What Do You Think Of Steve Jobs As Apple CEO? Forbes Hosts CEO Approval Rating Poll

by , 2:30 PM EST, February 26th, 2003

We aren't big fans of Internet Polls at TMO, except for ones intended to be humorous, and the occasional mainstream Apple related poll. Such is the case with a Forbes survey/poll being conducted at that magazine's Web site. Called "CEO Approval Ratings," the survey is a month-long survey covering 20 CEOs from the airlines, financial, media, and technology world, and Apple CEO Steve Jobs is included.

You probably won't ever have the pleasure of cozying up to the bar with Sanford Weill and telling him what you think of the job he's doing at Citigroup.

But thanks to Forbes.com, you can vote on his job performance--and post a note, too. Our CEO approval ratings let you mark your ballot on the most prominent U.S. business leaders, from Steve Jobs to Carly Fiorina to Warren Buffett.

In the tech sector, the following CEOs are included:

Steven P. Jobs, Apple Computer
Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft
John T. Chambers, Cisco Systems
Lawrence J. Ellison, Oracle
Carleton S. Fiorina, Hewlett-Packard

The "vote" is a simple Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down vote. When we voted, Steve Jobs had 4643 Thumbs Up, and 1020 Thumbs Down. That's an 82% Approval Rating, for those keeping score at home. Steve Ballmer, on the other hand, had 1659 thumbs Up and 2657 Thumbs Down, a 38% Approval Rating.

You can check out the poll at Forbes.com's site. We should note that the poll is set up to inhibit spamming. We also wanted to point out that there is an ad that features audio on every page of the poll (your results may vary), so turn your sound down if you are in an environment where that's an issue. That ad also seems to play havoc for Chimera, causing that app to crash several times.

The Mac Observer Spin:

It's not too surprising that Steve Jobs is getting a better than 4:1 approval rating, just as it is not so much a surprise that Steve Ballmer is coming in closer to 8:13. It's tough being the sweaty head of the world's biggest technology abusive monopoly.

Forbes's CEO Aprroval Rating Poll