See you, Steve: 5 could-be, would-be Ballmers to consider

Today in Redmond the skies are a Windows 95 blue. Somewhere, a midlevel marketing executive is locked inside a bathroom stall weeping quiet tears of joy, and a Herman Miller Aeron chair is tumbling end over end in its inevitable descent to earth.

That’s because today Steve Ballmer announced he was stepping down as CEO of Microsoft, some time in the next 12 months.

Roughly a year from today, the Mad Ballmer, the Steve Without Reprieve, the Man Who Would Be King if Only He Were Willing to Accept a Demotion, will be just another gainfully unemployed billionaire.

The reaction on Wall Street was ebullient. Microsoft’s share price spiked 8 percent in just a few hours. That’s got to leave a mark.

Like many others, I have pinned the blame for Microsoft’s many failings on the man at the top. True, he did what a CEO is supposed to do: make money by the truckload. Microsoft is a cash colossus. But its empire is built on yesterday’s technology, and everyone knows it. That’s a big reason why its share price, just a hair under $60 when Ballmer took the reins from Gates, is barely more than half that now. And it’s probably why Ballmer decided to jump before he was pushed.

I’m not really sure why this news makes me so giddy. Ballmer has been, after all, a big fat target for yours truly over the years. From the “developers developers developers” monkey dance to the chair-throwing incident to the innumerable palm-meets-forehead utterances emanating from his lips — I mean, just the tongue alone — he’s been comic gold for more than a decade. There is no CEO who can touch him for pure personality. Whoever replaces him is likely to be a boring technocrat who says the right things in as dull a fashion as possible.

The game is afoot

To forestall that, I’d like to make a few suggestions to Microsoft’s board as to who should replace Ballmer.

Elon Musk. Sure, he’s got a few things on his plate: running Tesla, pioneering commercial space flight, engineering a 700-mph rail system between San Francisco and Los Angeles. But what does it really take to run Microsoft, anyway? He can just pencil it into his calendar between fixing our mass transit mess and flying to the moon.

Larry Ellison. There’s only one reason to pick Ellison to take over the helm, and that’s to watch him dismantle every building on the Microsoft campus brick by brick, plow over the ultimate frisbee fields, and sow salt into the soil so that nothing grows there ever again.

Ashton Kutcher. True, he has no executive experience, save for playing Steve Jobs in the apparently awful “Jobs.” Then again, Kutcher has no real acting experience either, yet studios continue to pay him millions to appear on screen.

The Geico Gecko. Think about it. Is there anyone on the planet who doesn’t know that 15 minutes could save you 15 percent or more on your car insurance? Now there’s a guy — er, reptile who knows how to stay on message.

Mike Myers/Dr. Evil. Don’t tell me you didn’t see that coming. Talk about twins separated at birth. I can think of milli — no, billions of reasons why this is a perfect fit. Even Mr. Bigglesworth agrees.

Somewhat more seriously, I think Ballmer is a smart, talented, and charismatic guy. But he’s driven out a lot of top talent Microsoft could sorely use at the moment. And the vision just isn’t there. Anyone whose user experience philosophy can be summed up as RTFM (read the friggin manual) has no place in the consumer technology business.

I’ve long held that Microsoft should set its consumer and mobile divisions free and become an enterprise software and services company, period. Maybe someone new at the helm will see the wisdom of that strategy and make it happen.

In the meantime, grab some popcorn. Succession-palooza ought to be fun to watch.