Cisco CEO Living Off The Past?

Business Insider has an interesting chart today. The chart is comparing the stock prices of Cisco Sytems and Microsoft under their respective CEO’s, John Chambers and Steve Ballmer.

Comparing the stock price of Cisco and Microsoft

Basically, Business Insider is saying that Steve Ballmer is constantly given crap about how poorly Microsoft’s stock has performed with him as the CEO compared to Bill Gate. Meanwhile John Chambers is given a free reign and no one complains of the fact that Cisco’s stock has done even worse than Microsoft.

I would say that John Chambers is given a lot of leeway because of how he handled Cisco through the 1990’s. Back then the stock pretty much did nothing but go up, just like Microsoft. The thing is, I believe a lot of Cisco’s growth was due to acquisitions and not the organic growth of Microsoft.

And today both companies have problems because, they’re really too big to return to the stock price growth of the 1990’s. They both are huge companies and are the dominant company in their industry. I think that’s why you’ve seen Cisco buy up consumer technology companies because, like Microsoft, if they don’t do something with all their cash, they would, you know, have to give it back to the investors which they’re not going to do.

Apple, The New Evil Empire?

I have to say, I’m glad that I haven’t been in too deep with the hype machine that is Apple. It seems they’ve finally pushed people too far and have gone well beyond anything that Microsoft would ever do.

US regulators are considering an inquiry into whether Apple violates antitrust law by requiring that its programing tools be used to write applications for the iPad and iPhone, a source familiar with the matter has now said.

I’m not saying Microsoft hasn’t used its market position, but can you imagine the uproar if it told all its third party developers that not only MUST you buy a Microsoft operating system to create your applications, but you must also only use tools that we allow you to use.

The uproar would be stupendous. You would have geeks rampaging through the streets. Er, ok, maybe not that far. But it really is ridiculous to absolutely mandate that you must create an application only using approved tools.

This is the problem when you have a cult of personality instead of a CEO.

Let’s Tax Microsoft For Buggy Code?

Just when I thought Microsoft couldn’t put out any more stupid ideas, this piece of genius comes along.

A top Microsoft executive on Tuesday suggested a broad Internet tax to help defray the costs associated with computer security breaches and vast Internet attacks, according to reports.

Speaking at a security conference in San Francisco, Microsoft Vice President for Trustworthy Computing Scott Charney pitched the Web usage fee as one way to subsidize efforts to combat emerging cyber threats — a costly venture, he said, but one that had vast community benefits.

“You could say it’s a public safety issue and do it with general taxation,” Charney noted.

Since, Microsoft’s software is the primary vector for most of the attacks that go on and since it is their crappy code that causes all this, I propose we tax the hell out of Microsoft to fix the mess they created.

As they’ve proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are either incapable or incompetent at writing secure code, and since this is a public safety issue, we should most definitely tax Microsoft the company to the tune of at least $10 billion to clean up their mess.

Any other bright ideas Microsoft?