The Industry Standard - Ballmer still searching for an answer to Google - Comments

Steve, let me ask you about

Wim Heitinga — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 01:30:01 -0700

Steve,
let me ask you about the the Iphone and the Zune, if I may:
http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=C5oGaZIKYvo&fmt=18

Windows Mobile will be down

Tom Ross — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 17:03:04 -0700

Windows Mobile will be down from position #2 to #4 in the smartphone OS market by the end of 2008. RIM already passed them earlier this year (according to worldwide data from Gartner and Canalys), and Apple is doing the same right now (according to industry predictions).

Next year Google's Android will become a serious contender offering a drop-in solution for all the Windows Mobile phones that HTC, LG and others are offering at the moment, while Windows Mobile will see no significant updates until 2010.

Windows Mobile is in immediate danger of being obsoleted, and Microsoft's only hope is that Android development is going to stutter, because both RIM and Apple are clearly on a roll with their integrated devices.

I remember well the

EagerB0b — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 07:29:51 -0700

I remember well the interview when Steve "monkeyman" Ballmer laughed at the then-new iPhone.
Little did he know...

Now he says that Apple is going to lose out in the smartphome market as the market expands, since Apple makes both the hardware AND the software.

I say this is where Apple has a big advantage over their competitors. Since they provide both hard- and software, they can make sure it works better together than any pc or hardware could ever do running third-party software.
Also, they earn more money this way. Instead of selling just a disc with an operating system every three or four years, they sell a premium computer, a smartphone, an expensive display, airport express, and a wireless backup disc as wel. Not to forget the still hot-selling iPod, the iTunes store and the iPhone app-store, which rakes in over a million dollars each day....

microsoft and apple can

ed — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 20:54:53 -0700

microsoft and apple can argue amongst themselves all they want. i prefer freedom. i don't need to be led by the hand by a company. i now truly enjoy my computer. peace.

LOL

barnacle — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 16:24:16 -0700

LOL

The only reason MS dominated

barnacle — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 16:23:38 -0700

The only reason MS dominated the desktop is by ripping off Apple and selling their ideas to the lowest bidders en masse. They won't have the same opportunity this time. Also, Ballmer is an idiot.

I so agree with you Sbutts,

gnusci — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 15:02:20 -0700

I so agree with you Sbutts, I can't also understand why people still listen to such a TWAT, some times I feel like I am living on another dimension an I can not understand the rest of the world, here this guy is like to pay serious attention to Homero Simpson, but I see I am not a lone...

Balmer and Microshit, as

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:49:43 -0700

Balmer and Microshit, as dumb as a post!

While Ballmer is a total

Qka — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:32:31 -0700

While Ballmer is a total clown. Unfortunately, too many of us own shares in Microsoft through our retirement plans and other investment funds, and that bozo is wasting OUR money through his incompetence. Stock price going nowhere, and a pittance of a dividend.

Microsoft. The next Enron.

I'm surprised Ballmer is

Sbutts — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 10:23:45 -0700

I'm surprised Ballmer is losing as much weight as he is because he sure eats a lot of his own words. He said the same thing about the iPhone a year and a half ago, that Apple wouldn't gain any market share. Now look at Apple; second only to RIM, meaning they surpassed WinMo...in a year.

Why do people keep listening to this gas bag who has absolutely no idea what he is talking about? He hasn't been right about ANYTHING since he became CEO. However, I hope Ballmer stays the CEO of Microsoft for as long as it takes. I'll let you chew on that for a while and you'll figure out what I mean.

Ballmer kicks ass!

NeoCon — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 09:58:55 -0700

Ballmer kicks ass!

Ballmer sucks!

WilliamLee — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 09:55:48 -0700

Ballmer sucks!

Ballmer still searching for an answer to Google

IDG News Service — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 01:40:31 -0700

Microsoft may be the only company in a position to provide "any real competition" for Google in the online search business, CEO Steve Ballmer said Thursday. But first it will need to figure out a way to do it.

"We need to do some work to fundamentally reinvent the search business model," Ballmer said during a dinner at the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley. "You don't brute-force your way into a market. You only make great strides when you redefine the category for the user."

And that will take some time. "It's a five-year task," Ballmer said. But Microsoft is ready to spend a lot of money trying. The company told its shareholders recently that it was prepared to lose "5 to 10 percent of total operating income for several years" to improve its position in search, Ballmer said (see related analysis here).

The CEO offered little in the way of new insights during the evening, except that Microsoft will discuss "Project Red Dog," its secretive cloud computing initiative, at the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference next month.

Red Dog has been described as "EC2 for Windows," a comparison with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, said Ann Winblad, the venture capitalist who posed the questions to Ballmer. She asked him to elaborate but he said she would have to wait for the conference in six weeks.

Asked about server virtualization, Ballmer said Microsoft aims to "democratize" the technology by offering lower prices, integrated management tools and better-quality software. "If you want to have virtualization on 80 percent of servers instead of 5 percent, you'd better not charge three times the price of the server for the software," he said, in a jab at market leader VMware, which has been criticized for high prices.

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.

In other words, he thinks the same strategy that helped Microsoft become the leader on the desktop -- licensing its OS for use by other hardware makers -- will let it win out on smartphones. Long term, he said, the battle will be between the Symbian OS (which is now open source), mobile versions of Linux and Windows Mobile.

Apple won't boost its share of the personal computer market or become a threat in the enterprise for similar reasons, according to Ballmer -- because it won't license its software to others.

"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."

"I'm not saying there isn't a threat" from Apple, he said. But if Microsoft and its PC partners "do our jobs right, there's really no reason Apple should get any footprint in the enterprise."

Microsoft does "very well on balance" when it comes to software developers, he said. But the company has two areas of weakness, according to Ballmer: high-performance and technical computing -- which is important to Microsoft because "there are 5 million engineers and they use a lot of compute power" -- and in Web server applications, where it is losing out to Linux and PHP.

"Forty percent of servers run Windows, 60 percent run Linux," he said. "How are we doing? Forty is less than 60, so I don't like it. ... We have some work to do."

Winblad asked about the health of the IT business in light of the economic crisis in the U.S. "At least for now, people I talk to in our business are relatively -- I wouldn't say optimistic -- but feel better than if all you did was watch CNBC all day," Ballmer said, referring to the U.S. television news channel.

A member of the audience asked Ballmer how he manages his stress and stays healthy. Ballmer, who looks thinner and fitter than he did a few years ago, said his regime consists of PowerBars "to keep the blood sugar steady," "a constant dose of caffeine," and running.

"I did a five-mile run this morning. It does a lot to ease the stress and set up a good day."

More news, commentary, and predictions from The Industry Standard:

News: The 3D future, according to Microsoft: A Photosynth-based "Spatial Web"
Analysis: The future of the Web is 3D, not video
Analysis: Microsoft's struggle to innovate and lead on the 'Net
Prediction: Zune Phone announced by end of 2008?
Special Feature: Where are they now? The Industry Standard tracks down 10 dot-coms from the Web bubble of the late 1990s
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