world, to scrape some more profit). We also know for sure he screwed hard sometimes, Windows CE/Phone/Mobile struggled and lost billions for years, Zune was a flop, Vista was a half flop that without the usual huge preinstalled numbers would have nearly killed one of the two main MS money printers, XB360 became eventually a success, but it was rushed and the unreliability of the first model was the main responsible for losing its head start, quickly on Wii, that was incredibly strong, and eventually on PS3 too, despite the latter starting bad too. The original XB lost billions due to horribly one-sided deals with Intel and NVidia (not entirely his fault, during the first years of its development Uncle Bill was still CEO). Most recently, Surface achieved results strongly under expectations, Windows RT is a half flop, also due to its closed SW and HW approach, another example of greed and monopolistic behaviour being punished, and the list could go on...

Alby_da_Wolf said: Dance is what we loved Ballmer for!

Hey thanks for bumping this!

I missed it the first time around but that was a really really great video. He sure seems like he loves that job.

I dont have to worship Balmer if I dont want to, and it is perfectly acceptable around these parts to hold a contrary opinion.

Back to subject at hand, there have been numerous reports of Balmer being pushed out by ValueAct, and you know what?  Balmer being pushed out was cheered by investors and they pushed the stock price up. 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2013/08/26/ballmer-exit-another-sign-of-growing-influence-of-activist-investors/

I guess you've ignored the "lost decade" where the stock price of MSFT remained essentially flat, sure it is up this year but that is not good enough for somebody that expects returns higher than that over the long term.

There's the reference for this lost decade thing beinga pop culture item, and for the stock price price charts, from MSN ironically you have a lot of whipsaws, but regardless you need to be significantly higher than where you were at ten years ago; this year's growth excepting.

http://investing.money.msn.com/investments/charts?symbol=MSFT#{"zRange":"9","startDate":"2003-10-4","endDate":"2013-10-4","chartStyle":"mountain","chartCursor":"1","scaleType":"0","yaxisAlign":"right","mode":"pan"}

Finally, you're the one continuing this argument by responding to me.  If you don't like my posting about this, then stop giving rebuttals and I won't visit this thread again.