“To explain this change to employees, Microsoft hosted an internal event with CEO Steve Ballmer, chairman Bill Gates, Johnson, Allchin, Raikes, and Bach. Most of the discussion and Q & A that happened that day is largely irrelevant to Nexus readers, but the company did take one impromptu question about competition with Apple Computer that I thought you’d enjoy. Here’s a transcript of that portion of the session, and some photos taken from a video of the event,” Thurrott reports.
Q: Everyone wants to talk today about Google as a competitor, but Apple is resurgent as well and is doing some interesting new things, and moving over to the Intel platform. I’m curious about your perspective on Apple as a competitor, and also our Macintosh Business Unit is squirreled away in our games division, and, uh…
[Laughter from both the executive panel and the audience]
Q: … And I’m interested in that as an architecture. So what’s your perspective on Apple as a competitor and on our Macintosh business?
Steve Ballmer: [looking sideways down the panel and laughing]: Who wants to go first?
[Hearty laughter as everyone on the panel basically points at each other, offering choices other than themselves.]
Steve Ballmer: We’ll let Jim talk about Apple in general as a competitor, and then we’ll go from there.
The full spectacle, complete with the guy they’re firing forced to answer “the Apple question” first, and pictures that prove conclusively that we thought wrong: Uncle Fester actually can continue to get balder and fatter here.
Nervous laughter, condescending laughter, or just silly laughter? You decide. Does one part of Ballmer’s answers foretell a Microsoft ‘iPod?’ According to Thurrott, Ballmer said, “…obviously one of the keys for us in music and video is to make sure we have an integrated and strong portable device … [shrugs] business.”
After reading the whole exchange, it just never seems to end: Microsoft still wants to “deliver the same kind of end-to-end experience that Apple is able to deliver by being so vertically integrated,” but they never do. You can’t deliver a seamless user experience when you have too many cooks in the kitchen and you care more about controlling “ecosystems” that line your company’s pockets than you care about your customers’ user experience.
It’s too bad they weren’t asked about key employee defections, China, Microsoft’s flatlined stock price, and the company towel service. We’d have loved to see Balmer’s already-abused chair go sailing and the f bombs they’d drop en masse like a bunch of drunken sailors.
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