Ballmer: ‘Apple, because they went through the valley of the shadow of death, are the darling again’
Tuesday, November 08, 2005 - 07:46 AM EDT
Microsoft's chief executive officer recently sat down with CNET News.com for a Q&A session.
Mike Ricciuti reports for CNET News.com on one of the quetsions:
CNET: Thinking about the Windows Live announcement, there were some pretty harsh comments from analysts and from other sources around the Web. By contrast, Apple Computer usually gets this overwhelmingly positive response to almost anything it does--ditto for Google. Does that make you angry at times? How can you fix that?
Ballmer: There's sort of the good news and the bad news. The good news is, the expectations are higher for us--frankly, I think--than for anyone else. These people think a lot of us, and it's hard to always meet those demands. And we're the big guy. We were the little guy for a while, we had a 10-year run where we were the darling. Apple, because they kind of went through the valley of the shadow of death and have emerged, they are the darling again, even though they have been around for a while. And Google is still in that early phase. I know we're doing good work. As long as we are doing good work and innovative work and exciting work, the customers are going to look at that, and they are not going to start and end with the analyst reports. They'll start and end with the actual products we deliver.
Full article here.
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MacDailyNews Take: This is why you don't hire the sales guy to run a company. It all sounds great until you realize this is Microsoft we're talking about here and the phrases Ballmer spews mean about as much as any politician's on the stump. Clear-eyed customers have looked and are looking at Microsoft's work and seeing a morass of bloat and security failures that cost users billions of dollars. (Why hasn't there been a massive class action lawsuit against Microsoft for Windows' obvious problems that cost customers so much valuable time and money? If there's one thing Microsoft has, besides a mountain range of ill-gotten dollars, it's a stable of lawyers who know how to write EULAs exempting Microsoft from any and all responsibility.)
How Ballmer thinks Microsoft is doing "good, innovative, and exciting" work is beyond comprehension - until your realize he's a sales guy. Those are obviously his replacement words for the ones that don't really sell very well, yet are nonetheless much closer to reality: "mediocre-at-best, derivative, boring, late, bloated, counterintuitive, time-wasting, and insecure." In his closing line, Ballmer gets it right, smart customers will "start and end with the actual products" Microsoft delivers; mainly "end."
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Hello, if they put out a positive product, they'd get a positive response!