MacDailyNews Take: Ballmer’s trying to hang on until his imagined retirement date. Stay as long as possible, Steve!
“Mr. Ballmer spoke after other tech luminaries had spent two days largely declaring PCs to be passé. Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs on Tuesday made an unflattering comparison between PCs and trucks, vehicles that dominated the auto market but which gave way to smaller cars as the country grew more urban,” Wingfield reports. “Mr. Jobs said computers, including Apple’s own Macintosh, won’t go away, just as trucks didn’t disappear. But he suggested that sleeker portable products such as his company’s iPhone and iPad would be the equivalent of cars—offering touchscreen Website browsing, droves of applications and other features not found on PCs that run Microsoft Windows.”
Wingfield reports, “Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of the Hollywood animation studio DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc., said he has abandoned a laptop for an iPad and smartphone. ‘The laptop is yesterday’s news,’ he said.”
“When Apple’s’s market capitalization passed Microsoft’s last week—making Apple the most valuable technology company—the change bolstered the idea of the post-PC era,” Wingfield reports. “The debate partly stems from semantics, since Mr. Ballmer and some other industry executives regards tablet devices like the iPad as simply a new form of PC. He predicted future tablets that use Microsoft’s Windows will be competitive with the iPad, though he conceded the company has a ‘lot of work to do’ to ‘optimize’ its operating system to run on those devices. ‘The race is on,’ Mr. Ballmer said.”
MacDailyNews Take: The race is on and you’re still shopping for shorts, you big dummy.
Wingfield reports, “In mobile phones, Mr. Ballmer said Microsoft has learned the “value of excellent execution” through past missteps in the business. Microsoft makes an operating system for handsets, called Windows Phone, that has fallen behind technology and market share of Apple’s iPhone.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Surely a bigger fool than Ballmer has been mistakenly charged with running a major U.S. company. We just can’t think of one.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Doug A.” for the heads up.]