Ballmer: "We'll Outsmart Open Source"

An anonymous reader writes "Micorosofts Steve Ballmer is spouting off again in this ZDNet UK article. To an audience of Most Valued Professionals in London, he says 'We'll outsmart open source.' Among other things, he also says 'Linux is a serious competitor.' We've known ever since the Halloween Documents that they have been running scared, but this looks like a prelude to a whole new round of dirty tricks. It also looks like damage control for the statements of Microsoft's Sr. VP Brian Valentines last week."

Comments

I'm waiting for Steve

[teamhasnoi]

to outsmart perspiration.

Re:I'm waiting for Steve

[unicron]

Mark my words: Maybe not this Comdex, maybe not the one after that, but sometime within the next 5 years you will get to see that man have a corinary they will talk about in medical schools for the next century.

Re:I'm waiting for Steve

[JazerWonkie]

Or at least outsmart Code Red, or Nimda, or I Love You, or....

Re:I'm waiting for Steve

[Junta]

Well if he is in need of a defibrillator, I somehow doubt he has the capacity to refuse anything until after the fact....

Re:I'm waiting for Steve

[Anonymous Coward]

M$ never says what it means. In this case, they mean either "we will _legislate_ Open Source out of existence" or "we will patent Open Source out of existence" or both.

The meaning "we will right software that is smarter than Open Source software" does not, in this case, apply.

I can outsmart you in four words

[BurritoWarrior]

Developers, developers, developers, developers.

And this from a man...

[Noryungi]

That can be seen running around, screaming: "Give it to meeeeeeeeeee!!" in an MPEG file that has been mirrored all over the world... =)

Who can take anything Ballmer says seriously after seeing this movie clip? Certainly not Linus Torvalds, that's for sure!!

Re:And this from a man...

[zulux]

for (x=1;x>=1,000,000;x++){
print "DEVELOPERS";
}

Hey! This is Microsoft we're talking about:

10 PRINT "DEVELOPERS"
20 GOTO 10

and for the L33t Microsoft developer:

10 ? "DEVELOPERS":RUN

[clippy]
Hey, It looks like your trying to be sarcastic

First Developers Post

[Kaz Riprock]

Developers Developers Developers.... Developers Developers... Developers Developers Developers.. Ahhh, karma well spent.

Re:Ballmer

[l33t j03]

There are only about six or eight of you actually doing any programming. The rest are posting things like "I hope someone ports this to...", so it isn't really the rest of the world.

Re:Ballmer

[rmadmin]

Na, not that way, they are going to do it the Valentine way. "I'm not proud," Valentine said, as he spoke to a crowd of developers here at the company's Windows .Net Server developer conference. "We really haven't done everything we could to protect our customers ... Our products just aren't engineered for security."

Translation: We'll outsmart them by making them think our product sucks, then we'll surprise them with... oh wait, our product does suck.

Dijkstra

[axxackall]

About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.

--

Edsger W. Dijkstra

Dancing Monkey Boy is going to outsmart someone?

[burgburgburg]

Four words:

I
don't
think
so.

Re:Hmm.

[cscx]

And it's not even noon!

What are they posting next hour?

"Bill Gates mixes whites and darks in washing machine -- turns socks blue!"

Meep Meep

[signe]

Yep... we'll outsmart Open Source.

You see, we're going to order this rocket sled from Acme...

-Todd

Re:Meep Meep

[Anonymous Coward]

That would make a fun Flash spoof. An MS-Bob-like cayote chasing after a little penguin that goes "meep meep".

Re:Time value of money...

[Theologian]

You seem to forget the old addage of what putting 20 Microsoft monkeys will cost you....

• Complete works of Shakespeare = 1,000,000 years

• Windows XP = 2 Weeks

• Your very own Dancing MonkeyBoy = priceless

Security through obscurity

[jcsehak]

from the article: While Ballmer stopped short of advocating Microsoft's old "security through obscurity" policy, he pointed out that publicly posting bug fixes often prompted attacks. "The hacker waits till a fix is posted, then writes an attack and sends it out," he said. Such attacks are based on information in the fix.

In related news, I've noticed that the more dishes I clean, there more there are to get dirty, so if I don't do the dishes, then there won't be any clean ones to get dirty, and I'll be saved a lot of work.

Nobody pays for software on Linux.?

[Anonymous Coward]

"We do not anticipate offering software on Linux. Nobody pays for software on Linux."

Ahem. Last time I checked, we had to pay IBM for Lotus Notes/Domino. Practically bulletproof on Linux. Unlike that NT server we replaced it with that we renamed MONICA because it went down every morning. Guess our money doesn't count.

I smell Iocane powder

[Ilan Volow]

We've bested Steve's Ballmer's spaniard and we've beaten his giant. Like we didn't see a battle of wits coming....

Compare and Contrast

Better comparison...

[PrimeNumber]

Compare and Contrast

See what I mean? :)

He doesn't need to

[K-Man]

Invention is 99% perspiration. He delegates the inspiration to others.