Top investors push Microsoft board to boot chairman Bill Gates

“Three of the top 20 investors in Microsoft Corp are lobbying the board to press for Bill Gates to step down as chairman of the software company he co-founded 38 years ago, according to people familiar with matter,” Nadia Damouni and Bill Rigby report for Reuters. “While Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer has been under pressure for years to improve the company’s performance and share price, this appears to be the first time that major shareholders are taking aim at Gates, who remains one of the most respected and influential figures in technology.”

“There is no indication that Microsoft’s board would heed the wishes of the three investors, who collectively hold more than 5 percent of the company’s stock, according to the sources. They requested the identity of the investors be kept anonymous because the discussions are private,” Damouni and Rigby report. “Gates owns about 4.5 percent of the $277 billion company and is its largest individual shareholder.”

Damouni and Rigby report, “The three investors are concerned that Gates’ presence on the board effectively blocks the adoption of new strategies and would limit the power of a new chief executive to make substantial changes. In particular, they point to Gates’ role on the special committee searching for Ballmer’s successor. They are also worried that Gates – who spends most of his time on his philanthropic foundation – wields power out of proportion to his declining shareholding. Gates, who owned 49 percent of Microsoft before it went public in 1986, sells about 80 million Microsoft shares a year under a pre-set plan, which if continued would leave him with no financial stake in the company by 2018.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Boom! Behold the devastation Steve Jobs hath wrought!

What I can’t figure out is why he’s even trying? He knows he can’t win. – Bill Gates on Steve Jobs’ return to Apple to become the company’s CEO, June 1998

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “epd” for the heads up.]