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Ballmer Speaks on His Solo Act

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the but-does-he-do-the-monkey-dance dept.

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "In his first one-on-one interview since Bill Gates's retirement announcement, Steve Ballmer tells the Wall Street Journal he is bullish on Microsoft's investments in online services, and he dismisses as 'random malarkey' the idea that Microsoft is having trouble hiring and keeping the kind of brilliant employees that have always been the company's competitive weapon. Here's Ballmer on Gates's departure: 'As co-leaders of the business, I could allow Bill to be the full-time champion of innovation. And [now] with me really being the guy who's here every day running the place, I must be the champion of innovation.' And on competing with Google: 'We're going to compete. We're going to be in the online business. We are going to have a core around online. We're going to be excellent. That, I would tell people, to count on...'"

5 of 196 comments (clear)

  1. Microsoft Employees Waiting For Balmer To Leave by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Having talked to and read many Microsoft's comments/feelings about the company's future, almost universally there is an impression that for Microsoft to get back to a healthy growing company Balmer needs to go - yesterday if possible.

    I get the impression that most people up in Redmond have accepted the fact that Microsoft is going to shrink with the increasing tidal wave of open source/Linux/OpenOffice/OpenDocument use taking place across the computing world. They want to get it over with and move on and find Microsoft's new place in the computing world.

    They want Balmer gone and everyone else that is sympathetic to him. They want a complete house cleaning at Microsoft from top to bottom clearing out the massive amount of dead wood that has accumulated over the past decade there.

    They want to see fiascos like the Xbox project and all the other marketplace failures terminated.

    They want to show the world they can compete on product quality and make Microsoft a respected company in the computing world.

    May sound funny to people who consider Microsoft products garbage, but I can see how someone working there would have this attitude these days given the history of the company.

  2. we're going to succeed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Favourite quote "There are very few areas where, except for Microsoft Bob, we haven't succeeded or where we're [still] telling you we are going to succeed"
    Well apart from the Xbox division, which continues to haemorrhage money, MP3 players, where you're yet to make any serious impression, search, where Google and Yahoo continue to dominate, packaged enterprise applications, where SAP and Oracle dominate, Business Intelligence, where BusinessObjects, Cognos and SAS continue to dominate, and .NET, which continues to languish behind Java as a development platform, and where most of the strategy has never been developed, I can't think of single counter example.

  3. The tanks stopped by MarkByers · · Score: 2, Informative

    Actually the tanks didn't roll over him. They stopped for about 30 minutes. The Unknown Rebel then disappeared into the crowd and no-one knows who he is or what happened to him.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man

    --
    I'll probably be modded down for this...
    1. Re:The tanks stopped by rdoger6424 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Him? did you even read the WP article? The tanks rolled over student protesters the night before.

      --
      "Hello 911? I just tried to toast some bread, and the toaster grew an arm and stabbed me in the face!"
  4. Re:I have four words for you... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    If you bring that up again then I'm going to fucking kill you.

    Throws chair.