Ballmer Calls Android a "Press Release"

Bergkamp10 writes "Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer tried to shoot down Google's new mobile platform at a press conference in Tokyo. Ballmer called Android a mere 'press release' at present, and said the mobile platform market is 'Microsoft's world.' Ballmer dodged requests to comment on specifics of the Android software platform, preferring instead to highlight the successes of the Windows Mobile platform which he said is on 150 different handsets and is available from over 100 different mobile operators. 'Well of course their efforts are just some words on paper right now, it's hard to do a very clear comparison [with Windows Mobile],' Ballmer said. 'Right now they have a press release, we have many, many millions of customers, great software, many hardware devices and they're welcome in our world,' he added."

Comments

Does anyone care what Ballmer thinks on this?

[HBI]

This is the same guy who at one point ran around a COMDEX crashing OS/2 systems with a custom made application to put the lie to IBM's touting of its "crashproof" nature. He's been Microsoft's attack dog for the last 20 years and that's pretty much been his only role in the industry. What is the reason that I, or anyone else, should care what this professional troll thinks?

Re:Does anyone care what Ballmer thinks on this?

[Anonymous Coward]

If he did crash the OS/2 boxes he proved they were not "crashproof" as IBM falsely claimed though, didn't he? I don't think you can call him troll. I'd call him a debunker in this case. Actually, I'd call you troll.

Re:Does anyone care what Ballmer thinks on this?

[alexhs]

You might be right, but I would say "it depends".
No system is crashproof if you have root access
You can write to /dev/kmem to crash a Linux system...

The GP is light on details but you can interpret it as "They found a flaw working as an unprivileged user, and wrote a program exploiting that flaw, crashing the system" or "They wrote a program requiring root acces that would purposefully trash the system".

With the 2nd interpretation, Ballmer didn't prove anything else that "don't run your system as root/admin".

Re:Does anyone care what Ballmer thinks on this?

[uradu]

Yes, Microsoft are the dominant smartphone platform right now, and Android is nothing more than an announcement. But that doesn't change the fact that Microsoft have seriously rested on their laurels with their pocket OS. For a company that likes to include the word "innovation" in just about any phrase they utter, there's not much of that going on in the mobile arena at all. Their most cutting edge and innovative effort to date has probably been the Windows Mobile Search app. Perhaps if they let those guys loose on the OS, we might actually see some real innovation. They've just dicked around with the look of WM, without any significant changes of any sort. Adding HTML email support to Pocket Outlook and calling that a significant OS enhancement, just because those apps are bundled with the OS, is skirting the issue that they have no real will to make any serious OS advances. They're pretty much stagnant and at a complete stand still. WM6 is still clumsy and helpless with regards to resource use. It needs a complete overhaul of how it handles application life cycles. Starting apps and having no real concept of when to stop them again--because hey, you might need them again, and keeping them loaded will improve loading times--is hardly a viable approach when PIE plus another app (say mobile search) will often exhaust available memory and prevent you from even popping up the Contacts list to make a call (this IS a phone, after all!), let alone the camera or any other such unnecessary luxuries. I don't know how often I've tried to pop up the camera app on my HTC Dash to capture a quick moment, only to be told that there's not enough memory and basta. Only extreme self control and the disdain for blowing $200 in a flash have prevented me from smashing the phone against the nearest wall in such moments. Microsoft, that's not how a mobile OS is supposed to behave. If Android does better than that, you will be pushed into total irrelevance within a few short years.

Re:Does anyone care what Ballmer thinks on this?

[sarhjinian]

I agree with everything you've said, except for "resting on their laurels". WM hasn't been given any laurels. At all. We're in the middle of a deployment of these units to our sales staff and they're outright awful, regardless of the vendor source. Applications hang and lock the whole device, database stores get corrupt (oh, good job on persistent storage, guys--next time, how about an FS that doesn't cheese files on reboot) phone functionality is iffy and the hardware runs the gamut from "okay" (MotoQ, iPaq 6900) to outright awful (some of the dime-a-dozen Taiwanese makes). There are bugs in the platform that make, say, mail so bad that you pretty much have to use Exchange or replace Pocket Outlook with a third-party mail client. The aforementioned cemail.vol corruption problem is astounding: you can pretty much cheese your mailbox just by resetting the device while checking mail (which you will have to do because it will crash). It took a lot of digging to find out that the only option is to blow away the mailbox, which is really hard to do as the file is locked on device bootup. Exchange makes this a little less painful, but only slightly. This behaviour exists in any app on any WM5+ handheld that uses Microsoft's database volumes (eg, any app that wants to keep client-side data) and is a side effect of adding persistent storage without a decent FS. Before WM5, your handheld would self-erase upon power loss or hard crash. WM2003 was about as safe as it got, but with WM2003 you don't get push mail, persistent storage and a whole lot of other services. Contrast this with BlackBerry. Then there's device management (or rather, there **isn't** device management). You have to buy Exchange to do remote-wipe and SMS (or a third party app) to do anything else, and even then it barely does anything. And then there's ActiveSync, which is a tool of Satan. I can think of no other better evidence of Microsoft's monopoly effect in action than WM: no other company could have released something as patently awful and sucker so many people into using it unless they had another market they could leverage. It's especially amazing when in the other corner you have BlackBerry, which provides a rock-solid experience, great management tools and perfect push/sync (MS' push/sync is a nasty hack, by comparison. Sure, you can Frankenstein your implementation with third-party tools, but by that point you're in interoperability hell and the devices are still hanging and pissing users off. And god help you make third-party WM software to overcome MS's problems, because if you get wide enough adoption Microsoft will either buy you out (if you're lucky) or release a shoddy competitor (if you're not). WM is simply a vehicle to enable developers to take the path of least resistance. If it wasn't for the huge Windows developer base (and Microsoft's combination of deep pockets and sheer bloody-mindedness), this platform would be dead. It's scary to think that WM6 is, what, the eigth iteration of this product and it still can't hold a candle to the Newton Messagepad 2000, let alone BlackBerry.

Their world? Yeah right!

[BcNexus]

I've been sorely disappointed by each version of Windows CE/CE.net/Mobile. I've got many gripes including battery life, locking up when the battery runs down, losing everything when the battery runs down, wifi issues, inability to play video despite 400 MHz ARM processors, no upgrades to the OS are available to consumers, features are tied to OS upgrades... Windows PDAs stink for all those reasons!

Re:Their world? Yeah right!

[Ajehals]

Upgrade to something like Familiar, (or anything down the Open Embedded line) pretty much everything you mentioned goes away, battery life improves, you can watch full length DVD's (albeit at a small resolution), plus as a bonus you can use the unstable releases and retain those MS random lock ups, but in exchange for more features. Oh and if you use a PDA for reading Ebooks, then Opie-Reader is definitely the way to go, the best reader, once you have converted them all to text or html of course (but then I do that whenever I get an ebook anyway).

What happens...

[EaglemanBSA]

...when the 'press release' takes as much market share from Microsoft as, say, Google's search engine has? Investors try to plan ahead - customers now aren't as important as customers tomorrow. Honestly, if I had my choice I'd picka Google-run mobile simply because I trust them more to be innovative and customer-centered. I think vista has shown us that simply 'owning the market' so-to-speak isn't going to get you incredibly far anymore.

He's always trying to steal the hype

[empaler]

Like when he faked laughter at the iPhone. What can you do? The guy has to try to sell his cruft, and when his competitors get a lot of attention, he has to do something.
He obviously can't upstage them with functionality or stability (I have a Windows Mobile lying on a shelf, gathering dust), so he'll have to try name-calling.

Re:hmm

[TheGratefulNet]

I am not a huge fan of google these days (various reasons) but I was there for an interview and I was not allowed to 'see' things in certain buildings or offices. they all told me there was some hardware being worked on and that if I even saw it, I'd 'know' what they were working on. this was a few months ago.

I now 'get it'. its the phone they were working on.

I think its real. and they seem to be putting a LOT of energy into this project, too.

I doubt its vaporware.

Re:Vaporware?

[Da Fokka]

That's rich, coming from one of the greatest producers of vaporware in the world.

Be that as it may, Windows Mobile is in widespread use and Android isn't yet. I have little doubt that it will be adopted with great speed, but currently Mr Ballmer does have a point.

Re:Wel...

[mspohr]

Phone software can be much better... perhaps Google can help make it better.

For a good review of the latest Windows Mobile version 6 on state of the art hardware, see the NYT. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/08/technology/personaltech/08pogue.html?ref=business

I especially like his simple list of suggestions to Microsoft to fix severe usability problems such as: 'If it takes four presses on the More button just to see everything in the Start menu -- and you provide no direct way to get to the first page from the last -- you need to redesign.'

And... '...over all, it's a shame that such bloated, baffling software runs a phone whose hardware is so close to perfect.'

Re:Vaporware?

[Fred_A]

That's rich, coming from one of the greatest producers of vaporware in the world.

Be that as it may, Windows Mobile is in widespread use and Android isn't yet. Apparently Windows mobile has a little more presence on phones than Linux has on the desktop. "Widespread use" doesn't seem to be a very good way of characterising it.

Granted Windows Mobile has seen the Real World (tm) and has even been through a number of iterations which made it somewhet better (hopefully). It also has the theoretical advantage of being able to communicate more easily with the dominant desktop system and to share applications with it with a recompile (and possibly a few tweakings).

Note however that with those pretty massive advantages it still remains a very marginal player on the phone market. This hints very strongly at a problem with Windows Mobile. If it's Microsoft's World it's full of dragons.

Disclaimer : Looking at that market from the outside, not a Microsoft user, my phone is dumb and the PDAs I've used were Palms.

Re:Wel...

[AbbyNormal]

More importantly, from an industry stand-point, I find it turning into a very interesting chess game. Google's press releases the past two weeks have just been about introducing new systems. Every single release has caused Microsoft to go on the defensive. Google releases a new kit for an open social network, and Microsoft has to keep defending their Facebook investment and also downplay Google's product. Google releases a new mobile kit and is immediately attacked by Microsoft (and Symbian). I don't recall this happening with any other product released by Google, including Google Docs. The two giants are facing off.

Re:Vaporware?

[Aladrin]

On the other hand, maybe OpenMoko will be the one to 'get it right'.

I used to always believe that Open Source was a neat thing, and a good idea... But not terribly effective at being cutting edge. That has changed lately, at least in my eyes, and I see OS taking over. Compiz on Kubuntu is very, very nice, if not yet perfect. I can do things on it that make my Mac co-workers a bit jealous (Yakuake, desktop cube, scribbling on the screen) and it's getting better all the time. ATI has been releasing their specs and I expect Linux to soon (read: a few years) have better video drivers and capabilities than Windows.

OpenMoko could do for cellphones/mobile-devices what Ubuntu is doing for the desktop. If they get it right.

Re:Vaporware?

[wfWebber]

Let me start by saying I welcome any initiative to make it easier to develop software for phones. Let me continue by saying WM6 (atleast to me) is a great platform albeit a tad slow. I've yet to experience my first phone-crash, something I've seen more then once while running symbian.

delusions of grandeur

[m2943]

he is correct. Microsoft has a great share of the mobile market and their software is actually quite good nowadays. And yes, Google's announcement is sort of a press release at the moment.

Have a look at the market share figures:

http://x.msmobiles.com/portal/images/other/symbian-market-share.jpg

Microsoft's worldwide presence is a joke. In fact, Linux is already far more widely used worldwide than Microsoft, Palm, and RIM combined.

And yes, Google's announcement is sort of a press release at the moment.

It's a press release for something that is going to be available in less than a week for developers, with a dozen industry heavyweights behind it. That's not just a press release.