The bald truth

Stop press! Steve Ballmer in 'surprisingly unpopular' shocker! Dave finds out more

The $14bn personal fortune, the bonkers on-stage freak-outs, the occasional ill-judged vituperative outburst against his rivals - what's not to love about Steve Ballmer?

Well, I can't think of one single thing. But it seems those in his employ feel rather differently, as the Microsoft main man recently came bottom of the pile in a survey of tech CEOs' staff approval ratings. Research from Glassdoor.com finds that, over the past year, the sweaty software supremo was given the thumbs up by just two in five employees.

Worse still, the bosses of arch rivals Google and Apple head the approval table, with outgoing search engine chief Eric Schmidt and Mac man Steve Jobs posting scores of 96 and 95 per cent, respectively. Intel head honcho Paul Otellini is another nauseatingly popular leader, coming third with 90 per cent.

Michael Dell boosted his score by 12 points over the course of the year, but still gets a fairly meagre 48 per cent rating. IBM top dog Sam Palmisano was up 10 points to a more respectable 57, while Oracle's perennially youthful beard aficionado Larry Ellison posted a decent 73 per cent score.

All this prompted me to conduct my own research, and I was pretty crestfallen to get a zero per cent approval rating from my company secretary, treasurer, chief marketing officer and head of solutions. Especially as I've been married to her for 20 years.