At Microsoft’s private company meeting at Seattle’s Safeco Field yesterday a “poor Microsoft employee who tried to take a picture of Ballmer with an iPhone,” Todd Bishop reports for The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
MacDailyNews Take: Doesn’t sound “poor” to us. He /she sounds smarter than the average Softie; must work at MacBU.
Bishop reports, “When Ballmer was making his big entrance — slapping hands, running around, and generally whooping things up, as is his tradition at these events. That was when he spotted someone at field level, allegedly a member of the Windows group, using an iPhone to take his picture.”
“Ballmer grabbed the Apple device from the employee and made some funny remarks as everyone booed. Then he put it on the ground and pretended to stomp on it, before walking away,” Bishop reports. “The scene was visible on the big screen, so even people in the upper deck could see what was happening.”
Bishop reports, “Of course, Ballmer might do better in the future by making sure that the employee has good reason to pick a Windows-branded phone over competing devices — but as one of the person’s colleagues noted on Twitter, ‘you just don’t pick up the CEO of Chevy in a BMW.'”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: That employee must be new or he’d know that the delusional Microsoft brass loves to pretend that they don’t offer inferior products and that Apple, their inspiration, doesn’t even exist.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “MBP Screamer” for the heads up.]
This is Mr Ballmer’s plan to crush the iPhone. One at a time.
Awwww. It shouldn’t matter, but it’s almost a good point about the Chevy in a BMW thing.
That’s a very telling photography of him…He’s at once bemused an befuddled. He’s intrigued and bewildered. Please, please let him stay in charge at Microsoft…It’s really helping my stock in Apple.
Funny. Balmer had a bit of a point with that. If it was not company issued then he can’t damage it. I think Jobs would have the same problem with a win mob phone at an apple event. the only reason he would not if it was a demo on how hard it is to do simple things on win phone.
@PR That photo isn’t real. It’s Photoshopped.
It’s mind-boggling that a man whose behavior has been so thoroughly infantile on numerous occasions could become the head of a major corporation…
@ Alasdair
“This is Mr Ballmer’s plan to crush the iPhone. One at a time.”
ROFLMAO
we have a winner!!
@Twitter
‘you just don’t pick up the CEO of Chevy in a BMW.
1. No because clearly Rick Wagoner’s bailed out/fired A$$ is too broke to call a limo.
2. No but then again you won’t be picking him up in a Pontiac again either.
3. Same as above replacing Pontiac with Saab, Saturn, Hummer.
4. Of course not. Any place he can drive, he can take a company plane for 10x the cost.
Since when did “Chevy” have a CEO? Shows the intelligence of MS employees.
As I said years ago, this battle between M$ and Apple is personal. Ballmer cannot stand Jobs. It must eat him alive that they didn’t kill Apple when they had the chance.
Fat fsck should plan on a brain transplant….
It’s rumored that Ballmer has recently been in hospital for transplant surgery. He had an a**hole transplant…. unfortunately for his the a**hole rejected him.
Ballmer may be a dufus, but this still wasn’t a very smart thing the employee did. Some times it turns out that terms like “not a team player” or “occasionally doesn’t share the company’s vision” appear in performance evaluations as a result of things like this.
Maybe the employee was in charge of testing the Bing SDK for iPhone.
I once used FedEx to send a package to UPS headquarters. The next week our UPS guy said, “That’s not funny.”
I quite like Balmer. It’d be good to have him around at work, you know, like one of those friendly morons that everyone chides now and again.
“Hey Steve, nip down to the stores and get me some elbow grease”
“Yeah, okay”
or
“Hey Steve, can you go to the store for a long stand?”
” No problem”
and when he leaves the room, everyone laughs and shakes their heads.
Who does Uncle Fester think his random fits are influencing? It sounds like a cult over there, with everyone expected to share the same delusions. If you want to find fault with the iPhone, fine, but at least be rational about it. Anyone who does not think the iPhone has been successful should not be running a business.
A hearty thanks to ‘Alasdair Scott’ and ‘ Follower’ for my first morning chuckles.
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This fat sweaty ape of a shoe salesman is emblematic of a poisoned corporate culture. Microsoft, in case they forgot, makes software. It’s their raison de être. But instead of firing up the MBU and doing their fscking JOBS, they foment a childish adversarial war of sorts. Microsoft could have gotten in on the ground floor. They could have made Microsoft synonymous with the explosive development of software on the iPhone and opened a new market of 50 million customers.
Instead, they have Ballmer. May he be in charge for as long as it takes.
M$ employees should non-skid protective covers for the iPhones…if Ballmer were to slip and hurt his back while stomping on an iPhone, M$ have to pay for his back surgery and go broke paying for his weight loss so the back surgery can be effective…
just my $0.02
Does anyone recall the article where the MS employee talks about why they put Seadragon on the iPhone – because it was the only portable device with a GPU. Perhaps this was that guy.
Seadragon actually seems like a decent piece of software; it loads pictures and zooms faster than any of the Apple or Google apps for the iPhone…
We all aready knew Baller was ignorant, but with all the booing, we are now certain Micro$oft employees are ignorant too…if you’re going to be a sheep, be a sheep with the best product. If you’re going to climb the corporate ladder, make sure it’s the right ladder first.
Ballmer, excuse me…forgot the ‘ol “M”
M$’s way out of the toilet and new strategy should be to license the iPhone SDK for $99 and write iPhone apps. That’s their best future.
Based on what we know of MS, I suspect the iPhone was planted by MS PR, just so Ballmer could grab it and “stomp” it.
And like all MS PR, this one has backfired.
Sep 11, 09 – 09:02 amComment from: R Ballmer cannot stand Jobs. It must eat him alive that they didn’t kill Apple when they had the chance.
This is another thing: the Myth of Microsoft Invincibility. Microsoft cheerleaders everywhere are imagining a future where MS takes the mobile market by leveraging it’s monopoly to squeeze out the competition. This is hopelessly delusional. Not only did RIM carve out it’s empire right under Microsofts nose, and not only did Apple make MS irrelevant in the consumer space after less than 3 years making a phone, but those companies (Apple and RIM) did so in a market place that MS had in a hammerlock. MS had a desktop monopoly and a mobile platform when Apple was getting back on it’s feet and RIM was still making pagers. A market for an integrated mobile softwar. platform and now it’s almost entirely gone! What blinkered fan boy really believes MS has a chance of defeating not one, but two much more saavy and much more nimble competitors, when they couldn’t hold onto a market in which they were the only major player?