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Wonder what $1 billion will get you? Depending on your tastes, you can pick up a neat photo app with no business model, or a hefty collection of software patents from a struggling company.

Pending regulatory approval, Microsoft will buy more than 800 patents and related patent applications from AOL for $1.056 billion in cash. Not surprisingly, many of the patents being acquired will help position Microsoft in patent attacks on Google. But they're not likely to do much to help the tech industry or spur innovation.

There wasn't a lot of outright prophecy emerging from the Dreamforce conference three weeks ago, but Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff did say this:

"Facebook is eating the Web. And the Web is getting smaller now, and we're trying to get our heads around it, and we're seeing it in Arab Spring."

Tech CEOs are getting a lot of attention lately. With the exception of exiting Apple CEO Steve Jobs, the attention is not a good thing. From Carol Bartz's abrupt firing to Andrew Mason's IPO-icing shenanigans, many tech CEOs don't seem to be earning a janitor's salary – much less the inflated compensation they're getting.

So I decided to take a look around and see, who are the worst CEOs in tech? I limited the selection to those CEOs currently (or very near currently) working. So that means that some of the worst tech CEOs in history (see, for instance, SCO's Darl McBride) aren't on the list.