Did Steve Jobs Doom Apple With Tim Cook?

In January 2000, after running Microsoft for 25 years, Bill Gates handed the reins of CEO to Steve Ballmer. Ballmer went on to run Microsoft for the next 14 years. If you think the job of a CEO is to increase sales, then Ballmer did a spectacular job; he tripled Microsoft’s sales to $78 billion and doubled profits from $9 billion to $22 billion. The launch of the Xbox and Kinect, and the acquisitions of Skype and Yammer happened on his shift. If the Microsoft board was eager only for quarter-to-quarter revenue growth, Ballmer was as good as it gets as a CEO. But if the purpose of a CEO is long-term company survival, then one could make a much better argument that Ballmer was a failure as a CEO the moment he optimized short-term gains by squandering long-term opportunities.