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Does Ballmer Need To Go?
Pickens notes a TechCrunch analysis wondering — after Windows Vista and the failed Yahoo bid — whether Steve Ballmer's days at Microsoft are numbered. "Ballmer has been the big driver behind [the Yahoo] deal at Microsoft — some would say to the point of obsession. After the disaster that has been Windows Vista, Ballmer may have realized he needed to redeem himself in the eyes of Microsoft's board. And the 'transformative' deal with Yahoo was the way he was going to do it... If Microsoft's board loses patience with him, it might have to ask Bill Gates to temporarily come back as CEO until it finds a replacement. After all, Ballmer has already made a strong and convincing case for why Microsoft needs Yahoo to make its online and advertising strategy work. It's not clear whether Microsoft can achieve its objectives on its own or through other acquisitions. Maybe Ballmer thinks he can still do the deal by making Yahoo's stock price collapse and come back with a hostile offer."
A: No. Microsoft needs to go. Hopefully the new low-spec laptops (EEPC, OLPC, etc.) will help the process along.
---- It won't be as bad as you fear or as good as you hope, but it will take twice as long as you plan.
"xbox is only just starting to pay for itself, it does have the most to gain and is well on it's way."
Don't be an idiot.
The first Xbox marketplace disaster lost some 4-5 billion before the basketcase of a console was pulled from the market. The current turd of a console has racket up 2-3 billion more with the inclusion of the RRoD 1.1 billion costs.
The 360 has been on the market for 2.5 years and Microsoft in their most recent conference call confirmed they still are losing money on the hardware and have no timeframe for when they will.
The only thing keeping the 360's division barely out of the red right now are the ridiculous 50 dollar online fees Microsoft forces their diehard 360 fans to pay for the privilege of playing online games.
The 360 is dead in every market outside of the US and the UK. Microsoft isn't ever going to make back any significant portion of the money they've wasted on their mind boggling incompetent 7 years in the console market.
I don't think so. If, say, some other OS were to somehow come to dominate "the desktop", IMHO Dell & HP, et al would quickly roll with that and offer it on their hardware. The Vista vs XP debacle has proven that the OEMs don't care what they have to load to make product move across the shelves. Dell for one is _already_ selling (some) machinery with Linux pre-installs, and would probably be selling more if the Empire didn't limit them to "hobbyist" numbers under their OEM extortion plan<M-Del><M-Del>"agreement".
Can you say: 'prostitute'?
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.