ballmer

No doubt, it's been a doozy of a year for Jerry Yang & co.

Yahoo could have been sold for $33 per share to Microsoft back in the spring; now it's trading at less than $12. Internet advertising may be in for a rough patch, along with the rest of the economy. And morale at the Internet pioneer, well, just isn't what it used to be.

With that in mind, we thought it would be helpful to create a handy list for Yahoo watchers to keep in mind as Yahoo struggles to right its ship in the … Read more

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on Thursday promised it won't be long before the world gets to meet what he is calling "Windows Cloud"--something that acts like Windows but operates over the Internet.

"Just as we have an operating system for the PC, for the phone, and for the server, we need a new operating system that runs in the Internet," Ballmer said Thursday in a speech before France's CIGREF (Club Informatique des Grandes Entreprises Françaises). "I bet we'll call it Windows something. We're going to announce it in … Read more

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told a crowd in London that Microsoft this month will show off its new development environment for Internet-based applications--what he dubbed "Windows Cloud."

Although the term--which may or may not be the product's actual name--is new, Microsoft has been widely expected to unveil its cloud-based developer platform at the Professional Developer Conference at the end of October. Ballmer's comments, reported on Wednesday by IDG News Service, are the latest in a series of mentions of a cloud-based developer platform. Ballmer was asked at last week's Churchill Club speech about Red Dog, … Read more

If you've yet to watch Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's recent Churchill Club comments on everything from server virtualization to search to the mobile market, you're in for a treat. Ballmer is at his best, ripping on everything and everyone...except Microsoft.

Indeed, it's when Ballmer hits rewind on history to argue that Apple will lose in all the markets in which it is currently thriving--including smartphones and laptops--because it's not enough like Microsoft that he hits peak form:

Asked about smartphones, Ballmer said Nokia, Research In Motion, and Apple will all lose out as the market expands over the next five years, because they design their own proprietary hardware and tie it closely to their software.

Nokia leads the smartphone market today with about a 30 percent share, he said. "If you want to reach more than that, you have to separate the hardware and software in the platform," he said.

In other words, he thinks the same strategy that helped Microsoft become the leader on the desktop--licensing its OS for use by other hardware makers--will let it win out on smartphones. Long term, he said, the battle will be between the Symbian OS (which is now open source), mobile versions of Linux, and Windows Mobile.

I have some sympathy for this view, having argued that Google's Android is weakened by its lack of control over hardware (and boy, is its current hardware ugly). But this is a problem for the next few years.

Will Microsoft's strategy to separate hardware and software win long-term? Maybe. indeed, probably. But "in the long run," as John Maynard Keynes famously said, "we're all dead." Microsoft's mobile business may not be around long enough to be able to gloat over the iPhone's diminished fortunes because, well, those fortunes are rocking right now.… Read more

There's no shortage of people talking about cloud computing these days. But are they all talking about the same thing?

Speaking with venture capitalist Ann Winblad at the Churchill Club onThursday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer addressed those differences of opinion:

"I would have thought I knew what the word 'cloud computing' meant," he said, "until I sat with Anne and a bunch of venture capitalists this morning who used the word completely differently than I would have used it."

Ballmer declined to get into the specifics of Microsoft's vision, or to offer any details … Read more

One of the topics I didn't get a chance to write about during last night's Churchill Club speech was Steve Ballmer's comments on virtualization.

Here's a ZDNet video with Ballmer talking about Microsoft's "opportunity to democratize virtualization."

For those who want to skip to the money quote, here it is:

"If you want virtualization on 80 percent of servers instead of 5 percent of servers, you better not charge three times as much as the price of the server for the virtualization," Ballmer said. "For certain high-end applications, the approach … Read more

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said his company may be the only one with a chance to rival Google in search over the long term, but acknowledged that it will take several more years and a whole lot of money.

"It's going to take us a while," he said, during a speech at the Churchill Club. "We've got a lot to do."

Venture Capitalist Ann Winblad, who was moderating the talk with Ballmer, noted that when Ballmer addressed the club in 2006, he said search was a five-year battle.

"It's … Read more

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said Thursday that it remains to be seen how much the current economic crisis affects the technology industry.

"Our industry is not immune to what goes on in the global economy and yet as I travel and talk...I would say given the current circumstances, people see a certain buoyancy (in technology)," Ballmer said.

That, he said, comes from a variety of factors--the fact that consumer spending has not yet been harder hit and the fact that things globally aren't as severe as they have been in the U.… Read more

SANTA CLARA, Calif.-- Microsoft's Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were both making speeches Thursday, but to widely different audiences.

Gates, the company's chairman who has stepped away from full-time Microsoft work, was at the United Nations to discuss global progress in the fight against poverty, while chief executive Ballmer is here to address the Churchill Club, a collection of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and executives.

Gates was before the UN wearing his hat as head of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and to speak on where the world stands versus the Millenium Development Goals. Although the metrics … Read more