Fruitcake for lunch?
Balmer is a clueless fruitcake. His Long term strategy? Let's start with the disaster that was "Windows Millennium". Windows 2000 was fine, followed by Windows XP, which we had to live with until the disaster that was Vista in 2007. Windows 7 was what Vista should've been. Now what? Windows 8 on Arm? Where is the long term strategy for the smart phone and tablets? Too little/too late? Microsoft didn't like the Netbook market because everyone started buying them with XP on them, so they put a crippled Windows 7 on them to basically kill that market.
And yes, investors generally only care about short term profits and stock price increases, but this investor (as well as others) are right about Balmer's leadership. The only thing he got right in his 11 years at the helm, is the X-Box 360. Is that even profitable yet? So now he wants to drop 8.5bn on an unprofitable web telco, under the assumption of making long term profits? From who? Skype isn't profitable with Microsoft in charge. Who really thinks they will be with Microsoft in charge, especially considering that Balmer will surely ruin Skype by re-branding it with some Microsoft branding (which will surely ruin the product).
Balmer has got to go. He's failed and if he's permitted to do this Skype deal, that will prove to be his biggest failure to date.