Ballmer Says Amazon Isn't a "Real Business"

theodp writes According to Steve Ballmer, Amazon.com is not a real business. "They make no money," Ballmer said on the Charlie Rose Show. "In my world, you're not a real business until you make some money. I have a hard time with businesses that don't make money at some point." Ballmer's comments come as Amazon posted a $437 million loss for the third quarter, disappointing Wall Street. "If you are worth $150 billion," Ballmer added, "eventually somebody thinks you're going to make $15 billion pre-tax. They make about zero, and there's a big gap between zero and 15." Fired-up as ever, LA Clippers owner Ballmer's diss comes after fellow NBA owner Mark Cuban similarly slammed IBM, saying Big Blue is no longer a tech company (Robert X. Cringely seems to concur). "Today, they [IBM] specialize in financial engineering," Cuban told CNBC after IBM posted another disappointing quarter. "They're no longer a tech company, they are an amalgamation of different companies that they are trying to arb[itrage] on Wall Street, and I'm not a fan of that at all."

Comments

Re:IBM no longer a tech company?

[squiggleslash]

Only because they're trying to corner the market. And yes, I'm aware they kind of invented the type of cloud system that they are, but Bezos has been explicit from the beginning that he doesn't want competitors, and he'd rather see a few years of losses with the service underpriced than have a small share of the market.

I personally wouldn't invest in Amazon. That said, overall the company seems sustainable, it can afford to make losses like the one last quarter in part because it can easily reverse those losses if it ever becomes a serious problem. They're playing the "very long" game, everything they do seems to be aimed at ensuring they're a significant player 50 years from now. To me, that's absurd, you can't predict the future like that, but, hey, if they want to try - with other investor's money - then more power to them, it's that kind of attitude that moves us forward - usually.

The US tech industry

[Taco Cowboy]

Although I came in the tech field quite late (in the 1970's) I've still been around the block a few times, so here's my take ...

IBM
IBM was a sales company with strong tech foundation. Was. Now IBM has turned into a service company

Cisco
Cisco's strength was derived from teams of cracked engineers churning out amazing communication hardware. Was. Now that the cracked teams of engineers have mostly left Cisco has turned more and more like an Indian company

Microsoft
Microsoft used to be THE company that sells software that corporations need (from OS to their office suites). Used to. Now Microsoft is a company clinging onto new versions of legacy software

Apple
Apple used to be a very brave company that dare to come up with strange products that people crave for. Used to. Now Apple, much like Microsoft, is a company clingong onto new versions of legacy hardware

Re:The US tech industry

[LordKronos]

Apple clings so much to legacy hardware that the CPU clock speed of their new entry-level Mac mini is nearly the same as a decade ago.

That's not apple. That's the entire CPU industry in general. Clock speed, we are right around where we were a decade ago. And that has nothing to do with clinging, but rather what's realistically possible. CPU speed used to increase rapidly because it was the easy way to increase performance year after year. Then we started getting into diminishing returns....smaller improvements in performance even while power consumption and cooling requirements grew rapidly. So now they've learned they need to focus their improvements on both multi-core design as well as per-clock execution efficiency.

Re:Wow

[dbIII]

so it's probably the first instance of interesting business practices by MS

Starting up after dumpster diving for BASIC interpreter source code wasn't interesting enough?

The MS business model has always been to sell something that has already been demonstrated as a success by someone else and then use lawyers to stop the next in line doing the same thing. It's not unique (outside of computing) and it's not as bad as some of the practices of Cisco, HP etc (and MS being underhanded enough to deal with clones led to the cheap PC) - the only tragedy is they came to dominate so there wasn't really a lot of other stuff to copy and compete with. That's probably a major reason why computers generally still suck to use compared to what we would have expected by now. The MS Windows 10 desktop looks like a linux desktop from before this site even existed and the back end is nowhere near as good - how pathetic is that?

Re:Wow

[Anne Thwacks]

You mean when Bill Gates was introduced to IBM by his mum with such a high recommendation that they bought an OS from him that he didn't even have?

Its hard to top that!

Re:Wow

[LordLimecat]

Previous to that, I suppose Bills education as a Lawyer was probably the fuel for later hijinx.

Bill dropped out of a computer science program to start a business building software for traffic statistics equipment. Going to Harvard is not the same as being educated as a lawyer-- they DO teach other things than law there.

Seriously, where are people getting all of their bogus info? Every thread its people spouting about crypto, history, politics, and 90% of it is wrong.