[Macworld]

Post your comments for Ballmer still searching for an answer to Google here

[Grapho]

Nincompoop!

[Jeter2Fan93]

Quote

{quote:title=Steve Ballmer}{quote}
?Apple?s a good company, I won?t take anything away from them, but they have a certain kind of strategy. They believe in putting the hardware and software together, they don?t believe in letting other people make it.?

That's probably one of the nicest things he's said about Apple.

[dreyfus]

"Long term, he said, the battle will be between the Symbian OS (which is now open source), mobile versions of Linux and Windows Mobile."
Do his "PowerBars" contain Chinese milk? These are exactly the three mobile platforms that do not gain nothing, suffer from a lack of development tools, user-friendly Internet access and good user interfaces and suffer from fragmentation. Way to go...
RIM and the iPhone OS are leading the pack and if Google does avoid fragmentation and mis-use by the carriers it might be number three (but I do not see that yet). By the time WM7 will finally be available (late 2009 / early 2010?) it will still be the worst of the bunch and it will then be another 6-9 months before it appears in any device - this gives phone makers 2 years to adopt Android or Symbian, both being "free" (as in: no commercial license required). Who wants to stay behind for another two years, just for the opportunity to pay MS money?

[Hurley42]

Ballmer still misses the whole point. The searches through live.com/msn.com are fine, but the company screwed up so bad in the past (and present) with awful operating systems with very significant security holes and complete lack of stability that people don't trust Microsoft. It will take more than 5 years to rebuild that trust. First they need a rock-solid operating system and THEN they can build on that good will. Otherwise, Microsoft will be less and less relevant as time goes on - except when people need to use their software since the company they work for was enticed into buying crap.

[alansky]

Balmer still searching for an answer to Google:
How about: "I surrender!"?

[concentric]

"We need to do some work to fundamentally reinvent the search business model," Ballmer said.
Why? Is the current search business model not working right? Is it broken? No? Oh, that's right...it's just not putting any money into Microsoft's pockets, so there MUST be something wrong with it.

[alsturan]

Ok...Let me try and understand...
Mr. Ballmer says on one hand that you “don’t brute-force your way into a market" and that you "only make great strides when you redefine the category for the user.”
However, just a bit later, he claims that Microsoft is prepared to lose "5 to 10 percent of total operating income for several years” to improve its position in search.
Isn't Microsoft's raison d'etre to get into as many markets as it thinks it can and spend its way to the top, rather than truly innovate? When I say innovate, I don't just mean copy something and make it Microsoftian, but make it better than you found it.
I'm not claiming, however, that Apple invents things; it just seems to be able to make things easier to use for the average, non-technically minded person on the street.

[Rhywun]

alsturan said:

Isn't Microsoft's raison d'etre to get into as many markets as it thinks it can and spend its way to the top, rather than truly innovate? When I say innovate, I don't just mean copy something and make it Microsoftian, but make it better than you found it.

Absolutely. Case in point, Microsoft recently released an Illustrator clone (purchased from a third-party, of course) that's an absolute drag to use, compared to a relatively inexpensive shareware such as Lineform. (For example, it can't show real-time previews when you move nodes around--you have to guess what the shape will look like when you release the mouse.) This thing is only available as part of their ridiculously expensive suite of new tools for web design, which means it will sell like hotcakes and probably give Illustrator a run for its money, profit-wise. This is of course the same strategy they tried with Yahoo, and you just know Ballmer's fuming inside because now they'll have to do the work themselves.

[zarmanto]

Ballmer is an absolute nut with hardly any real business sense at all -- but pretty much everyone who pays any attention to technology news already knows that. (Remember the -- Ahem! -- "alleged" chair throwing incident?) The fact that he thinks that all of the industry front-runners in mobile phones will wind up being losers in the long run is just another example of how out-of-touch he really is.

Frankly, I think that the best bet Microsoft has at ever having any impact at all on Google's market share (and mind you, this isn't going to happen anytime soon, because Ballmer just isn't equipped to embrace this kind of philosophy) would be to entirely remove the Microsoft branding from the equation. They're trying desperately to refurbish their image with that $300 million ad campaign because they already have a pretty good idea of just how frelled the Microsoft name actually is... but the thing is, they could have seeded a custom tailored wholly owned subsidiary with that money instead, for the express purpose of targeting the search market. Give the new company a branding all its own, and just funnel money and talent into it without taking any kind of a visible role in the day-to-day operations... and then watch what happens.

I mean, admittedly $300 million isn't going to conquer a company with approximately half of MSFT's market cap over night... but if we were to look at that company after the same five year time line which Ballmer suggested, I'd almost be willing to bet that you could realize a five or ten-fold increase in market share over any search tools marketed directly under the umbrella of the tarnished Microsoft branding.

(But then again, maybe I'm nuts too... I suppose it's entirely possible that nothing funded either directly or indirectly by Microsoft could escape that tarnish. ;) )

[pauldfullerton]

Stevie boy demonstrates his delusions once again by saying that ...“Apple’s a good company, I won’t take anything away from them, but they have a certain kind of strategy. They believe in putting the hardware and software together, they don’t believe in letting other people make it.”
Apple's tight integration of hardware and operating system software is precisely the reason why Apple's products work better that Microsoft's products and Apple can evolve its operating system much more smoothly than Microsoft can. Having thousands of different developers with conflicting aims and quality standards fiddling with the crucial hardware-operating system boundary is a sure-fire way of creating a god-almighty mess, aka Windows! Thank God for Apple's sensible approach which keeps the complex hardware-software integration problems in-house but creates excellent tools for developers to create innovative applications. Steve Ballmer is plain wrong, but then again who is surprised at that?

[pdbreske]

{quote:}Asked about smartphones, Ballmer said Nokia, Research in Motion and Apple will all lose out as the market expands over the next five years, because they design their own proprietary hardware and tie it closely to their software. Nokia leads the smartphone market today with about a 30 percent share, he said. ?If you want to reach more than that, you have to separate the hardware and software in the platform,? he said.{quote}

I have one word for Monkey Boy: iPod.

Yeah, that tying-the-hardware-and-software-together business just isn't working out at all.

[bernardlanguillier]

I see a lot of unfair comments here...

I understand that there are many reason to dislike some of MS's business practises, but Apple is also hardly praisable here.

As far as technology goes, stability has simply not been a problem with Windows since XP. I personnally prefer OSX from a usability standpoint, but I don't see a major difference in stability.

As far as Steve's comments about searching. You guys are seeing too much evil here. From an objective standpoint, he is simply acknowledging the fact that MS has been unable to deliver good value until now in that domain, including online advertisement.

He understands that the game is open here, and that only value added applications will win customers. He is saying that MS is willing to invest a lot to come up with these value added applications. What's the problem with that?

Apple and MS are in the same boat here... and if anything Apple's Mac/OS X division is doing less than MS regarding online applications. Apple is going for a very different strategy focussing on online content, while MS is looking at the OS.

I find MS to be a lot more ambitious while Apple is once again focussing on a niche approach.

Cheers,
Bernard

[alsturan]

I'm not saying Microsoft didn't do something right somewhere, otherwise they'd have gone out of business. I'm simply saying that Mr. Ballmer's assertion that they "don?t brute-force [their] way into a market" is disingenuous at best, since that seems to be the standard business practice.