“It’s hard not to feel a little bit bad for Steve Ballmer today,” Miguel Helft reports for Fortune. “Not because he’s finally giving up the reins at Microsoft, where his 13-year tenure as CEO has been a string of disappointments for investors, but because there’s finally a figure – arbitrary as it may be – to measure that disappointment.”
“Ballmer, as it turns out, has been a $16 billion drag on Microsoft,” Helft reports. “Shortly after Microsoft (MSFT) announced his retirement Friday morning, shares surged by nearly $3, before settling at about $2 higher than the previous close of $32.39, a roughly 6% gain — on a day when the S&P 500 index is barely up. With 8.3 billion shares outstanding, that represents a surge of more than $16 billion for investors. (Mind you, the consolation prize for a bruised ego is nothing to sneeze at: Ballmer, with some 333 million Microsoft shares to his name, will net about $666 million for the day.)”
MacDailyNews Take: Golden parachute not required. And the luckiest dorm assignment in recorded history continues to pay off big time.
Helft reports, “On the outside, it’s not clear who has the chops to take on the challenge. As Meg Whitman’s ongoing struggles at HP show, righting the course of an industry giant that largely missed the tectonic shift to mobile computing will not be easy… Just last month, the company took a $900 million charge on its Surface RT, a device designed to compete with the iPad that failed to deliver.”
Read more in the full article here.
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