Steve Ballmer at All Things Digital

[RoyGBiv]

Steve Ballmer needs to get down on his knees and thank the gods of the multiverse that he hooked up with Bill Gates when he was young. Had he not, rather than getting paid to embarrass himself and everyone else who's ever worn the geek label with pride, he would have had to find some other sort of management position that better suited his talents. Given his ample expertise in trying to sell crap not even starving fanboys want and sweating profusely while blathering on with a nonsensical motivational battlecry, I think he may have found his niche in the chain restaurant industry.

Sorta like this guy:



Separated at birth? :shrug:

But, no, he knew Bill, so he got a job, and I guess as far as Bill was concerned he was good enough at it to keep him around and pay him enough to purchase small countries. But now Bill is gone, and Steve is the one going around trying to remind us of how wonderful Microsoft is. Unfortunately, his talent for bad restaurant management doesn't seem to transfer to things technical, which is odd for someone serving as CEO of one of the most pervasive technology companies in the history of the human race.

Am I overstating the case? Probably. Let's just say his "Developers ..." rant inspired me.

Ballmer and Ozzie at D8: Why does Google have two OSes?
By Peter Bright

After Steve Jobs did a turn at the All Things Digital conference on Tuesday, today was the turn of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and chief software architect Ray Ozzie. The two men talked about the transition to the cloud, the growth of alternative computing platforms like smartphones and tablets, and their relationship to the PC.

...

Ballmer also questioned Google's operating system strategy. Google has two operating systems; its phone and tablet OS, Android; and its future browser-oriented desktop OS, Chrome OS. Microsoft too has separate operating systems, the Windows NT platform used for desktops and servers, and the Windows CE platform for mobile applications, but the company is working to try to make the platforms more coherent. The use of Silverlight on the forthcoming Windows Phone 7 OS is a case in point; by using Silverlight for application development, the underlying differences between the desktop OS and the phone OS are made irrelevant.

...

From a technical point of view, it's a strange criticism for Ballmer to make; in spite of the efforts by Microsoft to reduce the discrepancies between its two operating systems, they are fundamentally very different. This in fact sets Redmond apart from both Cupertino and Mountain View. Apple's iPhone OS is a derivative of the desktop Mac OS X, and the differences between those platforms are shrinking with each new release. Both Chrome OS and Android are Linux, behind the scenes, so they too are closely related, and it's not impossible to see Google fusing them to gain the best of both worlds. If any company is truly developing two OSes here, it's Microsoft.

Ray Ozzie's comment on Google's strategy, however, was right on the money. Not only did he explain why Google was taking such an approach, he also showed that he understood the direction Google was moving in with Chrome OS: the transition to using the browser as the portal to everything—not just data, but applications too. Ray Ozzie's explanation was as on-target and understanding as Steve Ballmer's attack was misguided and nonsensical.

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/06/ballmer-and-ozzie-at-d8-why-does-google-have-two-oses.ars

[charlie]

1. Miss Bill yet?

:rofl:

Bill (and maybe Larry Ellison) is such a rare beast, genuine geek AND rapacious business asshole. When the business asshole part of him spoke, you at least knew he knew he was bullshitting. With Ballmer, you can never be sure.

Which is actually kind of strange. Ballmer's a geek, he got a perfect math SAT score, higher than Gates. And he's spent 30 YEARS in the thick of computer tech. Yet, he acts like his DNA was formed and set in the few years he sold toothpaste.

I wonder if he's ever written an entire program on his own. If he hasn't, it could be why he acts like the virgin in charge of a porn expo. Maybe Bill should've locked him in a room until he came up with a running instance of Minesweeper.

If Ballmer's feeling embattled, if he needs to commiserate with another misunderstood CEO, he oughta "friend" Carol Bartz:

"Google is going to have a problem because Google is only known for search," said Ms Bartz.

"It is only half our business; it's 99.9% of their business. They've got to find other things to do.

"Google has to grow a company the size of Yahoo every year to be interesting."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10090449.stm

[RoyGBiv]

2. Yes, actually ...

And for that precise reason.

Ballmer and Gates remind me of two people I knew in high school. Both of them were irritating little twerps, so socially awkward they had trouble fitting in with the afternoon "computer lab geek crowd." They were the people geeks pointed to and in an Ogre like voice yelled, "NEEERRRDDDDSSS!!!" But for reasons too intangible for me to describe them fully, one of them was "allowed" to work with the Apple IIGS our teacher talked the school into getting for us my senior year, and the other was most definitely not. Both of them were probably smarter than any of us were, but one of them had never proven his ability to work a spoon and fork properly ... and he was an asshole.

Today the Gates-alike of my youth runs the IT at an enormous company and has a wife and kids a house, two dogs and a cat and has stopped eating his mustache.

The other one has been through seven career track jobs since college, including a stint at a company that does work for the NSA and doesn't seem to do anything else I could ever figure out, and he hasn't spent more than 3 years at any of them before being asked to "move along." But, somehow he's managed to work really massive separation packages out of it and spends most of his time in strip bars.

Anyway ...

Poor Yahoo. They had hubris when hubris wasn't cool, and they've just continued refining how out of touch they are.

[charlie]

4. "...and has stopped eating his mustache" LOL

So, will Ballmer join your proto-Ballmer ogling g-strings? Can he get MS through the flattened trajectory and stasis of middle age? Can Ray Ozzie assure the developers-developers-developers the tech vision is sound, despite the boss acting like a gibbering mook? Will the race to the cloud and personal/mobile/embedded space finally take MS down a few pegs? Can Gates resist returning if things start to go south?

I dunno, of course. It's a fascinating moment, though. MS seems strangely untethered in some ways, robust as ever in others. And betting against them is still a dumb idea, Ballmer or no. But man, have they ever got the wrong guy at the wrong time.

(The image in your OP is broken, BTW. IMDB hotlink policy. Let me guess -- Peter Boyle as Young Frankenstein? :D)

[RoyGBiv]

5. Confused? You won't be ...

Next time on ... MicroSoap.

Yeah, I forgot about IMDB and hotlinks. It worked for several hours.

Peter Boyle's another possibility, but I was thinking of the restaurant manager in Waiting.

[charlie]

6. I haven't seen that

But I've worked for that guy. Beware the men in Dockers!

Gads, I just flashed on a Walmart gig from long ago. The Dockers man with the tilted beltline would grab us for pre-opening cheers. Gimme a W (pose as a W), gimme an A... I got chewed I don't know how many times for my desultory performances.

There's nothing more dispiriting than contrived/compulsory team spirit. Developers! Developers! Developers! Put a sock in it already!

[RoyGBiv]

7. Oh, you've got to see Waiting ...

Got to. Despite the fact it has Dane Cook in it (and he plays a cook and has a very minor part), it's pretty awesome, especially if you've ever worked for the guy in the Dockers. :)

"The difference between ordinary and extraordinary ... is that little bit extra." :puke:

I've never really known if the people who throw out this motivational crap really believe anyone buys into it. At times when people have tried to make me be the one handing it out, I either just refused or lied about my enthusiasm to the upper management people and spared the employees the drama.

Or maybe they're are people who get off on that crap, and the fact I don't is the reason I'm not a brazillionaire. :)

[charlie]

8. Will do

I'd never heard of that flick. It sounds good, thanks. Lotta laughs, I hope? I've been a waiter and I've been a bartender, absurdly high pressure jobs. Getting to the end of the day without calamity is motivation aplenty.

Happily, I've never had a job where I've been asked to pump up my crews. Or call a worker an "associate." So, I've never had to tell a corporate pinhead my forbears didn't die so he could bring Soviet mind jacking to the Land of the Free and GOD BLESS AMERICA, MAY HER BEACON OF LIBERTY NEVER DIM!! :D

[RoyGBiv]

10. Oh yes ...

It's similar to Clerks only with a budget. It sorta has a similar cultish following to Clerks. It's not high art, and some people might find it stupid or gross or whatever, but if you've ever worked in food service (or just with the public), it'll be so familiar you may question whether you should laugh or cry.

[pokerfan]

3. Steve Ballmer’s 20 best quotes

Open Source Blog
October 13, 2008

Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer is rarely one to mince his words. Here are his 20 best quotes, as voted for by yours truly.

1. "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches."

2. "There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance." To USA Today. In the US, the iPhone now has the second highest market share of any phone, at 17%, and is the market-leading smartphone, according to NPD Group.

3. “Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Yeagh!” Ballmer’s most infamous outburst/rabble-rouser on stage, which he has since described as, “a bit emotional”.

4. “We are just gonna keep coming and coming and coming and coming and coming and coming and coming. We are irrepressible.” Ballmer talks about the company’s attempts to wrest the search crown from Google’s head.

5. “It was a friendly disruption.” To the audience after a protester threw eggs at him at a Hungarian University.

6. “I have four words for you: I. Love. This. Company. Yeagh!”

7. "Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill Google." Allegedly said to Mark Lucovsky, a Microsoft distinguished engineer, when he told Ballmer he was defecting to Google. Ballmer also allegedly threw a chair across the room, hitting a desk.

8. “I have never, honestly, thrown a chair in my life.” To an audience at Gartner's Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, Florida (see quote above).

9. “Google's not a real company. It's a house of cards.” Also allegedly said to Lucovsky (see quote above).

10. “Come ooon. Come ooon. Get uuuup. Give it up for meeee. Woooooo.” More “emotion” as Ballmer takes to the stage, to the sound of Gloria Estefan’s ‘Get on Your Feet’.

11. “I don't know what a monopoly is until somebody tells me.”

12. “I heard an interview where Steve Jobs said -- I don’t know if it was me personally or Microsoft in general -- that we don’t have good taste. I think we have the taste that has appealed to over a billion people on the planet and Steve’s got taste that has appealed to about 35 million people on the planet. Hey -- they’re different.”

13. “What we've gone through in the last several years has caused some people to question, 'can we trust Microsoft?'”

14. "We don’t have a monopoly. We have market share. There’s a difference."

15. "My children - in many dimensions they’re as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least on this dimension I’ve got my kids brainwashed: You don’t use Google, and you don’t use an iPod."

16. "I think it would be absolutely reckless and irresponsible for anyone to try and break up Microsoft."

17. "I'm going to trust Vista on day one. I bet most people in this audience will trust it day one -- on their home computer!" Ballmer jokes whether enterprises will trust Vista from launch, at a Gartner Symposium back in 2005.

18. "How are we going to compete with Google? The good, old-fashioned way: with innovation. There are many things — who knows — Google may or may not do. If you read the papers, other than curing cancer, there are many things Google is going to do."

19. "There is such an overvaluation of technology stocks that it is absurd. I would include our stock in that category." Ballmer comments on the dot-com bubble, back in 1999. It burst not long after, proving him right.

20. “I'm not sure blogs are necessarily the best place to get a pulse on anything. People want to blog for a variety of reasons, and that may or may not be representative.”

[charlie]

9. Ballmer's Linux obsession is a quotemine of its own

"Linux itself is a clone of an operating system that is 20-plus years old. That's what it is. That is what you can get today, a clone of a 20-year-old system. I'm not saying that it doesn't have some place for some customers, but that is not an innovative proposition."
(*cough* VMS *cough*)

"There's no company called Linux, there's barely a Linux road map. Yet Linux sort of springs organically from the earth. And it had, you know, the characteristics of communism that people love so very, very much about it. That is, it's free."
(Explorer? Outlook Express? Frontpage Express? etc, etc)

Microsoft dips on Ballmer's Linux warning

Wall Street suffered an adverse reaction to Steve Ballmer's warning that open source and Linux software presents the company with a competitive challenge.

In an annual state-of-the-union company wide email to employees, Ballmer said the challenge to Microsoft from open source and Linux software requires "our concentrated focus and attention."

Microsoft's share price subsequently dipped during trading on Nasdaq while shares in at least two open source vendors soared. Red Hat Inc closed up 9.86% at $8.70 and VA Software Corp jumped 44% to $2.16 by the close of trade. Microsoft dropped 3.14% to $24.09.

SG Cowen Securities Corp noted Ballmer's memo weighed on the company's share price while headlines reported the document put "knee-jerk pressure" on Microsoft's stock...

:rofl:

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Microsoft+dips+on+Ballmer%27s+Linux+warning.+%28Infrastructure+News...-a0105204897

[pokerfan]

11. a clone of a twenty year old system?

You mean like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWLA5Fw5gAY

First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then they copy you.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=240x1963">Is Windows ready for the desktop?