[harristype]

Steve Ballmer is just jealous because Dr. Eric Schmidt is on Apple's board of directors. Time for him to take a valium and go reinvent Microsoft again.

[tallscot]

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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on Thursday questioned how entrepreneurial rival Google really is. <a href="/news/2007/03/16/ballmer/index.php">[more]</a>

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I hate it when CEOs are so childish. Next thing you know, Ballmer will have banners up making fun of Google during a keynote.

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What does this obvious slam against Jobs have to do with this article, Scot?

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Are you serious, or are you being facetious?

[Grapho]

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[Edited to fix wrapping.]

[Terrin]

Yes, except Ballmer's statement is not even factually correct. Last I checked Google introduced "Checkout" that compete's with Paypal. Unlike with Google's purchase of YouTube, Checkout has nothing to do with advertising.
Moreover, most of Microsoft's business is centered around creating software so except for a few exceptions it really is just a software company. It even outsourced the development of Zune.

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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on Thursday questioned how entrepreneurial rival Google really is. <a href="/news/2007/03/16/ballmer/index.php">[more]</a>

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[macFanDave]

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Whenever Ballmer speaks of his competition he comes off as a sore loser. So what if the YouTube is semi-related to search. . .
Ballmer will be smiling less when Google pulls-off making billions from YouTube. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

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I think Google will lose billions on YouTube. YouTube became popular largely because a lot of copyrighted stuff was being posted there. When it was run by poor pipsqueaks, the copyright holders figured that there wasn't any money in prosecuting them. Now that it is owned by a giant bag of cash (you may see Google, but the license holders can't get the moneybag image out of their minds), the lawsuits will come marchin' in.
Fortunately for me, Ballmer seems to have missed that obvious problem, so I didn't have to agree with him (gack!) in order to disagree with you about YouTube's future.

[UlfDahlen]

Ballmer is a strange person. What he says is almost never correct. Microsoft is a very bad company.

[jhow]

Google may end up losing money on Youtube, but not neccesarily because of copyright holders.
You can't immediately sue google if your work shows up there. You have to contact google first and let them know that there is copyrighted material there and where is it is.
I know Viacom is in the process of sueing google but they should lose because of the way the law is writen. They have to prove google's intention to keep copyrighted material on the site. Intention is pretty hard to prove.
So far I think that youtube is secure because of the simple fact that there are too many amatuers out there looking for their "fifteen minutes of fame." Also they are making inroads with midlevel content producers, NBA & Ford.
I think that competition for them will be from a company/website like joost. It's a peer to peer sharing method. But like googles method it has pluses and minuses.

[gslusher]

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Anyone with a brain knows Google is doing quite well with stock being at $450 a share or above versus Microsofts measely what maybe $40 if there lucky a share.

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A stock's price per share means exactly NOTHING. Nada. Not one bit. If you think that it does, I have a bridge that I'd like to sell you.
The reason is simple: it's based upon the number of outstanding shares. When a stock gets very high in price, companies may split the stock, turning one share into more than one--it could be 1.5/1, 2/1, etc. They do that, among other reasons, to encourage transactions, as many brokers will only deal in blocks of at least X shares. (X often being 100.)
What really matters is how a company is performing and how the stock is performing. Two measures (among many) of a company's performance are Earnings Per Share (EPS) and the Price-to-Earnings (PE) ratio. Apple's stock has a very high PE, which indicates great investor confidence.
A company's stock performance involves two things: dividends and share prices. Dividends are money in the investors' pockets, while share prices determine the value of the portfolio. Both should be considered in evaluating a company and its stock. The best way to look at price is with a chart that plots the price over time as a percentage of the price at the starting point. (You can get such charts through Yahoo, among other sources.) That's the only way to compare companies. A $2 rise in Google's stock isn't much, as Google is trading at about $440/share. That same $2 rise would be much more significant for Dell, which is trading at about $22.50 most recently.
The picture you get depends upon the time period you choose. Some people focus on the short term--maybe a month, while others look at performance over a year or even longer. When you look at such charts, you can find that, in the last 3 months, both Google and Microsoft stocks have declined about 9%, Dell about 17-18%, while Apple, after bouncing up and down, has gained a small amount. (The overall stock market is down 2-3% in the same period.) If you go back further, to the last 6 months, you'll find that Microsoft and Dell have gained a small amount--about as much as the market, overall, while Google has gained 9-10% and Apple about 20%. Over the past year, Microsoft is about the same price, the overall market is up 6-7%, Google up 30%, Apple a bit more (maybe 32-33%), and Dell is down over 20%. Go back 2 years and Microsoft is up maybe 8-10% (hard to read the graph), Dell is down almost 50%, Apple is up 110+% and Google is up about 150%.
That's the real story, not the stock price, itself.
(Oh, yes: you should use "their," rather than "there," when you mean the possessive form of the third person plural pronoun. I'm sure that you can find that in a fifth or sixth grade English text.)

[gslusher]

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I think Google will lose billions on YouTube. YouTube became popular largely because a lot of copyrighted stuff was being posted there. When it was run by poor pipsqueaks, the copyright holders figured that there wasn't any money in prosecuting them. Now that it is owned by a giant bag of cash (you may see Google, but the license holders can't get the moneybag image out of their minds), the lawsuits will come marchin' in.
Fortunately for me, Ballmer seems to have missed that obvious problem, so I didn't have to agree with him (gack!) in order to disagree with you about YouTube's future.

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YouTube also has legitimate copyright material. Some TV networks are posting clips on YouTube with associated advertising. Funny thing, too: those clips have much higher quality than the typical YouTube video.

[VeggieBeefcake]

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(Oh, yes: you should use "their," rather than "there," when you mean the possessive form of the third person plural pronoun. I'm sure that you can find that in a fifth or sixth grade English text.)

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I think "they're" is actually the correct word.
"if they're lucky."

[JakeT]

Good applications help sell computers running Windows. Those applications came from companies like Google, Netscape, Quicken, Apple, etc.
Bill Gates complained about the US losing it's tech superiority, then they bash companies that look for the best people and make the job attractive.