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."

Comments

Re:Peter Principle.

[gowen]

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.

Ford has caught Ferrari before

[asoap]

Ford caught ferrari years ago, back in the day when Enzo Ferrari was still alive. His whole entire engineering department quit on him because they were tired of his wife stickiing her nose where it didn't belong.

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.

Re:Microsoft is now irrelevent

[S.O.B.]

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.

Re:Microsoft is now irrelevent

[bored]

The answer is that it Just Works(TM). Apple has made Mac OS X an extremely pleasent environment to use with little things like Alt-TAB through applications, then Alt-` through an application's windows/tabs. These little things add up into a much nicer user environment. M$ strayed from it around the 98/W2k timeframe when they declared an end to MDI applications, instead claming that each document should have its own top level window. Hence the foot dragging to add tabbed browsing to IE, and the evil word behavior. Previous versions of word defaulted to MDI you can turn this back on by disabing the "windows in taskbar option". The big hoopla over tabbed browsing is yet another case of MDI's resurgence.

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.