“Microsoft executives love telling stories against each other. Here’s one that platforms vice-president Jim Allchin told at a recent Windows Vista reviewers conference about chief executive Steve Ballmer,” David Frith reports for Australian IT. “It seems Steve was at a friend’s wedding reception when the bride’s father complained that his PC had slowed to a crawl and would Steve mind taking a look.”
“Allchin says Ballmer, the world’s 13th wealthiest man with a fortune of about $18 billion, spent almost two days trying to rid the PC of worms, viruses, spyware, malware and severe fragmentation without success,” Frith reports. “He lumped the thing back to Microsoft’s headquarters and turned it over to a team of top engineers, who spent several days on the machine, finding it infected with more than 100 pieces of malware, some of which were nearly impossible to eradicate.”
Frith reports, “Among the problems was a program that automatically disabled any antivirus software. ‘This really opened our eyes to what goes on in the real world,’ Allchin told the audience. If the man at the top and a team of Microsoft’s best engineers faced defeat, what chance do ordinary punters have of keeping their Windows PCs virus-free?”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Nothing about the Windows morass and/or Ballmer surprises us anymore.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Chris” for the heads up.]
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Go MonkeyBoy!!
You ain’t touching my Powerbook…
They should have Allchin play the PC guy on the Get a Mac ads.
flame on !!
That’s about the 2,233,445 negative post about MS. Surely MDN has now run out of stories, right? RIGHT??
A team of engineers spent several days on this one computer. No wonder Longhorn/Vista was so delayed.
Even Ballmer knows about 15 minutes is all you give to a infected Windows PC, then after that it’s just more effective to erase and reinstall the operating system.
Ballmer just wanted to take the machine back for the engineers to study, like a diseased rat or something.
Just bought a MacBook and set it up this weekend. It works AWESOME with one small exception…
When I tried to print to a shared printer from Microsoft Word, Word crashed (not the computer, just the Word app).
Apparently it was because the networked computer the printer was connected to was asleep but it goes to show that the Microsoft software was the only software that had issues while setting up this new notebook.
For some reason, Ballmer and the word “moreass” just seem to go together…
Why Would Allchin tell an audience how crappy their OS is in the first place. I wouldn’t stand in front of an audience an tell them how my OS was turned to junk and a team of engineers were skunked by how polluted that Laptop was. The actual solution was low-level format and re-install.. and oh perhaps backup some useful data if it could be cleaned enough to actually be re-installed on a clean laptop..
Most telling bit “This really opened our eyes to what goes on in the real world.” Yes. Your software sucks ass. Stop with the Ads that say your software is more secure, better. Stop with the PeopleReady ads. Fix your product.
If this is true, here is why I like it. This promotes change and better products. I think that competition is healthy, it keeps quality high. Plus, I don’t really want apple to become this big giant – that is annoying. I like the little guy – it’s like my little secret.
Ballmer is himself a malware.
That says it all. These jokers suck and so does there malware.
Oh brother… who in their right mind tries to run anti-virus software from an infected machine? Once compromised it CANNOT be trusted. You have to boot off something else and scan it from the outside.
I’m surprised that Alchin is allowed to say these things. I guess it goes to show you that MS thinks they have no competition. They know the default decision is Windows and that very few people think about their OS for more than 3 seconds. Apple has had tons of ammo to use against Windows for years and has never capitalized on that, so Alchin knows that giving them even more, publicly admitting to serious system flaws, isn’t going to change anything.
And the sad thing is, they might be right. The OS market may never change.
Truth hurts.
$30+ billion in cash in the bank, ton of programmers, all of this time and their stuff is still swiss cheese.
Amazing!
Wow. Just Wow.
Windows XP has been on the market for how long, and their top engineers are JUST NOW having their eyes opened to how dangerous malware can be?
Take off the blinders, turn off the Xbox 360, and come out into the sun.
Wow. Ow.
Come on people, lets get some hate going here.
Priceless…
Can’t believe that Uncle Fester didn’t put the lightbulb in his mouth first!
What a maroon.
Runs the company and can’t clean the shit from the OS.
Classic, just classic.
SB
No koolaid here – It’s a Mac site, that means negative post about M$ are part of the bargain. There are other sites that take a gentler approach on M$, maybe one of those would suit you better.
is it just me or does ballmer look a lot like Hannibal lechter in that photo?
“That’s about the 2,233,445 negative post about MS. Surely MDN has now run out of stories, right? RIGHT??”
That’s okay–Microsoft keeps making new ones.
wow that was JUICY. What can you possibly say to top what Jim Allchin just described. I feel sorry for all the people using that software. There is a choice.
Owned.