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Ballmer for President

Dan Farber calls Steve Ballmer a flip-flopper for casually re-evaluating his pursuit of Yahoo during a speech in Moscow:

“Yahoo was never the strategy we were pursuing, it was a way to accelerate our online advertising business…We will spend money on some acquisitions. You can do a whole lot of things with 50 billion dollars.”

This Eastern-European tour didn’t start quite well for Ballmer, who received the egg-treatment in Budapest, but now it may just take a positive turn. After all, being a certified flip-flopper qualifies him as a Candidate for President (not of Microsoft, but the USA). He needs a new job anyway, now that Scoble is about to take over at Microsoft.smile_shades

Update: OK, so he’s late to run. I hear there will soon be another vacancy he can apply for…

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MicroScoble: Scoble to Become Microsoft CEO

While outgoing Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is being egged in Budapest Fake Steve Jobs is already running a poll to find his replacement. Ex-Microsoftie, current Uber-Blogger Robert Scoble seems to have a solid lead:

Congrat’s, MicroScoble! smile_teeth

Update: Robert did not hesitate to declare his first move as CEO: Why Microsoft will buy Facebook and keep it closed.

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Angry Mom Spanking Ballmer Over Useless Vista

Well, it’s not the Microsoft CEO’s mother – it’s analyst Yvonne Genovese who interviewed Ballmer at the Gartner Symposium.

“My daughter comes in one day and says, ‘Hey Mom, my friend has Vista, and it has these neat little things called gadgets — I need those.'”

Said Ballmer: “I love your daughter.”

“You’re not going to like her mom in about two minutes,” said Genovese, while the crowd laughed.

She went on to explain that she installed Vista for her daughter — and two days later went right back to using the XP operating system.

That must have been one entertaining session. Read the full story at Computerworld. But first, here’s another quote from Ballmer, clearly on the defensive:

“There is always a tension between the value that end users see — and frankly, that software developers see — and the value that we can deliver to IT.”

Yesss. The key word is IT. As in “expert only”. Perhaps it’s time Microsoft recognize that they failed to serve two “masters”, and in catering strictly for IT, delivering a super-secure (?) system they created a monster quite unusable by individual consumers.

I’ve been ranting about Vista enough here, let me just add another gem to prove my point.

It’s probably fair to assume that a lot of Vista (home) users will have at least one older, XP machine around – and if they do, they want these to see these connected on a Home Network. This should be a piece of cake… or not.

  1. Your Vista PC won’t see the XP ones on the network at all.
  2. There’s no documentation whatsoever, but after Googling around you can figure out that you need to patch the XP machines (!) for them to be seen by the Vista. (Incidentally, the patch requires WGA, which fails on one of my perfectly legit computers, but that’s another story)
  3. When Vista still can’t see the networked machines, back Googling again.
  4. After some research you’ll discover a well-hidden statement that it may take up to 15 minutes for a Vista PC to see a networked pre-Vista one. Fifteen minutes!!!! in 2007!!!!

This is just one example of the many idiocies crippling Vista. Nothing major, just stupid little things that don’t work and there is no easily accessible info about.

Vista is for the corporate world with IT departments, period. I can hardly think of better promotion for Apple then releasing Vista to the consumer market. Oh, and since a picture is worth a thousand words, here’s one from Princeton University (by way of Espen Antonsen)

Update: It’s not just kids anymore 😉

Update: Ballmer speaks; Can Microsoft be everything to everyone? at Between the Lines. More on the Computerworld Blogs