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?

[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.

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.'