Tim Cook at Apple was like Steve Ballmer at Microsoft. They scaled the company and made stock owners happy, but weren't true visionaries. I suppose there's a need for both types of leaders.

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paxys 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Microsoft's stock was flat for Ballmer's entire tenure. Investors were most definitely not happy, and that was the very reason he was forced out. Tim Cook meanwhile has grown the company 10x. It's an idiotic comparison.

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missedthecue 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Somewhat unfair. Ballmer took over at the dotcom peak. They were trading at ~70x earnings on his first day as CEO. That's the only reason MSFT stock performance under his leadership was (from start day to retire day) flat. There is no CEO who would have been able to flout the dotcom bust and maintain a 70x PE ratio for 13 years. But under his tenure, he grew revenue at one of the worlds biggest companies by almost 4x, a 10% CAGR, and EPS also increased considerably.

Also, he wasn't forced out, and the reason ValuAct was pushing for a board seat at the time was because Microsoft was falling behind in mobile and tablets. Around that time, Microsoft had taken a $900m writedown related to Surface RT.

Meanwhile, Tim Cook took over in 2011 when Apple's P/E ratio was only 13 (today it's 36). He has also obviously been a skilled operator, but stock charts by themselves don't provide all context or tell the whole story.

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xtracto 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Mhmm

Longhorn, Zune, phone, Skype, bungie , among many other failures. I was there, as a kid of the 80s, Microsoft, Windows, Visual Basic, VStudio were EVERYTHING up until around 2003, they just dropped too many balls.

	▲	voidfunc 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It was botching Mobile that really did Balmer in and possibly not reacting quite quickly enough to the need for Enterprise-grade Cloud Computing while Amazon was bootstrapping AWS right in Microsoft's back yard. They got the cloud situation under control but losing Mobile to Apple and Google was a disaster and they're paying for it still.