The INQUIRER Top 10 CEOs that went in 2007

CHRISTMAS is a terrible time to lose your job, unless of course you’re a technology CEO, in which case you can buy the world a drink and still have enough left over for a fleet of cars, a new ranch and enough plastic surgery to keep the ex-wife non-litigious for another year. Here’s 10 that walked (or were made to walk) in 2007.

10. Michael Snyder from Vonage. The VoIP company had a traumatic IPO and Snyder went in April among the general clatter of cost cutting and headcount realignment (read: “get rid of staff”).

9. David Pierce from Atari. Pierce walked in November but his exit served as a useful reminder to all of us – Atari still exists.

8. Terry Semel from Yahoo. After receiving a righteous kicking by Google, Semel had to either walk, be fired or put out of his misery. One of these occurred in June.

7. Ed Coleman from Gateway. He went last week as part of the Acer sale. And you thought Ted Waitt still ran the company…

6. Kevin Carmony from Linspire. The desktop Linux geezer had a good reason to go: he was helping out in Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.

5. Steve Burch from Virgin Media. Well, if you had to explain a quad-play strategy, you’d be off too.

4. Bruce Chizen from Adobe. The quiet man of software walked away to a chorus of “who?”

3. Ed Zander from Motorola. Ex-Sun man Zander started strongly with the Razr, then faded fast with everything else. Not a good combination when you think about it.

2. Kevin Rollins from Dell. After a decade of being the stock market’s darling, Dell had become the boot-faced old has-been. Calls for Michael to come back NOW! were received and understood.

1. David Orton from ATI. It wasn’t the biggest vote of confidence but maybe we should have read something in the tea leaves when former ATI boss David Orton walked in July, just nine months after the damned DAAMIT deal worth $5.4 billion. That’s a cool billion more than the current AMD valuation, of course. µ