Microsoft Chief Executive Chair Thrower Officer Steve Ballmer was speaking at Gartner’s Symposium/ITxpo conference in Orlando today, and according to ZDNet, he said something that must have sent a few tremors through the crowd. He said that if people want to wait for Windows 7, that’s cool with him. But he did qualify that statement:
“If people want to wait they really can,” said Ballmer. “But I’d definitely deploy Vista.”
Now that it’s cool to wait until Windows 7, good luck in terms of selling copies of Vista Mr. Ballmer. Because I assure you that not many business are going to do so now. To be fair, he did defend Vista a great deal. But given the fact that XP will be around for some time to come and he’s talking about Windows 7, it’s become clearer than ever that Vista is a failure in the marketplace.
Ballmer also talked about Yahoo and Google. In the case of Yahoo, he made this comment:
“It’s clear Yahoo didn’t want to sell. They probably still think it’s worth more than $33 a share. I still think it makes sense for their shareholders and ours.”
Yahoo stock which had sunk to $11 a share as recently as yesterday shot up by about a dollar the second he said that. I guess Yahoo shareholders agree with him.
As for Google:
“We have better competition today than Google Docs and Spreadsheets. We get more competition from OpenOffice and StarOffice frankly,”
That’s interesting. Considering that the mere mention of the word Google reportedly enraged Ballmer enough to throw a chair across a room and threaten to “kill” Google, not to mention that his kids are banned from using the Google search engine (as well as iPods, which must make them the biggest losers in the school they attend), I find that statement odd.
One thing to note, check the picture of Ballmer’s handlers in the ZDNet article. The guy needs five of them? Maybe it’s because they want to make sure that he doesn’t throw any chairs if he gets ticked off.