Ballmer's Early Reviews

Wally Bock provides some assessments of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. An excerpt:

Assessing any CEO is tricky without the benefit of the perspective that time gives us. We can look back at Jack Welch's tenure at GE, from the perspective of more than a decade and say, "Yup, it pretty much was as good as it looked at the time." On the other hand we will have to wait a few years to make a final assessment of Steve Jobs as CEO.

Even so, I don't think Steve Ballmer will come off very well. I'm sure he did many things to turn the Microsoft boat around, but there was always one thing lacking. We never really knew what Microsoft's strategy was. That got even worse last month when Steve Ballmer announced his "Strategy of Everything."