Microsoft Employees Divided on Ballmer

Microsoft employees generally seem to like their company ... but seem a little more divided in their opinion of CEO Steve Ballmer.
That's the new conclusion drawn by Glassdoor.com, which surveys employees about the minutiae of their workplaces. Microsoft earned a 3.5 rating out of a possible 5, based on 1,613 responses (Compensation and Work/Life Balance notched particularly high scores). Ballmer himself had a 50 percent approval rating, based on 1,117 responses.
That's a small fraction of the company's 88,596 worldwide employees (assuming all of Glassdoor's responses were provided by actual Microsoft employees). But Ballmer's rating is particularly interesting when compared with Glassdoor's survey numbers for other tech titans (and Microsoft competitors), including Apple CEO Steve Jobs (97 percent), Google's Eric Schmidt (96 percent), Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff (91 percent) and Oracle's Larry Ellison (78 percent).
Ballmer recently took a hit from Microsoft's board, which decided the company's recent setbacks in the mobile arena--and its slowness to jump into the tablet market--were enough to prevent the CEO from receiving his full potential compensation for the year. Ballmer received 100 percent of his $670,000 base salary as a bonus, when he could have earned 200 percent.
In other words, Ballmer's not likely to apply for food stamps any time soon; but the issues with Microsoft's mobile business were evidently enough (in the board's view) to balance out the successful launch of products such as Windows 7 and progress in cloud initiatives such as Azure. And if the board's feeling those setbacks, then I bet a certain portion of Microsoft's employees do, too. At least, that's the feeling I get from inward-facing blogs such as Mini-Microsoft.
Should Ballmer step down? That's a question I've seen debated on a number of news Websites and blogs over the past year. Whatever the prevailing opinion, I think the success or failure of Windows Phone 7--not to mention the Windows tablets supposedly due to appear around Christmas--will go a long way toward determining whether he stays in position.

Maximus Mcafee Memc Electronic Materials Mentor Graphics Methode Electronics