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Ballmer: 'We'll catch Google'
An anonymous reader writes "Steve Ballmer was all about honesty when briefing partners in Sydney yesterday. Microsoft CEO's confessed the software giant's .Net strategy has come to a standstill, says he's accepted SQL Server's shortcomings and vowed to keep fighting search giant Google."
I guess I am confused. Why must everyone "beat" Google? Isn't that what competition is about? You can't beat Google. Google didn't invent searching, but they did perfect it, and now with their newer products they are taking searching to a whole new level.
I don't understand why Balmer is all about trying to conquer every market, by shipping substandard products just so they have some kind of market share out there SOMEWHERE.
Some other market did that!! Anyone remember No Limit Records? Master P? C Murder, any of those guys?
They made their millions by shipping tons of substandard product becuase Rap was so empty after the deaths of Tupac and Biggie, that they were hungry for anything. Eventually, (yes the company still exists) but no one buys their music. Because it is sub-par.
Eventually Computer consumers will wake up and find the substandard OS'es (Windows) to be finally faulty (I think that's happening now) and people will transition to Quality products (Such as Apple).
Note to Microsoft: Quit trying to conquer everything and work on one thing at a time. Namely, right now, your OS!!
That's not really the Peter Principle, though, is it? He hasn't been promoted from his position of competence, because he has never held a position in which he was demonstrably competent.
It's more a case of the "promoting your mates over those better qualified is rarely a good thing" principle.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Becuase of this he was then willing to sell his company. One of the interested buyers was Ford. They had a meeting with Ferrari, with all the paperwork ready for him to sign. He looked it over, turned to his friend and said "Let's go get lunch" and never came back. This pissed off the guys at Ford and they vowed to beat Ferrari at his own game. That is when they introduced the original GT40 which cames 1st, 2nd and 3rd (I believe) at LeMans.
And thus, that is how Ford kicked Ferrari's ass. Although, I don't know how difficult that was considering that Ferrari's engineering team left him. Regardless though, it was still a massive accomplishment for Ford.
Treat me like a marketing stat, and I'll treat your movie like a series of ones and zeros
I know your post is being facetious, but...
Microsoft's Maps ... It never gives wrong directions. (Becasue it doesn't exist.)
It exists, and it does.
Desktop search is the voice recognition of the new century. It will sort of work, but never well enough to make it worth relying upon.
Hmm, I have relied upon it about a dozen times so far today. So you may want to revise your estimate of "never" to a month or so ago. I keep everything on my machine organized into a pretty intricate directory tree that is great for finding things but it is not perfect. First it is easier to add multiple meta-tags than it is to create multiple shortcuts and directories and secondly because it is just more convenient to hit a quick key sequence to launch apps and documents and network locations than it is to browse a directory. I can launch any application using my traditional directories with a single click, but I rarely do so anymore because I can remember the names of most programs I want to run and it is faster to cmd-space, type a couple letters, down arrow, and enter than it is to even get to applications even when I have their locations memorized.
Read the article.
This wasn't a press conference, and the questions weren't from journalists.
The questions were from Microsoft's partners (ie, VAR's, stockholders, people who have large investments in MS products)
They aren't paid to ask questions, they're paid to implement solutions. They want to make sure that their chosen partner is doing their fair share.
Its a two way street -- the MS execs get real feedback from real customers who aren't afraid to call the shots the way they see them. The partners get some added measure of a pulse from the management of their very important business partner.
Troll Like a Champion Today
I think you're confusing relevance with visibility. IBM may not be a visible as they once were but they are relevant. There are a lot of things IBM does and services they offer that companies depend on for their day to day survival.
For example, IBM is one of the largest IT outsourcers and if they fell off the face of the planet there are a lot of companies that would have little or no IT area to speak of. Try getting a bank balance when the mainframe your account data sits on no longer exists. That's what I call relevant.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
Ballmer was the best executive at Microsoft even when Bill Gates was the CEO. Bill Gates could hardly predict the future, and his legacy is always catching up with competitors and copying ideas. Ballmer is a very seasoned business person with great marketing and strongarm tactics. He isn't a great technological leader, but neither was Gates. Most of the success of Microsoft could be attributed to Balmer because he made some of the best business decisions to get Windows everywhere it is today.
Unfortuntately for Microsoft when you've saturated the marketplace, killed all the competitors, and do not have a nature of innovating, it leaves you with a billion dollar giant that doesn't know how to ship a product that consumers will want to buy. Longhorn isn't delayed only by technology problems, but they don't know how to expand their business and get people to buy upgrades.
Ummm, nope. It's at 20.26 percent, and consistently falling.
I think you need a better example, windows has since 3.0 (maybe longer) the standard where alt-command works on the global application space while ctrl-command works on the application space. Very few people know this, but its true. For example, Alt-f4 closes the application, ctrl-f4 closes the window. Alt-Tab cycles through applications, ctrl-tab cycles through the current applications windows.
I will agree with you though that as far as 'unix' goes OS-X is light years beyond any other 'unix' desktop. When i'm using linux one of the reasons I use KDE almost exclusivly is because they have tranditionally done a better job keeping application keystrokes consitant. While OS-X is _VERY_ nice any its pretty i'm not so sure about the keyboard usability. I can use a windows box without a mouse, i can't do that on a mac, maybe thats because i'm just not smart enough to know all the hotkeys.
Actually, MSN Search gives you the same first result.
o +is+the+account+manager+for+the+Commonwealth+Bank+ of+Australia&FORM=QBHP
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=microsoft+wh
I love Google Search, but you need competition to keep them honest.
Your description makes it sound like it should work. But it doesn't. If I switch to Windows Explorer in Windows, I can't Ctrl+Tab to the next Explorer window. It just doesn't work. I can Alt-Tab my way across the different Explorer windows though, even though they're all the same application.
On OS X, I can CMD-Tab until Finder is selected. This is much faster, because it's by application and not the individual window. When I get to Finder, I can then hit CMD-` until I reach the Finder window I want. The difference in time to find the correct window is:
Windows: O(W)
Mac OS X: O(A + AW - 1)
Where W is the total number of windows open, A is the total number of unique applications open, and AW is the number of windows per unique application. O(W) is worst case. i.e. We may have to switch through every window in the system before finding the correct one. O(A + AW - 1) is far better, because you tend to only have a few applications open, but many windows per app. The worst case in this instance is that there is one window per application.
Using my current XP desktop as a common case, I find that I have 10 applications with an average of 3 windows per application. That gives an O(W) worst case of about 10*3 or 30 switches. Using O(A + AW - 1), however, I get a worst case of 10 + 3 - 1, or 12 switches. The OS X method is 60% faster!
Is that a bit clearer?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Alt-Tab cycles through applications, ctrl-tab cycles through the current applications windows.
That would be cool if it worked.
In Mozilla, Ctrl-Tab cycles between tabs - not windows.
In Explorer, Ctrl-Tab Goes from the file explorer to the address bar and back again. Not between Windows.
In Putty Ctrl-Tab does exactly nothing.
(that's all in Win2K - is that an exception?)
In Finder on the Mac I can toggle between windows. Actually in any app I can toggle between app windows reliably.
How about Windows Cut & Paste with Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V? Even that doesn't work all the time! I find many dialogues I can't even paste into with Ctrl-V, even though Ctrl-Insert/Shift-Insert works just fine. What the hell is that? How can you claim Windows has any kind of consistant behavior at all? I can even spell-check a dialogue text-box entry on the Mac if I really want to.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley