Slashdot Mirror
Ballmer Hits 10th Anniversary As Microsoft CEO
bednarz writes "Ten years ago on Jan. 13, 2000, Microsoft's Bill Gates turned over the CEO reins to Steve Ballmer. Back in 2000, Microsoft was still under threat of being broken up by the Department of Justice. Today, Ballmer is trying to meld enterprise and cloud computing. He has spent the past decade working through lawsuits, mergers, acquisitions, competitive battles and, of course, new software including Windows 7, which could become the legacy of his leadership at Microsoft. Not that we'll ever forget Ballmer's 'developers, developers, developers' rant."
Did they mention his important work in the field of chairodynamics?
or
How about his charitable donations of 288,000 pints of human sweat?
Was it just me who read the headline "Ballmer Hits..." and my mind automatically filled in with " ...XXX With A Chair" ?
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
I saw one of those annoying pop up ads saying that Bill Gates would pay you x amount of dollars to do Data Entry for Microsoft from home.
I just kind of sighed and went "Really? REALLY?"
He hasn't been the CEO of Microsoft for a decade now. Ask all of the people you know "Who runs Microsoft" and I am willing to bet a fair share of those not in the computer industry will still say Bill Gates.
...NOT. According to him, it's
" a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.
It must fly in the face of every business practice he's come up with.
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
"LOL Moron"- says Anonymous random, about man who successfully gained a CEO position at one of the world's biggest companies, and many billions of dollars.
Yeah, what a complete moron.
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
Or flying chairs.
After Bill Gates resigned, many of the Microsoft middle managers came up to Steve Ballmer's office to talk about all the problems they had under Gates. Sensing the opportunity for change, nearly all of them said, at some point, "I simply won't stand for this anymore". Ballmer just got tired of this after a while and decided to manage more efficiently.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The "ballster" picture is my favourite.
Even when he will eventually resign, he will still be remembered as the chairman of Microsoft. Now THAT's a legacy!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Microsoft, like many huge businesses, is much like an oil tanker. They keep running for a long, long time even with the engine off. You don't even notice a change when the engines are turned off, they lose speed so gradually that you only notice it when you concentrate on it. Unless you're standing right next to the engines and see that they're not moving, and in that case, especially if it's your fault that they're off, you better keep your mouth shut about it, do your best to fix it and give the captain a thumbs-up every time he bothers to show up and see if everything is allright.
Ballmer is currently frantically trying to fix those engines and give a thumbs-up to the shareholders, even though he doesn't know jack about the engines and also has no idea what tools to use.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Not only gained, but kept, for a full decade, without any media speculation of "who will succeed him?" his CEO job. There's a large number of major corporations that rotate through CEOs every 3-7 years, and even right now, even though he's secured another 3 year contract, the media is already asking who NBC's current CEO will be. Not to mention the big three automakers in the last year, along with many major banks. Balmer's done some pretty dumb, boneheaded stuff in his decade at Microsoft, but nobody in the media has ever honestly questioned his ability to run Microsoft in ten years; a rare feat for such a high profile company.
moox. for a new generation.
I hate it when you liberals are always so negative. Why can't you rephrase it to make it sound positive. Like, "say what you want about GWB, but you have to give him that: He accomplished a decade of failure in just 8 years."
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Just because he got that job (from hist long-year friend und co-partner), doesn't qualify him to be _not_ a moron.
Bastard? Sociopath? Arsehole? Prick?- maybe.
Moron? I'd say no. A *moron* would have fouled it all up somehow, either not getting the job in the first place or not retaining it for the last 8 years. He didn't.
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
A *moron* would have fouled it all up somehow
Have you ever _used_ Vista?
To be a successful CEO, you simply have to be less of a moron than your shareholders (or rather, your board of directors). Given the current crew running most large corporations, that's really not that great of an accomplishment.
That's true. Slashdot has modded up jokes about flying chairs every day for the last five years.
"He threw a chair at it!"
HAHAHAHA HO HO HO HO HEEE HEE HEE HEE HEE.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
From a tech CEO perspective: yes. For everything else; no.
Don't confuse business with technology. The only reason that Microsoft is even in business today is because most people are morons when it comes to anything remotely logical and technical... But that also doesn't mean that most people are morons.
Here be signatures
Have you ever _used_ Vista?
Has anyone?
What else should I run my Windows ME emulator on?
What it amounts to is the most fortuitous dorm assignment in the history of the world, that's all. The guy is an idiot. That being said, may he stay CEO as long as possible, I'm enjoying watching Microsoft take on water. . . .
Vista and 7 changed the playfield. Apple came along with OS X, and Windows started to compete for home users market share, and somewhere on the line pretty much forgot the business users. The OS is no longer clearly aimed for business users.
Oh yeah, I remember clearly when they threw away Active Directory, File Sharing, Smart-card Authentication, Shadow Copy and all of those other business-class features that were just slowing home users down. Or... maybe you're smoking crack.
You can't just say things, you have to actually justify them. What makes you say that Windows no longer has a business focus? Please cite specific examples.
Vista was a disaster pretty much every way you look at it,
Not my way of looking at it. I call it, "rational human being who doesn't make decisions based on Slashdot or hype." I'm not going to say that Vista is the best product ever, but it's not even close to Microsoft's worst OS.
Part of the problem is the overly simplifying things and forcing old reliable tree-browsing into libraries.
I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. I suspect you also do not.
Library-like browsing is fine, if you want to watch photographs or browse mp3 collections at home, but it doesn't really work for corporate cases.
What is "library-like browsing?" Why doesn't it work for corporate cases? (You also can't just pull terms out of your ass and use them as if everybody else knows exactly what you mean.)
Fileservers are easier to use if you can logically follow the treeview.
What exactly is Vista or Windows 7 doing to prevent you from logically following the treeview?
Is your entire complaint centered around the fact that you've never bothered to check "Navigation Pane" from the Organize menu in an Explorer window? I hope that's not the case, because you'd end up looking like a real idiot.
(yes 7 has treeview too, but it sucks compared to old xp model)
Sucks how? Again, you have to actually justify statements like this... you can't just spout crap out of your noisehole and expect me to take it seriously.
Comment of the year
After all, VB6 couldn't be automatically upgraded to VB.net. .Net. VB.Net is essentially just an alternate syntax of C#, plus optional parameter support.
That's because just about every detail of how VB6 worked was a consequence of either how older MS Basics going back to 1975 had worked (the bizarre boolean rules) or how COM works. The different memory model alone would make it nearly impossible to automatically upgrade projects directly, and is why Office (still COM) Automation still doesn't work well under
Neither C# nor VB.net forms projects can be automatically upgraded to ASP.net
You mean automatically converting WinForms projects? How could that possibly work? WebForms already denies the basic properties of the web way too much.
Yes, we're all enjoying the benefits of that wonderful CIL. It's just provided the folks on the ground *so* many benefits like, um, er...
Real inheritance.
Collections other than arrays and "Collection".
Fewer arbitrary "you can't combine these features because we didn't think of that" restrictions.
Better performance without the COM reference-counting overhead.
Much better string performance if you learn how to use it.
Worthwhile built-in libraries.
Dynamic form controls without invisible "control array" seeds.
Initial values in variable declarations.
Not so much of this kinda thing: "Left(Upper(LTrim(RTrim(txtStuff))), Len(LTrim(RTrim(txtStuff)))-1)".
XCopy installation.
Console app support.
IDE tooltips showing any expression's current value.
he doesn't know jack about the engines and also has no idea what tools to use.
When all you have is a chair, all your problems look like developers.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere