Short-term performance following the departure of company founders

Microsoft

Bill Gates resigned from the CEO in 2000. Microsoft's growth rate is starting to slow. And some of the major trends, including search, smartphones and cloud computing, have been slow to respond.

Twitter

Twitter has largely come from the idea of Jack Dorsey, after stepping down as CEO in 2008. Twitter, though an explosive increase in the number of users, has yet to find a clear profit-making model. Last year, new CEO Dick Costolo again invited Dorsey to return to Twitter full-time, although there was still no significant progress in the profit model, but Dorsey introduced many new features like the profit direction and reached an agreement with Apple to preinstall Twitter.

Intel

In the 10 years that Andy Grove as CEO of Intel, Intel's market capitalisation soared from $4 billion to $160 billion. But Intel's share price has been stagnant or even falling since its outgoing board chairman in 2005, and it is increasingly suffering from arm competition.

Palm

Jeff Hawkins developed the Palm OS to lay the foundation for one of the most successful products of the 90 's Palm Pilot.

But then the company plunged into a series of mergers and acquisitions – first U.S. Robotics mergers and acquisitions, and then 3Com mergers and acquisitions. Until 1998 Hawkins and co-founder Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan left to set up another company Handspring. Palm also began to experience significant management changes, although it introduced some good smartphones at the start of the century, but was eventually marginalized and was bought by HP at $1.2 billion.

Android

Andy Rubin, who co-founded the Danger Company in 2000, was expelled by investors in 2003. So he went on to develop Android. As a result, Andy Rubin took Android to Google and made it the top-ranked smartphone operating system, and danger 500 million dollars to Microsoft to produce a short-lived social phone kin.

Foursquare

Dennis Crowley sold its location-based social network dodgeball to Google in 2005. But by 07 Crowley was tired of Google's mismanagement and ran away and created another similar company, Foursquare, which is said to have valued more than $500 million trillion.

Sun

Co-founder Scott McNealy, who witnessed Sun's rapid growth during the dotcom bubble, began to decline after the bubble burst. The 06 handover of corporate governance to Jonathan Schwartz deepened Sun's woes, slowing growth in high-end server demand, and Java's not knowing how to make money. Scott's biggest contribution to the next stage was a doubling of sun's cash reserves by reaching a $2 billion antitrust settlement with Microsoft.

Sun ended up selling it to Oracle at a price of 7.4 billion dollars.

AOL

Steve case created AOL and turned it into a super Internet company that annexed Time Warner in 2000. 2005 years later, when the case left the board, AOL and Time Warner split again in 09, AOL ushered in the new CEO Tim Armstrong, but the development is not smooth.

Yahoo!

Mr Yang screwed up Microsoft's 40 billion-dollar takeover in 08, allowing the board to kick the CEO's position. But then the new CEO Carol Bartz is also weak.

Apple

In 1985, because of the business philosophy, Jobs was kicked out of Apple by the board, and it was since then that Apple had been going downhill and eventually even on the verge of bankruptcy. But after Mr. Jobs's return in 1997, everything else goes without saying.

Via BusinessInsider