Business mag dubs Ballmer lame duck

The magazine says that the softly spoken, shy and retiring CEO is a lame duck. Even if the board still backs Ballmer as CEO, with longtime partner Bill Gates stepping away from his job and Ray Ozzie playing the role of resident visionary, the CEO job is pretty pointless.

The magazine also names Ken Kutaragi - the president of Sony Computer Entertainment - as another industry duck as a result of his mishandling of the Blu-Ray release.

Rob Malda, he of Slashdot.org fame [What it? Ed.], is equally pointless after the online magazine's editor driven format has been replaced by user-generated systems such as Digg.com. [What? Ed.]

Jonathan Schwartz CEO, Sun Microsystems is another lame duck quaking, according to Business 2.0. Although he is full of ideas, he needs to realise that Sun's server business has become a commodity, and the company is not making enough money from software like Java to supplement its shrinking hardware profit margins.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds is a victim of the operating system's success, said Business 2.0. His Linux operating system is fast, cheap, and out of control entirely by design.

While Torvalds still oversees any changes made to the innermost core of Linux, the innovation is now done by others, and commercial businesses like Red Hat and Novell increasingly steer its future.

More here. [That's far too many ducks in one story pond. Ed.] µ