Sure, it's not Monkey Boy's fault. It never is.

Excuses, excuses. It's somebody else's fault. That's real leadership!

As CEO he is 100% responsible for his own actions or inactions and for the actions, or inactions, of those who have been hired to perform a particular task within the company. If they don't perform to your standards, hire someone who will.

Clearly Ballmer lacks the job skills to be CEO. He has spent the past 10 years allowing MS to become more and more irrelevant. It's way past time they hired someone else as CEO. Investors should demand it.

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As long as Ballmer is at Microsoft, I'll be happy.

To paraphrase Balmer, 'Nobody wants a smartphone without a keyboard' and 'nobody wants a touchscreen without a stylus' to name 2 blunders.

Using focus groups to create products results in massive shareholder loss on products like the 'kin'. People don't know what they want until they have it. Dream it up, invent it, then try it out.

The 2 biggest reasons that APPL is where it is today are:
1. Steve Jobs
2. Steve Balmer
Hang in there Monkey Boy
I and my AAPL stock are rooting for you! May you have many, many, more glorious years at Microsoft!

Apple is not the threat to Microsoft, and Ballmer knows it. The clueless investors compare MSFT to AAPL because they were competing 30 years ago, but today it is meaningless. Google is much more likely to eat their lunch because they are the ones who will displace Windows servers, SQL servers, LDAP servers, Exchanges servers, Sharepoint servers, and all the other infrastructure pieces that keep MS in the entreprise, justify Office, and make so much recurring revenue for MS.
Apple will continue to make tons of money by making products that people want to buy, not ecosystems that fewer and fewer entreprises will want to invest in.

The biggest threat to Microsoft is Ballmer himself. They need new blood there. Obviously if the stock hasn't moved in 10 years then someone else needs to come to the helm and turn things around.

@fgilbert, Google doesn't have any products that compete with Microsoft's variety of infrastructure products. There are Linux products that do but Google doesn't offer them. Equating Goggle with Linux doesn't work. Yes, Google could repackage some open source Linux distros, and hopefully would get in trouble if they try and sell them, but I don't sell them doing that )or getting away with it). Google still is a threat to Microsoft but not in the areas you mentioned.

If only Ballmer were used to be Apple board of director and saw what Schmidt had saw inside Apple secret dungeon, thing would had turned out differently from Microsoft. But still happy Apple is ahead of the game after all those decades long of being nobody.

"The stock market's kind of a funny thing," Of course it is. When you do nothing innovative for 10 years, the market gets excited and buys lots of your stock and pushes the price up, right???