“This fall, Microsoft is embarking on one of its biggest series of launches ever, with new versions or updates of nearly all its products and services, from Windows to Windows Phone, Office to Windows Server,” Janet I. Tu reports for The Seattle Times. “On top of that, the company is debuting its first branded computing devices: the Surface tablets.”
Tu reports, “Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer, who has called this year ‘the most epic year in Microsoft history,’ sat down for an interview with The Seattle Times last week to talk about the new products and services, the state of the company and the future.”
Some snippets from Ballmer:
• You know, Windows 95 was certainly the biggest thing in the last 20 years until now. I think Windows 8 certainly surpasses it.
• Screaming loudly doesn’t work very well in our industry.
MacDailyNews Take:
• If you look at the bulk of the PC market, it would run between, say, probably $300 to about $700 or $800. That’s the sweet spot [for Surface tablet pricing].
• Just yelling loudly in any business is never going to help.
MacDailyNews Take:
Someone really should explain to Ballmer T. Clown the purpose of a microphone.
• I think you always want to have a system that has a chance to recognize people who are doing a great job, a good job, and helping people who are still doing maybe even a decent job, but they’re not doing as good a job as the other folks. It helps to let those people recognize where they stand.
MacDailyNews Take: Microsoft’s downfall: Inside the executive e-mails and cannibalistic culture that fueled Microsoft’s lost decade – July 7, 2012
• “Q: Where do you see Microsoft’s position in five years, 10 years?” Ballmer: First of all, I’d say: pre-eminent technology company.
• We’re trying to really re-imagine the world from the ground up with Windows 8.
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, the netherworld.
• You know, Windows 8 is going to do great… It’s a fantastic product.
Read more in the full interview here.
MacDailyNews Take: Let’s take a look at some reviews of Windows 8:
• Valve co-founder Newell: ‘Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space’ – July 26, 2012
• ZDNet’s Kingsley-Hughes: Microsoft’s Windows 8 is an awful, horrible, painful design disaster – June 8, 2012
• Dvorak: Windows 8 an unmitigated disaster; unusable and annoying; it makes your teeth itch – June 3, 2012
• The Guardian: Microsoft’s Windows 8 is confusing as hell; an appalling user experience – March 5, 2012
And if you can’t trust a chair throwing clown like Steve Ballmer who CAN you trust?
I forgot jumping, repetitive (Developers! Developers!) and monkey like.
Take a look how Ballmer greets people sticking his tongue out at them like some kind of lizard or sea serpent. Disgusting. Could there be something psychological about this going on showing his contempt for people?
It shows that he has exotic, if not great, taste
Lounge Lizard wearing a clown hat and red nose.
Check out 2:30 of the store opening video. He flashes some chick with his dirty tongue. What a greaseball.
Im starting to think he just. doesn’t. get it…
I don’t promote or condone drug use but what ever he is smoking I need to get some of that stuff it makes you think everything is always perfect. They could have used it aboard the titanic. Hey Balmer IceBerg Dead Ahead…. May you be CEO for however long it takes.
It isn’t drugs, SuperK – it is billions of dollars in the bank. Money is a proven aphrodisiac and stoker of egos.
Give Ballmer a break. What do you want him to do? Walk on water AND smoke crack?
He’s got a schlong that performs. Unfortunately he uses it to think with too, but that’s another story.
Well, if you’re the left hemisphere of that brain – and you’re here instead…. then that makes a whole lot of sense how he’s able to be truly creative with his factless, tactless verbal diarrhoea, unencumbered by any sense or logic!
Lexotanil 😉
Steve Ballmer is the Karl Gauss of technology marketing. He comes up with one proof after another of the fundamental theorem that he is a fool.
When a salesman fails to deliver time and time again, it all starts to sound hollow.
It’s called “Marketing-As-Management” and it’s almost always fatal.
Aka Emperor hasn’t had any clothes on for a long time. Anyone who would trust this Bozo suffers from real delusion.
Thank God your Imperial observation is only metaphorical (gag)
Windows H8
Everyone from the games industry through enterprise hates Windows H8, it’s Vista 2 no matter what Ballmer says.
Who is everybody? I am using it via Parallel and on my PC and there is nothing wrong with Windows 8. It is very well suited for a touch screen PC and if the user prefers the Windows 7 UI then have at it. Frankly not that hard to use with a standard mouse.
OSX is by no means superior to Windows…. I use both and have for a number of years and they are both fine.
Windows 8 has been described as a painful, horrible design disaster, so I’m glad you like it. It’s going to flop like Vista. Microsoft has no clue.
“It’s going to flop like Vista”
Did you know that if it sells like vista, the ipad will instantly be dethroned?
Did you know that the market share of this “flop” today, after all those years, is still double that of the mac install base?
If it “flops” like vista, I bet the people at random will be very happy. They’ll dominate the tablet space.
What apple fanboys don’t realise is that the amount of tablets sold is ridiculously low up until today. Apple is great at generating buzz and media attention. But they fail to actually deliver. All that talk about ipad this and ipad that… It’s ridiculous. 70% of apple’s revenue comes from their phone products. The ipad is like a fly on the wall. And Redmond is getting ready to swing a newspaper at it. And it will be squashed like it’s nothing. It won’t even take long. I predict it will be dethroned within 4 months after windows 8’s release.
What many of you fail to realise is that the only chance of the ipad to stay on top of the market is if windows 8 becomes the worst selling windows version in the history of the world.
Even vista, with all its (initial) problems, sold hundreds of millions of copies. Windows 8 won’t be any different.
The ipad will join the mac market share. A marginal percentage for an elitist group that likes to feel special.
I absolutely despise Windows 7- I simply have no idea why people subject themselves to such crap.
I like Windows 7, compared to the Vista debacle, the XP Gulag, the ME eye gouging, the Win95 travesty and all the STDs (I mean service packs) in between.
Windows 8 promises to entertain even more than a Richard Chamberlain movie box set, a bipolar trophy wife, mud wrestling amongst the Kardashians, or a Home Shopping Network extravaganza featuring Tony Little stress pillows and Lance Armstrong vitamin supplements.
I haven’t touched a windows machine for a few years then a coworker asked me to fix something in his machine and I’m like “duuuuuuuh where did everything go!” Lol not a smooth UI at all, OSX just makes sense and feels natural
Maybe you should ask the +half a billion people that activated a license.
The problem is that it’s not at all what their customer base as a whole is interested in!
Sorry but I think you may be in the minority here in your liking of Windows 8 and your belief that OSX is not superior to Windows.
Valve, Blizzard, Notch (of Minecraft fame), CNet, and countless others blogs and techie websites and enterprise IT departments hate Windows 8.
Obviously it’s not just because of the GUI — two OSes bolted together — although that’s obviously what you’re simply referring to, but it’s Microsoft’s attempt to lock-down Windows and make it a closed and walled-garden desktop OS.
Actually Valve is just pissed because Steam started selling non-games apps and MS marketplace is cutting into his profits. Blizzard is backing Valve, not thinking for himself, and Notch… well make a game that people don’t refer to as Lego and get out of Steams pocket 😐
“not that hard to use with a standard mouse”
And you find this ACCEPTABLE?
@Gary
“OSX is by no means superior to Windows”
hahahahahaha
I’ve had over 10 years of experience with Windows, and although I’ve only had about 3 years experience with OS X, I can tell you that Windows is absolutely, positively, hands down inferior to OS X or any other operating system you care to name, aside from possibly DOS.
Its UI is designed by idiots and its codebase written by even larger idiots. God, it’s still as shoddy today in 2012 as it was in the 1980’s(I guess if nothing else, Microsoft should be given points for consistency).
Anytime anybody claims Windows is as good or better as OS X, I know that either:
1. They’ve only used OS X for about 5 minutes.
2. They’re judging the greatness of Windows based solely on how many games are available for it(while ignoring the rampant crashing of said games)
3. They’re lying completely.
I’m betting you’re a… #3?
With people like Steve Ballmer in tech, who needs comedies?? LOL It’s been a fun, eventful week so far and these utterly clueless statements from our favorite M$ clown are the icing on the cake.
“We’re trying to really re-imagine the world from the ground up with Windows 8.”
And the end result make many of us shudder… Oh well, thankfully I won’t have to live in that world myself!
I’m actually starting to feel sorry for Ballmer.
I have to agree. He’s really painful to watch. But I like his strategy. I like it a lot >8-)
Almost time for Ballmer to put the light bulb in his mouth and play Uncle Fester. Halloween is soon upon us in a month.
Just because I’m starting to feel sorry for Ballmer doesn’t mean I don’t like his strategy . . . a lot !
It’s so hard to believe a guy like him would be running ANY company he’s so obviously inept, a clodhopper, a bull in a china shop kinda guy. It would depress the heck out of me if Windows were my poisonous OS pick.
A vivid and apt description! The guy would try to sell a vacuum cleaner to his wife, after which he would show the rubes how it’s done at the pumpkin seed spitting contest at the county fair, then drive on over to the Rodeo in his painstakingly restored Nash Rambler. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, if he’s the Rodeo clown
Ballmer would make an excellent rodeo clown! He has most of those skills down pat.
… and as the old joke goes, that Microsoft vacuum cleaner would be the first Microsoft product that didn’t suck.
I love this line. MS product that didn’t suck! Awesome.
And in the Apple corner we have “the Most Powerful Gay Man in America”. Guess that’s why their designs are always good.
Well I’m glad SB set the record straight, once and for all. 😉
Have you ever noticed the Steve Bomber’s initials backwards are BS? Are we in the Burmuda Triangle?
…deeply in the triangle. At times reality seems heavily slanted toward “Alice in Wonderland”.
…and pigs will surely fly…
Oh come on, no one’s done it yet?!?
I like our strategy. I like it a lot.
Haha. I always type that one! Why isn’t that more popular?
ILOSILIAL for life!
From the article Balmer says it’s never going to be sexy (selling to enterprise)…
I don’t know about that, I am sure there are some enterprising gorillas that would get off on the monkey dance…
Developers developers developers…
Then again it’s a challenge to think of a microsoftie as being sexy so maybe he’s right.
Yelling never works….ha, Balmer speak with forked tongue.
Sexy.
Ballmer the sales guy.
Ballmer is the one man who could conceivably popularize the monkey dance in forgettable product showcases, folding chair tossing as an Olympic sport, man sweat as the Xbox 720 matching fragrance, and incidentally assure Windows 8 ubiquity by continuing his impressive campaign of feints, dodges, and red herrings designed to befuddle the competition, making them think he’s losing it, when in fact this marketing genius has a solid record of going viral—and virile—on the Internet, in corporate boardrooms and corridors of power, and throughout the rest of a world of ordinary people weary of Apple’s swagger and presumptuousness, pacifism and environmentalism, imperialism and litigiousness, perfectionism and preciousness, and envious of their money…with so much stacked against the unclean usurper Apple, Ballmer has a chance for the biggest upset of all time.
No Steve. Windows 8 is a big, fat piece of shit much like yourself.
You’re being much too kind.
My wife just begged me, pleaded with me to shut that video off of Ballmer jumping around like a clown, now she has headphones on. Ballmer = Wife Repellent – who knew!
Use this knowledge wisely, my friend.
MDN – It’s been a while since we’ve seen your picture of Ballmer as Capt. Smith of the Titanic.
With an unsinkable product like W8, it’s time to get that pic out again.
MDN’s funny pics that we all got a kick out of have all been replaced by ads in that spot. Bring back the pics you have enough ads MDN.
And the funny part is… It is often a Samsung Galaxy S III or Tab ad.
Well, in that case, then I guess it’s still comedy.
Wish I could post the Photoshop special I did of Skipper Steve & his little buddy Billigan aka Gilligan’s Island. Pretty funny.
No wonder the word thinks Americans are stupid.
Windows 8 is going to do great! I base this on denial.
No, even Windows Server 2012 has metro – DOA.
• Valve co-founder Newell: ‘Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space’ – July 26, 2012
• ZDNet’s Kingsley-Hughes: Microsoft’s Windows 8 is an awful, horrible, painful design disaster – June 8, 2012
• Dvorak: Windows 8 an unmitigated disaster; unusable and annoying; it makes your teeth itch – June 3, 2012
• The Guardian: Microsoft’s Windows 8 is confusing as hell; an appalling user experience – March 5, 2012
Or as Ballmer would say of Windows 8, PERFECT!
So in order to even use it properly, we have to go out and buy touchscreen computers, right? Right!?!
I have W8 (preview version) on my MPB and I am not impressed or amused, no matter what his “sweet spot” is.
Whenever Microsoft and epic are juxtaposed in a sentence, I always expect the next word to be fail.
Interesting…”Fantasy Island” has moved from HP back to it’s former home at Microsloth.
Yeah… But at least she’s still got gams, he’s all gut. Go for it Ballmy, liking that strategy… Liking it a lot.
Go Apple!
“Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer, who has called this year ‘the most epic year in Microsoft history,’
Yup, it is the year Ballmer gets the boot. A decade in the doldrums is going to be just too much for the Board of Directors.
I’ll show you ‘EPIC’. Here comes the Metro backlash. Enjoy!
It doesn’t even matter if microsoft’s products are finally decent or not, they are so late to the 20th century, they are irrelevant and will never recover.
Being slow to innovate, or really outright lazy, and not being first mover (or even second) on smart phones has dealt a deadly blow. They are as they always have been, a company that reacts in a daze to new trends, not creates them. And nobody an afford being asleep at the switch anymore. Tech has matured to the point that the science fiction devices of our youth are now real. This is why Steve Ballmer is not the right person by a long shot to lead Microsoft in this new Post PC era. The Sales Guy has gotta go and he isn’t even all that good at that either since no one trusts anything he says anymore, no one with an ounce of intelligence anyways.
Just in time for Halloween, Windows hiding behind the mask of a great, fantastic product. But sorry, that mask is Metro and it’s scary as hell. Run away! Run away! The Metro monster is coming to get us! 😆
Metro is gone, vanished into trademark limbo. And “Modern UI” isn’t scary, only stupor-inducing.
But, you may actually have a great idea for holiday costumes! Which would be scarier…a mask of Meg Whitman or Steve Ballmer?
It would not matter, as the rest of the body would be the same blob
I know ‘Metro’ isn’t scary. I was having fun. ‘Metro’ is merely an annoying PITA that gets in the way of functionality for folks who aren’t granny.
The name ‘Metro’ will live on and on. Marketing the name into oblivion is mere marketing. I don’t care, nor does anyone else if the alternative name is ‘Modern UI’ which is meaningless. I LOVE great marketing and thankfully have the knack for picking out the good folks. But OMG it’s like every nutjob and psycho on the planet has taken over the marketing profession these days. THAT is scary!
Are we speaking of a Modern urinary tract infection or a woefully stupid user interface?
At 3:10 in the store launch video, it sure looks like that store employee (he has a badge) is using an iPhone 4 or 4S to video.
Ballmer: ‘Windows 8 is going to do great; It’s a fantastic product’
And how could I ever disbelieve Ballmer’s brilliant prognostications?! …
Monkey Boy…endlessly cornering the market on Cluelessness.
What do Apple and Wayne Gretzky have in common? They both “skate to where the puck is going to be.” Ballmer still hasn’t even figured out how to lace the skates up.