Steve Ballmer needs to get down on his knees and thank the gods of the multiverse that he hooked up with Bill Gates when he was young. Had he not, rather than getting paid to
embarrass himself and everyone else who's ever worn the geek label with pride, he would have had to find some other sort of management position that better suited his talents. Given his ample expertise in
trying to sell crap not even starving fanboys want and
sweating profusely while blathering on with a nonsensical motivational battlecry, I think he may have found his niche in the chain restaurant industry.
Sorta like this guy:
Separated at birth? :shrug:
But, no, he knew Bill, so he got a job, and I guess as far as Bill was concerned he was good enough at it to keep him around and pay him enough to purchase small countries. But now Bill is gone, and Steve is the one going around trying to remind us of how wonderful Microsoft is. Unfortunately, his talent for bad restaurant management doesn't seem to transfer to things technical, which is odd for someone serving as CEO of one of the most pervasive technology companies in the history of the human race.
Am I overstating the case? Probably. Let's just say his "Developers ..." rant inspired me.
Ballmer and Ozzie at D8: Why does Google have two OSes?
By Peter Bright
After Steve Jobs did a turn at the All Things Digital conference on Tuesday, today was the turn of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and chief software architect Ray Ozzie. The two men talked about the transition to the cloud, the growth of alternative computing platforms like smartphones and tablets, and their relationship to the PC.
...
Ballmer also questioned Google's operating system strategy. Google has two operating systems; its phone and tablet OS, Android; and its future browser-oriented desktop OS, Chrome OS. Microsoft too has separate operating systems, the Windows NT platform used for desktops and servers, and the Windows CE platform for mobile applications, but the company is working to try to make the platforms more coherent. The use of Silverlight on the forthcoming Windows Phone 7 OS is a case in point; by using Silverlight for application development, the underlying differences between the desktop OS and the phone OS are made irrelevant.
...
From a technical point of view, it's a strange criticism for Ballmer to make; in spite of the efforts by Microsoft to reduce the discrepancies between its two operating systems, they are fundamentally very different. This in fact sets Redmond apart from both Cupertino and Mountain View. Apple's iPhone OS is a derivative of the desktop Mac OS X, and the differences between those platforms are shrinking with each new release. Both Chrome OS and Android are Linux, behind the scenes, so they too are closely related, and it's not impossible to see Google fusing them to gain the best of both worlds. If any company is truly developing two OSes here, it's Microsoft.
Ray Ozzie's comment on Google's strategy, however, was right on the money. Not only did he explain why Google was taking such an approach, he also showed that he understood the direction Google was moving in with Chrome OS: the transition to using the browser as the portal to everything—not just data, but applications too. Ray Ozzie's explanation was as on-target and understanding as Steve Ballmer's attack was misguided and nonsensical.
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/06/ballmer-and-ozzie-at-d8-why-does-google-have-two-oses.ars