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Balmer Vows to Kill Google
An anonymous reader writes "Probably due to the Microsoft suit against Google over human resources, some very heated exchanges have turned up in some court documents. Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer has apparently
vowed to kill Internet search leader Google, according to documents filed in the increasingly bitter battle between the rivals." From the article: "At some point in the conversation, Mr. Ballmer said: 'Just tell me it's not Google,'' Lucovosky said in his statement. Lucovosky replied that he was joining Google. 'At that point, Mr. Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office,' Lucovosky recounted, adding that Ballmer then launched into a tirade about Google CEO Eric Schmidt. 'I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google.' Schmidt previously worked for Sun Microsystems and was the CEO of Novell."
That the CEO of Microsoft is a calm and collective guy. With good management come good software. I am glad that 90% of the worlds computers are running software by responsible and rational managers.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It comes as something of a surprise that Steve Ballmer doesn't know how to spell the word "fuck".
Or maybe "f***ing" is the poster's way of representing Ballmer's dribbling, shouting, flobbing, ranting, malsonorous splange of words laughingly called his voice.
Nice man.
It's a quote, hence (if I understand correctly) it's not required of Slashdot that it be true, only that it be an accurate representation of what that person said.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
two men enter, one man leaves
two men enter, one man leaves
TWO MEN ENTER, ONE MAN LEAVES!
Court filings are protected. You can't be sued for libel in a civil action over what you tell a court; you can, however, be jailed for perjury if you're caught lying.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
listen, jerk, this clearly unstable guy has armies of "developers, developers, developers!" standing by ready to crush anything he doesn't like. intead of attempting to help prop up this man's onviously twisted tyranny infomred by his unhinged world view, you should be using your lofty powers as a slashdotter to bring him down.
we have hundreds of thousands of socially mal-adjusted virgins at our fingertips i say we pool respources and attack microsft this weekend unless they have a whole bunch of females stockpiled at the microsft campus nothing can stop us!
Steve Ballmer can kill anyone he wants! Steve Ballmer throws chairs ALL the time and don't even think twice about it. This guy is so crazy and awesome that he flips out ALL the time. I heard that Steve Ballmer was eating at a diner. And when some dude dropped a spoon Ballmer killed the whole town. My friend Mark said that he saw Steve Ballmer totally uppercut some kid just because the kid opened a window.
And that's what I call REAL Ultimate Power!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yup...
Steve Jobs was right ... Steve Jobs was right
Oh, please. Check with people at Apple or Pixar and ask if Jobs has ever had a maximum-flake-factor freaky tirade in their own personal cubicle before. Don't let the sandals fool you. He's no paragon of zen-like level headedness when confronted with contrary news, uppity employees, or a marketplace that doesn't always see things his way.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The scene was more like this:
Balmer: 'I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google.'
BillG: YEAH!
Balmer: Then I'm going to take this frikkin chair, smash his face with it, and lick the blood off the ring.
BillG: Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Watcha gonna dooooo....
Balmer: BUT DO YOU KNOW WHAT I'M REALLY PUMPED UP ABOUT!?!?!
BillG: Oooooh Yeah!
Balmer: I just saved a boatload of money by switching to Geico.
(Running on excercise machine)
BillG: You can dooo it!!!
Assuming that the chair-throwing and the mindset it implies are true... whose stock do you buy or sell?
Google?... Microsoft?... (OfficeMax?)
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
I was shocked to see this was actually not a The Onion article like last time.
That monkey dancer never cease to amaze me.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
>At least he's passionate about his job.
> That's more than you can say about a lot of
>executives. What's wrong with wanting to crush
>the competition?
Uhh, being passionate is a relative thing.
Being passionate about creating new art is
a good thing. Being passionate about being
a serial killer is a bad thing.
Being passionate as a thug I would argue
is not a good thing. Please keep in mind
that the goal of a businessman is to do
business, not to throw chairs around
a room, nor to threaten an individual
with bodily harm. That kind of behavior
is simply childish and unprofessional.
A professional would have looked at the
situation and thought how to improve his
business. Ballmer did neither.
--Johnny
P.s. Tell Monkeyboy keep up the good
work and show us what good leadership
is all about.
At least he's passionate about his job. That's more than you can say about a lot of executives. What's wrong with wanting to crush the competition? That's what capitalism's all about.
True. I believe a whole chapter of The Wealth of Nations was devoted to the importance of chair throwing.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
Microsoft can't coexist with anyone. To them, "the competition" is anyone in the computer industry who is making money or gaining power who is not them. You cannot possibly say MSN search or, say, microsoft netmeeting were serious products Microsoft cared about or which were serious competitors to google or skype when they started up; you cannot possibly say the appearance of skype or google threatened any product that Microsoft was even meaningfully supporting. Yet skype and google gain mindshare, and suddenly making the "google killer" or the "skype killer" become huge priorities. Or at the other end of things, Microsoft ignored Adobe for years as long as they were powerless, profitable but consigned to a "niche", predictable; but suddenly Adobe starts having influence on popular file formats in the form of PDF (invented) or Flash (bought), starts showing signs of growth, and suddenly it becomes absolutely essential for some reason that Microsoft create a PDF Killer.
... then the first thing that happens is the most powerful company in all of software suddenly has it as priority number one to take you out, duplicate your product and give it away for free, subsume your functionality into the OS, etc. They won't always succeed at this, but they have at least the ability to make your life and job very difficult without even breaking a sweat. And it has been demonstrated that even in the most flagrant case of destructive behavior, even if they are tried and convicted of illegal acts, there will be no consequences for them.
Microsoft keeps demonstrating, again and again, that they believe no one may have power but them, and keep killing companies to attain that goal. And people just keep pretending this is somehow good for the market, because the idea that market forces could lead to something other than the perfect outcome is just something some people just don't want to admit could happen.
But this is hurting the market, in the most direct way possible: Microsoft's expansion strategy is based not on finding the next big thing, but on stopping it before it starts.
Supposedly the computer industry lives and thrives on small discoveries that grow to the "next big thing". You know, the proverbial cliche of the startup in somebody's garage, a new way of looking at things, an idea that could change the world, yadda yadda yadda. But more and more the fact is-- and most people see this-- if you find that brilliant idea, if you sweat and pour your life and blood and tears into making the new next greatest thing,
What is the point of trying to build, or finance something revolutionary like Skype, if you know that whatever it is (even if it isn't something Microsoft does yet) Success will just result in Microsoft signing a corporate death warrant? The answer is obviously "because you love what you are doing", but what about the people who don't love what they're doing enough to take the risk of so much wasted effort? Are there people who would be going out and doing new and interesting things they aren't doing now in a world where trying to change the face of computing is rewarded rather than punished? What kind of chilling effect is this having?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
You cant really mix passionate with completely mad. Wanting to crush the competition is not sane since the goal is to make money, not kill everybody else. If your goal is to crush your competition regardless if you make more money on it you are way off.
Capitalism is about healthy competition that follows rules. When coorporations compete on common ground it drives prices down and quality up and fosters innovation. I have never ever read about how capitalism is supposed to foster killing competitors with legal tactics, bribes and by using illegal or shoddy business deals. You probably mistake capitalism for anarchy.
HTTP/1.1 400
Imagine, if you will, Dr. Claw, banging on his desk, alarming his cat:
I'LL GET YOU NEXT TIME GOOGLE! NEXT TIME!!!
Investors should take note of these types of situations.
While we all think it funny, it offers insight into the emotional response of the CEO of the world's largest software company. It shows his a weakness, that he is personally threatened by Google, and a despiration, that he feels Google just one upped him. There is a difference between being passionate about your products and being threatened by your market mates.
Is this the type of personality you would want running the company your 401(k) was invested in? Your retirement future, child's education, or second house at the lake, all riding on the ability of a short tempered reactionist who would scream and shout and create a personal vendetta not only aginst a competitor, but CEO-to-CEO?
In many cases the CEO is a significant reason to invest in a company - that's why there are such massive stock sell offs or buy ins when leadership changes (look at HP recently as an example or further back to Chrysler, GM, etc).
I'd rather invest in a company who's CEO is headstrong and confident enough to try to innovate their competition our of existance, not temper tantrem their CEO to death.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
I think Balmer is violating Nintendo's Insanity Patent.
Overheard in the Google boardroom --
Balmer: I've done far worse than kill you, Google. I've hurt you. And I wish to go on hurting you. I shall leave you as you left me, as you left her: marooned for all eternity in the center of a dead planet, buried alive. Buried alive.
Google: BAAAAALLLLLMER!!!!!!
And, actually, wanting to crush competition is not what capitalism is all about. The idea that competitors need to be crushed instead of, well, competed with is largely what is wrong with capitalism today. It is also precisely what is wrong with Microsoft.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I think you're describing the ideology of capitalism, rather than capitalism in practice. Innovation is no longer fostered by capitalism, it is capped. With the rise of DRM, propriatory solutions, closed standards, cheap 3rd world labour and large scale downsizing the idea of capitalism has changed to *maintaining* an advantage, rather then innovating it. Development hasn't given momentum to corporate profit in 10 years. It's control of a current market, pure and simple. Give any corporation the chance to monopolise the industry and they will. Consumers gain nothing out of the current situation.
No, he said he'd kill Google, not the people at Google. Big difference. A company is an entity independent of its employees.
Our current government is "pro-Business" rather than "pro-Market".
Being pro-Business means that you pass laws designed to protect the revenue streams of businesses (copyright extensions, DMCA, patents on "business methods", etc).
Being pro-Market means that you pass laws designed to facilitate competition in a market and curb the excesses of existing companies.
Crushing competition, in the Microsoft sense, means using virtually any means to eliminate said competition. According to the Federal court that deemed Microsoft an illegal monopolist, that includes illegal tactics, and lots of them. That is not capitalism, that is not a free market, and in the long run we lose. If you'd been in the personal computer business since its inception (like I have) you'd have some awareness of the staggering number of ideas, technologies and products that Microsoft either suppressed or stole outright. And I have no doubt that there are thousands more that we'll never know about. If that's capitalism in action I'll take vanilla, thank you very much.
... hey, now that's capitalism, market-driven all the way. But that's a far cry from what Microsoft has been doing.
And no, I don't think you understand what capitalism is truly about. In pretty much all marketplaces there is room for more than one supplier of goods and services. Certainly that is the case with operating systems and office suites. And no reasonable person would have a problem with a corporation "crushing" its competition by providing a quality product, since it would be the consumer's choice to, in effect, grant a near-monopoly to that company. And when the value of that monopoly's product falls off and someone else becomes top dog for a while
Really, that view of the business world is fundamentally incompatible with Gates & Ballmer's. Their idea of successful competition is the wholly-unenlightened approach of ruthlessly suppressing or eliminating anything that is or might become a threat to Microsoft's hegemony. That's the history of that company, much of which was brought out during the antitrust trial (read up on the "Microsoft tax" and some of the interesting contracts Microsoft forced on the big hardware makers to keep competing OSes out of the picture.)
Actually, I would have to say that Microsoft's way of doing "business" is really more in line with Chinese or even Japanese methodologies than those of traditional American or European businesses. I was watching a TLC program (I think it was TLC) that showed a business strategy meeting from some unnamed large Japanese manufacturer. It was run along near-military lines, and was full of terms like "englobement", "encirclement", "cutting supply lines" and "choking off their air." I found it very interesting, since it was all aimed at removing some competitor from existence (they didn't say who.) I'd like to be a fly on the wall at some of Gates' strategy meetings. I suspect he learned a thing or two from the Japanese.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Lucovosky is a smart guy but is also a prima donna quite capable of embellishment. Let's just say there are undoubtedly two sides to this story. I read the story linked to from the original post and note that Ballmer said that Lucovosky exaggerated the meeting. Based on my interactions with Lucovosky I would tend to believe Ballmer. That said, I have no doubt that Ballmer was passionaet and noisy. Anyone with an Internet connection knows that (Developers! Developer! Developers!).
Actually, what Ballmer is doing is true capitalism; it's just the extreme of it. Capitalism is great, but this is exactly what it turns into when allowed to go unchecked. That is why we have governmental controls. Too much government = communism; too little = ruthless Capitalism (e.g. Ballmer).
While I agree that Ballmer's strategy is maniacal and disgusting, you can't reproach him by saying that he isn't true to Capitalism, as though Capitalism is this machine turning out benevolence and fairness.
This is akin to saying that all we need is true Democracy. Democracy is great too, but pure Democracy is pure majority-rule and no protection of minorities. If 51% wanted to ostracize blacks, then, hey, that's democracy. Fortunately, we don't live in a pure democracy. We have very undemocratic institutions such as the Constitution and the Courts.
Thus, you can't condemn Ballmer as though he's not following "true" Capitalism. He is; that's the problem.