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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.'"

8 of 265 comments (clear)

  1. Yeah right. by failure-man · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "I have never, honestly, thrown a chair in my life."

    Sure Steve, and I'm not the guy who hacked the announcements system when I was in high school. Face it. It's what you're famous for. Make use of it.

  2. Cancer? by utexaspunk · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Hey, google could be working on that, too...

  3. the good old-fashioned way by zapatero · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Let me extrapolate on Balmer's Microsoft competes the "Good old-fashioned way":

        We will own more congressman and senators than Google, and then we will make Google against the law, and then make it illegal for them to index any Class-C address web-site, and then we will buy all Class-B addresses and then patent them, and make it so only Windows machines can reach a Class-B address. After than we will have our congressmen and Senators pass a law making IP-v6 illegal, thereby protecting our hold on addresses. Then we will go to Europe and outlaw X.25.

    That's just a good old-fashioned microsoft technology battle.

  4. Re:Google To Cure Cancer! by Eberlin · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Microsoft claims Linux is Cancer
    Google uses Linux
    Microsoft repeats claims that Google cures Cancer
    To cure cancer, you make cancer go away.

    Therefore Microsoft claims Google will make Linux go away.

    Since I like Linux, should I be using MSN search then?

  5. Hmmmm. Would people here trust MSN? by hey! · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've never tried Microsoft's search engine. This article made me pause a bit and ask why.

    The reason may not be entirely rational, but I just don't feel like I can trust MSN. It isn't just a blanket mistrust of Microsoft; writing a memo on Word doesnt' make me uneasy. I think the issue is that Microsoft has such an obvious lust to control the economic and technological ground on which information is created, processed, stored and distributed, my subconscious impression is that I couldn't rely on their search results as not having some kind of strategic agenda embedded in it.

    Of course, may not be wise not to trust Google either, but they are in the informaiton as information business, not in the business yet of setting themselves as the ground on which all transactions have to occur. The most important asset they have is user trust. In many ways, Google is the closest thing we have to the old newspaper business model: we give you information, and support that service by advertising around the information. Newspapers these days tend to be part of media empires with financial interests that go beyond the old fashioned cussede political biases.

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  6. Re:Google To Cure Cancer! by Tinidril · · Score: 5, Interesting

    OK, I'll bite. :)

    The massive clustering infrastructure google has developed sure could help with protein analysis. I would bet that their idle cycles could easily match or exceed what is being done today with United Devices or Folding at home.

    They may not cure cancer, but I could see them partnering to help those that will.

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  7. Too late for them by Buran · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm sorry ... but MS has burned us all so many times that no matter what they say, I will never trust them again. I also don't like their attitude and the attitude of their staff (one of their reps described a tech support policy I find abominable, I said I'd never do business with their employer, the rep snottily said 'okay, remove all MS software from your computer', I responded that I long since quit using their crap and that I'm a Mac user... never got a reply. How predictable).

    They ignore antitrust rules (most recently, Microsoft Pulls Its Head Out), they make software that ignores standards (IE), they assume their customers are thieves and demand all kinds of crap from us to prove we aren't when no other major OS vendor does that, and they are a convicted abusive monopolist and should have been broken up but are still operating.

    Sorry, Ballmer. Sorry, Bill. You lost me a long time ago. You had lots of chances, and that time is way past over. You dug your own hole. Rot in it.

  8. Google Toolbar Curing Cancer! by fbg111 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Hate to break it to ya Steve old boy, but Google is curing cancer. The Google Toolbar includes Google Compute, which contributes unused CPU cycles to Folding@home, the Stanford research project on protein folding. Potential payoffs of the research include curing some types of cancer.

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