14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft’s Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer is not getting much love from company employees, according to one survey conducted by Glassdoor.com and cited by CNN Money. It appears that only just a little over half of the employees surveyed have indicated that they approve of Ballmer’s performance at the head of the largest software company in the world.
No less than 49% of the employees participating in the study noted that they were unhappy with Ballmer.
It is important to note that Glassdoor only surveyed some 1,000 Microsoft employees, which although a large number, might not sufficiently accurate reflect the overall sentiment of the people working for the software giant, which number almost 90,000 people, over 53,000 in the United States alone.
On the other hand, Microsoft did have a few duds under Ballmer’s leadership, and as a company continues to have its stock falling, even as it reported growth in terms of revenue.
Earlier this week, Goldman Sachs downgraded Microsoft from "buy" to "neutral," and put forth lower earnings estimates, by 4%.
During a Q&A at the London School of Economics earlier this week, Ballmer provided no answer to a question asking him to comment on the move from Goldman Sachs and the imminent launch of Chrome OS.
However, he did emphasize that he believes it would be very hard for Microsoft to fail, and that the company would have to underperform in order for such a scenario to become a reality.
Post-Vista, the software giant launched the immensely successful Windows 7 platform, and is gearing up to release Windows Phone 7 and an innovative gaming system dubbed Kinect for Xbox 360.
“How are we doing [as a company]? Pretty darn good. Could be better. Always could be better,” Ballmer said.
“But, you know, we’re a company that, I don't know, will make about US$26 billion of profit pretax. I think there’s one company in the world that makes more than that, so I’m not going to be apologetic about our financial results nor our investment. I think we’ve done a pretty good job.”
In September 2010 Ballmer received only 50% of his full bonus payout, with Microsoft revealing that the “penalty” was because of failures such as Kin, and the company’s lost terrain on the mobile phone OS business and on the tablet market.