
Steve Ballmer: Chrome And Safari Are Rounding Errors  - dwynings
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/29/ballmer-microsoft-interview-chrome-windows-internetexplorer/
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lliiffee
Isn't it an accepted journalistic standard of some kind to smooth out the many
stutters and small grammatical mistakes everyone makes when speaking verbally?
Exact, word to word transcriptions like this are actually a classic dirty
trick for news organizations to try to embarrass politicians they don't like.
(Ballmer does much better than most.)

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jimfl
TechCrunch seems to revel in the abandonment of accepted journalistic
standards. Story embargoes for example.

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jrockway
To be fair to TechCrunch, embargoes are a dumb idea. If you don't want people
to know about something until a certain date, don't tell them until that date.

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rbanffy
Embargoes allow real journalists to do better research, to make sure they
understand what they are writing about and to, in general, provide higher
quality information than TC would ever consider doing.

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jrockway
Perhaps, but most bloggers wouldn't bother doing the research anyway. There
are two kinds of news sources these days; blogs for instant facts, and real
news sources (NYT, etc.) for actual thoughtful analysis. I would never expect
the NYT to be first on any story, but I do expect it to be a good read.
Usually my expectations are met.

Anyway, TC is not journalism, it's a blog.

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ujibuip
There are two kinds of news sources these days; blogs for people who have
personal experience of the topic, and real news sources (NYT, etc.) for
reprinting press releases of those companies that don't compete with their
parent media group.

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ZeroGravitas
_"And Microsoft’s competitors are doing exactly what Microsoft is prohibited
from doing – bundling an operating system and a browser."_

Yes, and ordinary people are allowed to step within 200 yards of schools.
Other people, those tried and found guilty of certain crimes, are not.

I despair that even tech journalists can't grasp the basics of what is one of
the biggest tech news stories of the last twenty years.

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oneplusone
That is ridiculous. They got punished because they were ahead of the times,
not because they were evil. What they did by bundling IE with Windows was the
right strategic move. They understood that the browser was an integral piece
of the experience before anybody else.

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protomyth
They got punished for making deals that locked Netscape out of the market by
making OEM's pay more for including competitors products.

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leej
Intel gives incentives to OEMs to lock out AMD. Google pays Mozilla to lock
out other search engines on Firefox start page and search bar (and it does not
allow customization at install time). Apple does not allow 3rd party apps
colliding with Apple produced ones on App Store. Any comments on these other
monopolies' actions? Every company does the same.

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stepherm
The difference is Mozilla and Apple don't have 9X% market share.

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InclinedPlane
And google doesn't have 9x% market share?

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statictype
Well, no, actually, I'm pretty sure they don't.

You'd be surprised at how many people still use Yahoo for search.

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jws
Has Ballmer lost a finger? For safari+chrome to be a rounding error you have
to be using a single digit of precision in a number base lower than 10.

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LogicHoleFlaw
Wow, as much crap as my slashbot self has given Ballmer over the years, this
interview really shows him having his act together.

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flatline
He had some good points. The Chrome/Android split I agree with him on - not
sure what Google is doing there - but I wouldn't bet on it being a long-term
mistake like Ballmer is doing. He also continues touting Windows and the
Windows Mobile platform. That's obvious, but what are they actually doing to
innovate or compete? He just talks about attack vectors to the behemoth that
is Microsoft. I still think that Ballmer just fundamentally does not "get it".

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warfangle
There's probably not much "reason" behind the Chrome/Android split. It's
likely that they were both once someone's 20% project, and simply bubbled up
through different portions of the infrastructure.

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jrockway
Google purchased Android.

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warfangle
Thanks for the correction.

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gstar
_We have one and a half operating systems, Windows and Windows Mobile. Windows
Mobile is kind of a half because it’s not entirely the same as Windows. And
everyday, I say I’d love to get those two things to share more._

Say, like Apple, Steve?

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axod
If you believe webapps are the way of the future, then the browser stats are
completely different. Then IE is a rounding error.

IE simply doesn't cut it with js speed/stability etc

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blub
Big if.

Wikipedia: Netscape began to experiment with prototypes of a web-based system,
known internally as "Constellation", which would allow a user to access and
edit his or her files anywhere across a network no matter what computer or
operating system he or she happened to be using.

Industry observers confidently forecast the dawn of a new era of connected
computing. The underlying operating system, it was believed, would become an
unimportant consideration; future applications would run within a web browser.
This was seen by Netscape as a clear opportunity to entrench Navigator at the
heart of the next generation of computing, and thus gain the opportunity to
expand into all manner of other software and service market.

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makecheck
He is focused on browser market share, when ironically that is precisely
what's forced Google into this position. If IE6 wasn't a ridiculous percentage
of the market, its brokenness wouldn't matter enough for another company to
fix it.

Google doesn't care whose browser is used, they care about a sane foundation
on which to deploy web apps. Steve shouldn't sound so hurt, it's not as if the
entire industry hasn't been "asking nicely" for years to have IE catch up.
They can't cry now that someone has taken them by force.

Steve also goes into all the wonderful things happening in IE8 and beyond. And
they're irrelevant, for the same reason: IE6 is still the breaking point. Any
"innovation" in IE that doesn't come in the form of a free update to IE6 that
works on XP, doesn't matter.

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sonofjanoh
Most of the people I come in contact with don't even have the faintest idea
what IE or Chrome is. They might complain that their "facebook" does not work
anymore knowing nothing of the changes occurred to their browser. It's not
relevant to the masses who is giving the browser. If Windows will continue to
dominate the laptop/desktop market then it matters nothing if the browser
comes from a different source because it is not the browser that costs.

Who wouldn't protect their own market share? I don't think any startupers will
welcome a new thing that takes over their business slowly. When it's on a
small scale it makes up a good story when it is global it's war. Good for the
consumers though.

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skalpelis
It might explain why his software is hated so much, if it routinely rounds off
5+%.

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butterfi
If chrome and safari are rounding errors, sign me up for some of that rounding
action. On my site, year to date shows IE "rounding" down by some 20%. Most of
it to FF, but Safari and Chrome are both growing. Seems like only yesterday
Ballmer was dismissing FF as well. I'd say Ballmer's hubris has remained
steady though.

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allenbrunson
you can't really blame him. ballmer's primary job is to be a cheerleader for
microsoft.

ballmer also said that the iphone would get absolutely no market share at all.
i doubt even _he_ believed that.

the practical upshot is that you can't trust high-tech ceos to tell you which
way the wind is blowing.

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fragmede
Chrome and Safari might be rounding errors, but resources wasted on supporting
'your' browsers definitively are NOT.

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acg
Much as I like them, you have to question whether Google are going to be
smart/rich enough to flank Microsoft. Or whether they can co-exist in some of
these markets in the future.

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greyman
My prediction is that Google will not be able to beat Microsoft, and it
doesn't help that they are smart or rich.

IMHO, their strategy to making OS irrelevant by having everything run from
Chrome OS might not succeed in the end.

Just one example: Some time ago, I wanted to become more independent from MS
and store my files online, so I started to use Google Docs. It's quite usable
for home use, but currently, I switched back to my old Office 2000, with the
difference that my files are not only on my harddisk, but I share them on the
cloud with Live Mesh. This is a some kind of foreplay for the next year, when
MS will come with Office 2010 and also Online office. So MS will have both the
native windows client and the online application, while Google has only the
later. I really don't see how they can compete here.

The danger for Google lies in the fact, that all their online assets are copy-
able, and MS are slowly becoming able to achieve that.

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stcredzero
But to win this fight, all Google has to do is to be better able to respond to
customer needs than Microsoft. Maybe you're right, and they're going to lose.
Customers stand a good chance of winning either way, though.

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gaius
The difference is that the feedback loop for Microsoft for, say, Excel is that
they want to sell 50,000-seat site licenses to accounting firms and will do
what they need to do technologically and commercially in order to do that. As
an aside, Excel becomes a superset of what other users need. The feedback loop
for Google's spreadsheet is... what?

Remember Google's users are not its customers, they're its _product_.

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leej
On the Ballmer side, he is such "great" at this kind of sentences that two of
his greatest hits: (Google is a) deck of cards. (iphone) does not appeal to
biz customers.

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Estragon
If their market shares are rounding errors, MS's market cap is a dropped
decimal. :-)

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InclinedPlane
Ballmer is misguided on several counts:

Chrome, firefox, and safari are much, much more likely to be used by the
technically elite. These are the people who fix their friends' and relatives'
computers, who design and build websites, who write about technology, they
have the ability to influence the less sophisticated in browser choice.

More importantly, browsers are free (except Opera), and in the internet age
the process of changing your choice of browser is about as difficult as
posting to facebook. This makes browser market share potentially highly
volatile. Firefox and chrome are slowly but steadily making gains in market
share, and firefox is already within striking distance of becoming the
dominant browser. There is very much the potential of reaching a tipping point
where the featureset of IE becomes so outdated that it no longer becomes a
viable browser choice. And if we ever reach that point, and I believe we very
well could given the differential in pace of development of
firefox/chrome/safari vs. IE, then the entire browser marketshare arena could
be turned upside down overnight. One need only to look at the growth in
popularity of twitter, for example, to see how fast things can change in the
modern internet world.

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Perceval
Opera is free for personal use. It has been since version 8.5, released in
2005.

