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Ballmer - Trusting Vista and Battling Google
Carnivore24 wrote to mention a C|Net article discussing Steve Ballmer's morning keynote at Gartner's Symposium/ITxpo. From the article: "'I have never, honestly, thrown a chair in my life,' Microsoft's CEO said ... Ballmer also touched on a variety of areas related to Microsoft's competition with Google. The software maker will compete 'the good old-fashioned way, with innovation,' he said. 'There are many things--who knows?--Google may or may not do. If you read the papers today, other than curing cancer, Google will do everything.'"
OK, a little offtopic, but if I can save someone some hassle later on...man, I hate that windowsupdate BS. Here's what I remember I did to solve it...
:).
You MUST leave the WindowsUpdate service in automatic mode for windowsupdate.com to work properly. You can use the control panel and set it to not do automatic updates, but the service itself must be automatic. And no, that bit of information is NOWHERE to be found in the suggested fixes for the ActiveX error that windowsupdate.com actually shows. Stupidest. Bug. Ever. Also, if you have it set to manual mode, and start the downloads yourself, they have a tendency to fail. You need to: 1) set the service to automatic 2) delete the temporary folder in which the downloads reside and 3) re-visit windowsupdate.com IN THAT ORDER, or it fails again.
Yep, I ran into that one before
DIdn't Bill Gates called open source cancer? Maybe that's Ballmers next mission, curing cancer.
evil is as evil does
http://search.yahoo.com/
http://search.msn.com/
-ashot
If they're referring to MSN Messenger, yes. Nobody uses their crappy portal & search, though. MSN Messenger took off in Europe, because it's preinstalled on windows XP (and has nag screens that almost force you to sign up), and there was virtually no competition. ICQ was used, but not that much. AIM never got used in Europe, being an American thing (AOL only recently became an ISP in Europe). But people are growing sick of the ads and extra tabs in the interface, so alternative apps like Gaim and Trillian are slowly getting used more. And once you have a multinetwork IM, nothing's stopping you from signing up on jabber or something else, while keeping your current contacts. MSN's success in Europe and Asia was because it got shipped with the OS before any competitor got a large enough user base (and everyone had a hotmail address anyway).
The software maker will compete 'the good old-fashioned way, with innovation,' he said.
Innovation?!
That's not the 'good old-fashioned way' of Microsoft that we all know and love!
This type of thing (which occurred just the other day) is the 'old-fashioned' way:
"Microsoft Corp., already under government scrutiny over its behavior toward competitors, told manufacturers of iPod-like portable audio devices that under a new marketing program they would not be allowed to distribute rivals' music player software but pulled back after one company protested." - [more]
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