Ballmer, Gates on Microsoft's Future

RoadFever writes: "At the Microsoft shareholders meeting, CEO Ballmer acknowledged they may have a popularity bug. "We understand, based upon the fact that our industry didn't rally to support us, that we need to change the way we interact and relate to our industry," Ballmer said. There's a summary article in the Seattle Times and more stuff on the Microsoft investor relations page. Will words translate to action? Well, the company might want to start by toning down the habit of taking credit for every innovation: "Really, the reason you see open source there at all is because we came in and said there should be a platform that's identical with millions and millions of machines," Gates said." The question-and-answer session near the end of the meeting has the most juicy quotes.

Comments

Re:Driving people to open source

[flacco]

I think what Bill is saying is that he feels the Open Source movement is riding on the coat-tails of Microsoft's success.

That is exactly what he's saying. What astoundingly large cajones on that filthy bastard. He must have his Armani trousers specially fitted.

If OSS rides on the coat-tails of anything, it's the global collaboration that the Internet makes possible - and we all know how large a role Microsoft played in that.