14 DAY TRIAL // Even though a recent research indicated that most employees still find Steve Ballmer the perfect leader for Redmond-based tech giant Microsoft, former executives and analysts continue to criticize the CEO for some of its recent decisions.
Joachim Kempin, a Microsoft executive between 1983 and 2002, will release a book titled “Resolve and Fortitude: Microsoft's ‘secret power broker’ breaks his silence” to discuss some of the issues he noticed in the time he worked for the software giant.
One of the main topics of the book is Steve Ballmer, the one who’s still in charge with the Microsoft business in the entire world and the man who reportedly fires everyone who has a chance to replace him at the helm of the company.
Kempin told Reuters in an interview that ever since 2000, Ballmer had been ousting every single person that’s considered a potential CEO in the future, starting with Richard Belluzzo, a former Microsoft COO, and ending with Steven Sinofsky, the one in charge with the Windows division until November.
“For Microsoft to really get back in the game seriously, you need a big change in management. As much as I respect Steve Ballmer, he may be part of that in the end,” Kempin was quoted as saying by Reuters.
“Steve is a very good business guy, but make him a chief operating officer, not a CEO, and your business is going to go gangbusters. I respect that guy (Ballmer), but there are some limitations in what he can and can't do and maybe he hasn't realized them himself.”
This isn’t the first time when Steve Ballmer is attacked this week, as Adam Hartung, a Forbes analyst and managing partner at consulting firm Spark Partners, said in a blog post that Microsoft’s CEO was completely ruining the software company’s business.
“Game over. Ballmer loses. And if you keep your money invested in Microsoft it will disappear along with the company,” Hartund said, while predicting that Microsoft would fire thousands of workers in the upcoming years.