“Microsoft’s CEO emphasized the importance of attracting talent and urged shareholders to be patient with the amount of time it might take the company to pursue its various business models, speaking during Microsoft’s annual financial analyst meeting on Thursday,” Nancy Gohring reports for Macworld UK. “‘Vista doesn’t get done by three people in a garage in three days,’ said Steve Ballmer.”
MacDailyNews Take: It just feels like it to the end user.
Gohring reports that Ballmer said, ‘We are hell bent and determined to allocate the talent, resources, money and innovation to become a powerhouse in the advertising business.'”
MacDailyNews Take: Well, his first four words are certainly the truth.
Full article here.
Daisuke Wakabayashi reports for Reuters, “Ballmer said the $1.06 billion charge the company took to fix problems with the Xbox game console was ‘painful,’ teaching it a lesson about hardware design.”
MacDailyNews Take: Hopefully, it taught consumers a lesson, too.
“The company said it expects the total installed base of the Windows operating system to hit one billion — which Microsoft noted was more than the number of cars in the world — during the current fiscal year,” Wakabayashi reports.
MacDailyNews Take: The Dark Ages of Personal Computing ain’t over, yet, folks.
Full article here.
Jim Goldman reports for CNBC that also at financial analysts meeting, Bill Gates attempted to demo “Suface,” that “Big-Ass Coffee Table” that Microsoft trotted out earlier this year in a failed attempt to sap some PR from Apple’s iPhone. Goldman reports, “Says our source who was on hand for this: ‘Gates’ first demo on that ‘table’ Surface display (the one Microsoft made a big deal about) didn’t work.’ (Remember this product, unveiled earlier this year? The coffee-table sized computer that, um, acts as a coffee table?) ‘Supposed to be a ‘touch screen’ control but Gates touched it and tried to move things on the screen; nothing moved, it was frozen.’ Gates’ quote, according to our tipster: ‘It’s a lot more fun when they work.’ He added: ‘Gates looked kinda embarrassed, but he’s still talking…'”
Goldman reports, ‘He later got it fixed,’ our tipster writes, ‘but it took two tech guys 7 to 8 minutes to fix it.’ It gets worse. The same analyst says the crowd can’t connect into Microsoft’s own network to view slides on their laptops during the executive presentations: ‘IT guys running around like crazy here trying to get things fixed… Whenever you are tempted to buy Microsoft, just pinch yourself really, really hard, and buy Apple instead.'”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We can’t wait for the YouTube video of Gates’ Surface demo! We also pray every single day that Ballmer staves off golden parachute deployment forever.
