Microsoft caps Ballmer bonus over mobile phone, tablet failures

Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer missed out on a maximum bonus in the company’s last fiscal year, after he failed to move quickly enough against Apple’s iPad and lost market share in the mobile phone biz. The unsuccessful launch and speedy demise of Microsoft’s doomed social networking mobile device Kin also kept Ballmer’s piggy …

[Anonymous Coward]

Collection

May I be the first to send the collecting tin round for poor Steve? I mean tis barely a living wage.

[Anonymous Coward]

So

If you need change for a cuppa, fly to seattle and ask Steve.

[Slappy]

Poor bastard

<Guffaw!>

/me rolls under table

[JDX]

Oh what a surprise

Jokes about how he earns a lot. Big deal. If YOU earned £300k year but could earn up to £1m including bonuses, wouldn't you care about it?

They've taken 1/3 of the total he could of earned, that is a LOT unless you're earning several million. I'm actually surprised his salary is so low, considering the size of the company... compare with CEOs of banks and what-not.

[James Hughes 1]

One word..

Stock options.

Damn , that's two words.

[Mike Hanna]

That won't be everything

I'm kinda thinkin he'll have two or three quid thrown into stocks and shares on his behalf, and then also given stock options, sole use of the company jet, however many dancing girls he can handle...

[Alan_]

Well...

It's actually even more if you earn a few million ;)

[Robert E A Harvey]

untitled

>I'm actually surprised his salary is so low,

I was thinking that. We appear to have heads of individual hospitals earning that.

[Eponymous Cowherd]

Hospital heads

***"We appear to have heads of individual hospitals earning that."***

We do indeed.

And, in the light of impending Government Cuts, the NHS stuffed shirts are currently running around like headless chickens trying to decide which *medical* staff they can lose in order to save their own worthless (but expensive) hides.

[TeeCee]

Other news today.

Heavy trading has seen a massive increase in the share prices of office furniture manufacturers.......

[Anonymous Coward]

Stock options

Don't forget his stock options. I wonder how much he has made on those this year? MSFT stock had a couple of good ramps up before the more recent decline.

[The Messiah by Handel]

No options

He doesn't have options; Microsoft no longer award them and his ownership stake preceded the IPO. He DOES have more than 400 million shares of MSFT worth just under $10 billion (about 5% of the company).

As an aside, what does the Steve in your comment have to do with an article about the Microsoft Steve?

[Bilgepipe]

About Time

About time this buffoon paid for his dismal performance. A hundred vaporware tablets, a failed phone that even HE wouldn't buy, departmental in-fighting, job losses, and best of all his comedy "predictions" on the fate his competitors's products.

He should have been fired after that embarrassing "funeral" crap the other week.

Evil Bill, 'cause El Regs icons are STILL stuck in the 1980's.

[Rich Turner]

Hate to tell you this, but ...

... in a time of economic uncertainty, Wall St. loves execs who cut heads. MS grew from around 30K heads in 2000 to more than 95K heads in 2009 - it was a sound, although cold, plan to cut some dead wood loose.

[Peter 39]

still wrong

Dear Board,

For improved Microsoft performance, try the following for Steve ...

Salary ZERO

Bonus ZERO

With the money you save you could hire a better CEO

[Chemist]

"With the money you save you could hire a better CEO"

Or TRY and write a better OS

[pj3090]

Astounded

Sad to say, but I find it both mind-boggling and refreshing that his performance actually influenced his compensation. Nice change from the standard "here's $20 million even though you ran the company into the ground" that CEOs seem to enjoy.

[Arctic fox]

@pj3090 Yes. Much as it pains me to have to say so but.........

......if MS does not award stock options and the CEO's salary is as reported in this article then the reward structure for senior managers there is _way_ more "modest" than in a very large number of listed companies where X-million a year is the usual form.

[Phillip Baker]

Agreed

That's a big 'me too' here. Nice to see that sanity still rules somewhere.

[Uncle Siggy]

Duck...

CHAIR!

[Lars]

Would be nice to know

if annoys him or not.

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm..

Some commenters don't understand how incredibly rich these sort of people are. Steve Balmer owns about 5% of MSFT. But the market value of his 5% has fallen by half - about $10B since he was appointed CEO. So the "bonus" he has lost represents less than one hundredth of one percent of what he's already lost on account of poor MSFT performance under his management.

[Lars]

Came to think about it

Ballmer is a very rich guy, but he does not, apparently, increase his wealth bye charity like Bill, he does not take part in the America Cup, like Ellison, to save the face of the USA and as far as I know he is not in the space business either.

Golf yes, chair throwing yes, but only one recoded.

One gets the feeling that he is actually a rather normal person, or am I not surfing enough.

[Trevor_Pott]

$670,000

The base salary. Without bonuses.

It would retain my services for eight years. That's starting at $67,000 and increasing the salary over the course of the eight years as my experience (and hopefully performance) increases.

To make TWICE that amount in one year for failing miserably and essentially ensuring the eventual slow death of what was once the greatest software empire in the world?

Hat’s off to the man. He’s got a good thing going there.

[Wallyb132]

$670,000?

For the position he's in thats both a surprising salary as well as an insulting salary, compared to what others in the industry make, for example:

Paul S. Otellini Intel Corporation $14,581,900.00

Samuel J Palmisano IBM $21.300,000.00

John T Chambers Cisco Systems $62,990,000.00

Edward J Zander Motorola $12,540,000.00

Lawrence J Ellison Oracle $75.330,000.00

John W Thompson Symantec $71,840,000.00

And Ballmer makes $670,000.00? he must be the laughing stock of the secret ninja CEO club, then again the only person listed above that sits higher on Forbes list of richest Americans is Larry Ellison.

And Ballmer does have one claim to fame that no other person in this world can claim, he is the first and only person to have become a billionaire from a company that he neither founded or was related to the founder. so that in and of itself is a noteworthy accomplishment that no one else can claim.

[Arctic fox]

The only thing that is insulting here is........

.......that those guys make more in a year than the overwhelming majority of ordinary working stiffs make in an entire lifetime. They may be good at what they do but _that_ good they're not. Ballmer is a paragon of modesty (salary-wise) compared to them.

[JonHendry]

Dividends

Ballmer also gets about $250 million every year from dividends on his MSFT stock.

[Wallyb132]

@JonHendry RE:Dividends

This might be true, but most of the MS stock Ballmer has he purchased, the amount of stock options he's received to date still hasn't topped the amount of stock he purchased in the 1980's when it looked likely that Microsoft was going under as a result of Apple's look and feel lawsuit...

[ThomH]

I guess Microsoft aren't scared of anybody else poaching him...

... or, you know, even considering to employ him were he to ask.

[Grumpytom]

And to think

Steve @ Apple only gets $1 as far as I'm aware. So I think he gets my vote in value for money terms.

[Don Mitchell]

The future

Microsoft might be able to get back into the pad market, but it's hard to imagine them recovering from their loss in the cell phone market. Here is a company that was working on the eBook more than ten years ago and just dropped it. The multi-touch interface you see on the iPhone and iPad was pioneered in Dave Kurlander's research on MS Surface ten years ago. And Ballmer failed to take the risk. This is what happens when accountants run companies.

[ThomH]

A selective retelling

MIT Media Lab did the first serious work on eBooks, starting in the mid 90s and leading to the eInk screens that everybody uses in book readers now.

The multi-touch interface you see on the iPhone and iPad grew out of work begun at FingerWorks during the late 1990s. Apple purchased FingerWorks in 2005.

[pctechxp]

@Grumpytom

Steve Jobs makes a killing from his other investments such as being one of the largest shareholders in Disney if not THE largest.

[Penguin herder]

Want the big bucks?

Then it should be contingent on performance. That does not mean that the company has to actually make money: if MegaWhatever is set to lose several billion and a CEO caps that to a loss of a billion, bring on the bonus truck, it was well earned.

Given how much Ballmer has in the bank, I'm surprise he even works for such a small amount of money?? Maybe he sees it as an opportunity to protect the value of his stock. What I hate to tell him is that, from the outside, it looks like he could do that best by stepping down.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dogs dinner?

"...Kin was a total dog’s dinner..."

Which differentiates it from Microsoft's other offerings in what way?

[ThomH]

Quite simple

It was a dog's dinner that nobody bought. Also, I don't care what anybody says — I like the Office ribbon.

[Trevor_Pott]

@ThomH re: "I like the Office ribbon."

Heathen.

[Rex Alfie Lee]

Get rid of Ballmer...

Microsux will never move ahead while Ballmer remains at the helm. Nobody trusts him & he is a dinosaur with ideas in business that should legally hoisted to hell. He's untrustworthy & a huge liability for M$ & can never redeem himself. He is so low that a snake wouldn't notice if it passed over him...

[Rex Alfie Lee]

It's not fair, I think their really mean...

Useless pr1ck!