In baseball, you get three strikes and you're out. As for technology CEOs, that depends. It depends on the magnitude and visibility of their screw-ups, the aggressiveness of the board, all kinds of things.
Sometimes it just takes one event, if it's big and hairy enough. On the other hand, I've seen CEOs swing and miss dozens of times for years on end, and they're still in the game.
Let's take a look at five recent examples of CEOs getting canned and see what we come up with:
Patricia Russo of Alcatel Lucent. It came as no surprise when Alcatel Lucent announced on July 29 that CEO Russo would step down. She had a decent run at the helm of Lucent, but the 2006 merger with Alcatel has been a disaster for both companies. This is a great example of one huge, high-visibility strike doing a CEO in. Incidentally, Chairman Serge Tchuruk is out, as well. ... Read more
During the back half of the 1990s, I was in charge of corporate marketing at Cyrix, a Texas-based microprocessor company, and at National Semiconductor, the company that bought Cyrix.
Today, I looked at some of the CNET news stories I was quoted in back then. I couldn't believe some of the blustery crap that spewed effortlessly out of my mouth.
Everything we did was the fastest, most powerful, most highly integrated, lowest cost, blah, blah, blah. The processor gods blessed everything we designed. Customers were lining up around the block. Intel was the devil incarnate. Advanced Micro Devices was just a lowly also-ran, doomed to forever live in Intel's shadow.
As the story turns out, Cyrix imploded and National Semiconductor blew I-don't-know-how-many-billion dollars cleaning up the mess. Intel's still the world's largest semiconductor company, and AMD--well, AMD at least survived. ... Read more
Here we go again. This time it was New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo who ceremoniously launched an investigation into monopolistic practices by Intel.
"Our investigation is focused on determining whether Intel has improperly used monopoly power to exclude competitors or stifle innovation," Cuomo said in a statement.
The competitors in question are AMD, AMD, and of course, AMD. ... Read more
On March 21, 1983, AMD went public. Adjusted for splits, the stock closed at $9.00 that day. Today, shares of AMD closed at $7.95. That means if you invested $10,000.00 in AMD's IPO, today you'd have $8,833.33. Adjusted for 25 years of inflation, that would be about a buck and a half.
Just to calibrate that, the same investment in Intel would have gotten you about a half a million dollars, Texas Instruments about $150,000, both the NASDAQ and S&P 500 about $100,000; even National Semiconductor and LSI beat AMD, although not by much.
Of course, some investors have figured out that you can make a fortune playing the AMD roller coaster. Except for the tech bubble and a brief spike two years ago, the stock has traded in a relatively narrow range. Seems like a nerve-wracking way to invest, but I know people who swear by it. ... Read more
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