Defensive Ballmer dumps on Google

Stan Beer
Friday, 19 October 2007 06:11

Opinion and Analysis

As usual, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer took his best shot at making observers wince with embarrassment during his keynote address at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco yesterday. Being an event focussing on the Internet of course, the target of his characteristic buffoonery was naturally Web kingpin Google.

The problem for Mr Ballmer is that underneath all of his seeming light hearted banter, it is obvious to all who bother to watch that there is a seething cauldron of pent up anger and frustration. It's not hard to imagine that third party tales of him throwing chairs around rooms while screaming at the top of his lungs in a fit of rage as being dead on the mark.

If to Ballmer, open source is a slow burning cancer, then Google is a massive potentially terminal heart attack for which there is no cure but phony positive thinking.

Microsoft is getting slaughtered in the search space and Ballmer knows it. Yet his only response (read excuse) is that Microsoft at present a light weight punching above its weight until it builds its size and strength to the point where it will eventually dunk over Google.

Well if Google is the search heavyweight (12 year old) and Microsoft is the lightweight (3 year old), what exactly has the world's largest software company been doing for the past 13 years since the Web was invented? Living in denial.

For instance, Ballmer essentially dismissed Google's online delivery model of office productivity applications as being too lightweight to compete with the desktop bound Microsoft Office. That may be true enough for now but it sounds terribly like a company that has no answers and therefore prefers to live in denial.

If Microsoft really wants to be a global player in Internet search, it would have to observe the difference in its culture to that of Google. While Microsoft pretends to compete with a small division of a few hundred developers centralised in Redmond, Google has Googleplexes employing thousands of the most talented Internet software developers all over the world.

Microsoft, which successfully crushed Web pioneer Netscape out of existence in the mid-1990s, has been fiddling with the Internet for nearly all of that time and simply treading water showing that it really doesn't understand the medium. Meanwhile, Google, essentially a 21st Century company, grabbed the bull by the horns and showed Microsoft how to make money out of the Internet. If Ballmer's antics yesterday are any indication, Microsoft, despite the size of Ballmer's wallet, still doesn't understand.