Ballmer Hits 10th Anniversary As Microsoft CEO 185
bednarz writes "Ten years ago on Jan. 13, 2000, Microsoft's Bill Gates turned over the CEO reins to Steve Ballmer. Back in 2000, Microsoft was still under threat of being broken up by the Department of Justice. Today, Ballmer is trying to meld enterprise and cloud computing. He has spent the past decade working through lawsuits, mergers, acquisitions, competitive battles and, of course, new software including Windows 7, which could become the legacy of his leadership at Microsoft. Not that we'll ever forget Ballmer's 'developers, developers, developers' rant."
but..... (Score:5, Funny)
Did they mention his important work in the field of chairodynamics?
or
How about his charitable donations of 288,000 pints of human sweat?
Re:but..... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:but..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Funny how Vista is oddly missing in that list of achivements. But then again, there are times when a hole in your CV is preferable to being truthful.
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"Achievements" has a positive connotation, so it's no surprise that bad things aren't on there.
Re:but..... (Score:5, Funny)
You misspelled chairitable.
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Did inflation get so out of control that he has to throw cherrytables now to make the news?
Re:but..... (Score:4, Interesting)
Did they mention his important work in the field of chairodynamics?
Some things speak for themselves.
Microsoft's revenues, $56 billion.
Its profit margin 24%. Debt $6 billion, cash-on-hand $33 billion. MSFT Key Statistics [yahoo.com]
Re:but..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Does anyone have numbers to compare from 10 years ago?
Revenue should scale up with inflation and standard growth. I'm particularly curious about profit margin, and market share.
In this past decade Microsoft lost market share, presided over the Xbox's massive hardware failures, and the massive failure of Windows mobile. IE went from utterly dominating (95% plus) market share to having less than 50% market share in some areas. Most people expect Firefox to overtake the majority of market share in all markets. Microsoft has also lost market share in search, got blasted by the EU, and had to back-pedal on several key strategies.
All those things go on his resume.
Microsoft also has to look where the future takes them.
A linux netbook with a random distro without many packages, and no big brand name behind it may not set the world on fire. But when Best Buy starts selling Chrome OS netbooks with a big Google brand on it, Microsoft will start shitting themselves.
Google has a lot of pieces they've yet to put together, but when they do, Microsoft's business model in several markets may suddenly shrivel and dissapear. Microsoft won't disappear overnight because they're diversified, but a company can rule a specific market one day, and then disappear the next if they're not careful.
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Unless things change severely, I doubt much will really happen.
When netbooks first came out, salespeople were warning that they didn't run Windows and you can't expect your applications to run on it. (I got the whole diatribe trying to buy my Acer netbook with Linu
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In this past decade Microsoft lost market share
OS Platform Stats W3 Schools [w3schools.com]
Mar 2003 Linux 2% OSX 2%
Dec 2009 Linux 4% OSX 6%
Jan 2009 Win 7 0% OSX 6%
Dec 2009 Win 7 9% OSX 6%
Vista and Win 7 combined hold a 25% share in the December W3Schools stats. That ought to silence the geek who insists on calling Win 7 a "Service Pack."
But when Best Buy starts selling Chrome OS netbooks with a big Google brand on it, Microsoft will start shitting themselves.
Microsoft and the big box retailers have had a mutually profit
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Your numbers show that Microsoft went from 96% market share to 90% market share. All that does is prove my point.
They're losing market share.
When Firefox was at 10% market share and slowly chipping away, people scoffed at it and said, "well, IE still has 90% market share, so who cares about the trend?"
How did that turn out?
Again, Google has deals with tons of major vendors and retailers. Currently the cheap PC market is all Windows. When Google suddenly dominates the cheap netbook market with a Linux varian
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Every year, retail stores sell less, and online retailers sell more.
Best Buy online lists 35 Windows netbooks.
TigerDirect 112 new Win 7 laptops.
Walmart.com 24 Windows netbooks, 66 Windows laptops [some overlap here] and 30 Windows desktops.
Dell can't hide a $50 Microsoft tax in a $250 netbook as easily.
"The Microsoft Tax" is the goofiest idea to emerge from the geek mind:
By the time product reaches the shelves you save next to nothing on Linux.
That's the sad truth behind the geek's pursuit of the elusive
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Still annoyed that the 2.88MB floppy didn't catch on, eh?
Was it only me (Score:5, Funny)
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Was it just me who read the headline "Ballmer Hits..." and my mind automatically filled in with " ...XXX With A Chair" ?
Hey, WTF? I've never heard of this. What the hell does Balmer have against porn? Jerk.
Re:Was it only me (Score:4, Informative)
He threw a chair at an employee that decided to go to google. Allegedly.
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What's the story on this chair thing I keep seeing referenced?
Check it out [theregister.co.uk] yourself.
The other day (Score:4, Insightful)
I saw one of those annoying pop up ads saying that Bill Gates would pay you x amount of dollars to do Data Entry for Microsoft from home.
I just kind of sighed and went "Really? REALLY?"
He hasn't been the CEO of Microsoft for a decade now. Ask all of the people you know "Who runs Microsoft" and I am willing to bet a fair share of those not in the computer industry will still say Bill Gates.
Chairs??? (Score:3, Funny)
Not that we'll ever forget Ballmer's 'developers, developers, developers' rant."
Or flying chairs.
Re:Chairs??? (Score:5, Interesting)
Or flying chairs.
After Bill Gates resigned, many of the Microsoft middle managers came up to Steve Ballmer's office to talk about all the problems they had under Gates. Sensing the opportunity for change, nearly all of them said, at some point, "I simply won't stand for this anymore". Ballmer just got tired of this after a while and decided to manage more efficiently.
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That's cos Bill didn't have the physical strength to lift and throw a chair being the penultimate geek.
One must wonder though if even before Ballmer took over he had a penchant for throwing chairs, even at chief Bill. Certainly Bill had mad chair evasion skills:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxaCOHT0pmI [youtube.com]
I wonder if this is why Microsoft has a history of buggy software? Because rather than managing properly Bill and Ballmer spent half their time in the office playing dodgeball with chairs or something?
One question (Score:2)
That's cos Bill didn't have the physical strength to lift and throw a chair being the penultimate geek.
If Gates was the penultimate [wikipedia.org] geek, I want to know who was the ultimate geek, and what does that make me?
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People often say "penultimate" when they mean "consummate [merriam-webster.com]".
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It should be obvious to any other geek who the ultimate geek is. Woz of course.
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It should be obvious to any other geek who the ultimate geek is. Woz of course.
Not only that, the Woz can dance [sheknows.com]!
Oh, wait...
Re:Chairs??? (Score:5, Funny)
Even when he will eventually resign, he will still be remembered as the chairman of Microsoft. Now THAT's a legacy!
Re:Chairs??? (Score:5, Funny)
That's true. Slashdot has modded up jokes about flying chairs every day for the last five years.
"He threw a chair at it!"
HAHAHAHA HO HO HO HO HEEE HEE HEE HEE HEE.
Come on, he's a Friend of Linux... (Score:5, Informative)
...NOT. According to him [wikipedia.org], it's
" a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.
It must fly in the face of every business practice he's come up with.
Icon Change? (Score:2)
Does that mean the Microsoft icon changes to a Borg Ballmer?
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The "ballster [fakesteve.net]" picture is my favourite.
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We tried, but he kept shorting the equipment we install in his armpits.
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Does that mean the Microsoft icon changes to a Borg Ballmer?
It means that the geek's recycled jokes from a decade back are still worth a cheap mod-up.
The sun rises. The sun sets.
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Does that mean the Microsoft icon changes to a Borg Ballmer?
Dear god no. Borg Bill looks funny, Borg Ballmer would scare away children and adults alike.
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Slashdot? Change an icon?
What strange parallel reality are you posting from where that happens?
10 years of change (Score:2)
Vista and 7 changed the playfield. Apple came along with OS X, and Windows started to compete for home users market share, and somewhere on the line pretty much forgot the business users. The OS is no longer clearly aimed for business users.
Vista was a disaster pret
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During these 10 years, there's been change in the target audience of Windows.
Older versions of windows were designed specifically for office use.
Windows 2000 and XP did not change this line and were still clearly aimed for business users.
So please explain Windows 95, 98, 98SE, and ME? Those are all HOME OSs. No really separate user directories, no granular file permissions, and really weak security. NOT something for office use, although I have seen them used in offices.
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9x/ME were half-assed attempt to create multitasking window manager designed pre-internet era( Gates actually was dreaming of something internet-like, but microsoft controlled network, MSN). But their legacy still lives as parts of the original gui concept are still part of almost every OS today.
Today there's only different versions of the home-oriented OS. Calling OS enterprise and actually not having it behave like a different prod
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The reason you saw many many offices use the 9x line is simply because they were much cheaper compared to the NT line. A lot of places had tens or hundreds of 95/98 workstations and a few NT/2000 servers.
Re:10 years of change (Score:5, Insightful)
Vista and 7 changed the playfield. Apple came along with OS X, and Windows started to compete for home users market share, and somewhere on the line pretty much forgot the business users. The OS is no longer clearly aimed for business users.
Oh yeah, I remember clearly when they threw away Active Directory, File Sharing, Smart-card Authentication, Shadow Copy and all of those other business-class features that were just slowing home users down. Or... maybe you're smoking crack.
You can't just say things, you have to actually justify them. What makes you say that Windows no longer has a business focus? Please cite specific examples.
Vista was a disaster pretty much every way you look at it,
Not my way of looking at it. I call it, "rational human being who doesn't make decisions based on Slashdot or hype." I'm not going to say that Vista is the best product ever, but it's not even close to Microsoft's worst OS.
Part of the problem is the overly simplifying things and forcing old reliable tree-browsing into libraries.
I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. I suspect you also do not.
Library-like browsing is fine, if you want to watch photographs or browse mp3 collections at home, but it doesn't really work for corporate cases.
What is "library-like browsing?" Why doesn't it work for corporate cases? (You also can't just pull terms out of your ass and use them as if everybody else knows exactly what you mean.)
Fileservers are easier to use if you can logically follow the treeview.
What exactly is Vista or Windows 7 doing to prevent you from logically following the treeview?
Is your entire complaint centered around the fact that you've never bothered to check "Navigation Pane" from the Organize menu in an Explorer window? I hope that's not the case, because you'd end up looking like a real idiot.
(yes 7 has treeview too, but it sucks compared to old xp model)
Sucks how? Again, you have to actually justify statements like this... you can't just spout crap out of your noisehole and expect me to take it seriously.
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I'm glad I'm not the only one that dislikes the Libraries and lack of proper tree-view on my work PC.
It seems to me .... (Score:2, Insightful)
It seems to me he's just slowly, gently, running Microsoft into the ground. He's not a horrible failure, but there seems to be a complete lack of inspiration and mojo.
Has Microsoft had any major hits since 2000? Like, real killer apps or disruptive new technologies?
Re:It seems to me .... (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft, like many huge businesses, is much like an oil tanker. They keep running for a long, long time even with the engine off. You don't even notice a change when the engines are turned off, they lose speed so gradually that you only notice it when you concentrate on it. Unless you're standing right next to the engines and see that they're not moving, and in that case, especially if it's your fault that they're off, you better keep your mouth shut about it, do your best to fix it and give the captain a thumbs-up every time he bothers to show up and see if everything is allright.
Ballmer is currently frantically trying to fix those engines and give a thumbs-up to the shareholders, even though he doesn't know jack about the engines and also has no idea what tools to use.
Re:It seems to me .... (Score:5, Funny)
he doesn't know jack about the engines and also has no idea what tools to use.
When all you have is a chair, all your problems look like developers.
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Photosynth is pretty cool, but of course it didn't come from "in-house," nor is it a commercial product.
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Some people will argue that taking share away from Sony was a "win".
The other creepy Steve (Score:3, Interesting)
I've seen "people I'd like to have a beer with" lists that some people make.
I wouldn't even want to ride an elevator with Steve Ballmer. He seems like a real prick.
My campus office used to be adjacent to the Business School at my institution, before they built a shiny new building for the b-school, and I used to have lunch in the cafeteria that was in their basement. I used to observe a lot of the over-amped business students that had similar grating mannerisms as Ballmer. Smelling of cheap cologne and flop-sweat, they were part obnoxious frat-boy, part desperate grasper, and part arrogant sociopath.
That's what I think of Steve Ballmer.
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You said: He seems like a real prick.
Steve Said, "... The bone doesn't fall out of our mouth... we keep working and working and working and working and coming and coming and coming and coming".
He wants to embrace, extend, and squirt into every market.
Study item:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7Klczu14tE [youtube.com]
Man, I really love -- (Score:2)
-- Steve in his retro "Toxic Pit Stains" look.
Hawt.
Two brothers where born... (Score:2)
...I think the other one was Kevin Spacey
10 Years of Wasted Stockholder Value (Score:2, Insightful)
http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:MSFT [google.com]
Even if you take into account that 10 years ago was the height of the tech bubble, it is amazing how much money Microsoft has wasted trying to get into new markets without any appreciation to its stock price.
All that Zune R&D money should have been given out directly to stockholders so they could have done something useful with it.
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Apple has never been innovative in the first to market sense. They look at what others are doing, and do the same thing in a package people actually want to buy. The iPod was not the first MP3 player. The iPhone was most certainly not the first cellphone/smartphone. And yet, both of those products are considered the standard in those markets. The same could have been said about the Macintosh in its heyday.
If the Apple tablet exists, it may or may not be a
The wrong ceo (Score:2, Insightful)
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Under his reins Microsoft scrambled for MBAs
Link? I found the MS page for MBA recruitment but is there a story directly linking Ballmer with the drive for MBAs?
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And they wouldn't realize that if it wasn't for Ballmer ?
I say Ballmer did what he could to avoid it. He killed Netscape. He fucked up Windows by integrating a web browser in it. People we so pissed about it they would buy utilities to remove it (98lite). He did succeed for many years. What happened then was inevitable. But give the guy proper credit.
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Netscape was already dead 10 years ago. If you remember back that far, their amazing new feature in Sept 1999 was the shop button. The ability to load pages containing javascript without crashing was yet to come.
Credit for what exactly? (Score:2)
You claim he did fine because he delayed in the inevitable. A good CEO would have avoided the inevitable. It is like saying the captain of the Titanic was good because he got so far before sinking. Sorry, a good captain would have avoided the icebergs altogether.
MS has in many ways been playing catchup and using delay tactics. Fine, but that is something a crap ceo does because he can't do any better. A good CEO would have made everyone WANT to use IE and make it the best browser around. It isn't hard. ALL
Let me be the first to wish him (Score:2)
And what a stunning job he's done! (Score:2)
Compare their stock price to the common indices. He's done significantly worse than the S&P and Dow, and barely eked out a little better than the NASDAQ.
Now THAT'S innovation.
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you're being too kind.
msft has dropped 45% in the last 10 years.
goog and aapl (microsofts own self-stated competitors) are up 500% or more over the same time period.
ballmer's performance as a ceo is a miserable failure, so to speak.
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Awesome, thanks. I dug a little harder and was able to get nasdaq give me what I wanted:
http://www.nasdaq.com/aspx/chartingbasics.aspx?intraday=off&timeframe=10y&charttype=ohlc&splits=off&earnings=off&movingaverage=None&lowerstudy=volume&comparison=on&index=&drilldown=off&symbol=GOOG&symbol=AAPL&symbol=MSFT&selected=MSFT [nasdaq.com]
Developers Developers Developers (Score:2)
Just remember that there was a crowd cheering Ballmer.
I have no problem with Ballmer's enthusiasm; I can act like Ballmer anyday when I am happy. But people cheer me for acting like a clown ?
Those childlike morons clapping their hands represent what I resent in Microsoft fans: unquestioning devotion.
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Just remember that there was a crowd cheering Ballmer.
Well, you know the reason they were so enthusiastic, don't you? Because if they weren't, they'd be fired [youtube.com].
Seriously though, stories about Ballmer show that he's nothing but a giant bully [businessinsider.com]. Managers like that ensure that their most talented people move to better companies, leaving the company with nothing but the borderline-incompetent who have nowhere else to go. It's not hard to imagine that the people who would be in that audience would play along to prevent being targetted by the bully with the securit
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!!! Unbelievable!
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I think you just described Apple fans too.. and they're far more numerous. :)
Simply looking at their marketshare (global one, please...) makes the last part highly unlikely.
it *is* the developers, stupid. (Score:2)
I am principally a developer in *nix. But...as a concept, his developers rant was actually and a correct view.
Know thine enemy.
Good Grief! (Score:2)
Has Microsoft been rudderless and uninspired/uninspiring for 10 years already?
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George Bush already owns the rights to that phrase.
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The best part: it wasn't even a decade, just 8 years, so the phrase "decade of failure" is yet more fail.
Of course, it did feel at least a couple of years longer than it actually was.
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It's a base-2 decade.
move along.
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So it's a debicade, then?
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Precisely
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No, it's an octal decade.
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I was going for a bit-to-byte joke there... I obviously missed.
Re:Also titled (Score:5, Funny)
I hate it when you liberals are always so negative. Why can't you rephrase it to make it sound positive. Like, "say what you want about GWB, but you have to give him that: He accomplished a decade of failure in just 8 years."
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That's the best you've got? "I know you are, but what am I"?
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Yeah, what a complete moron.
Re:Moron (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only gained, but kept, for a full decade, without any media speculation of "who will succeed him?" his CEO job. There's a large number of major corporations that rotate through CEOs every 3-7 years, and even right now, even though he's secured another 3 year contract, the media is already asking who NBC's current CEO will be. Not to mention the big three automakers in the last year, along with many major banks. Balmer's done some pretty dumb, boneheaded stuff in his decade at Microsoft, but nobody in the media has ever honestly questioned his ability to run Microsoft in ten years; a rare feat for such a high profile company.
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You can be a moron and still be successful. For reference, see politics.
Granted, it's rarer in areas where you are chosen not for your looks or your ability to kiss baby asses but for your (alleged) knowledge and where you're (allegedly) accountable for your blunders, but it works here too!
For reference, see banks.
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Ballmer may have many faults, but that's one thing I'd never accuse him of!
Re:Moron (Score:4, Insightful)
To be a successful CEO, you simply have to be less of a moron than your shareholders (or rather, your board of directors). Given the current crew running most large corporations, that's really not that great of an accomplishment.
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To quote Monty Python: "Well nowadays a really blithering idiot can make anything up to ten thousand pounds a year - if he's the head of some big industrial combine."
A slightly more modernized version: "Well nowadays a really blithering idiot can make anything up to $100 million a year - if he's the head of some big investment bank."
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That reminds me of the following joke:
A boy goes to his dad and tells him "Dad, when I grow up I want to be a fucking loser".
The father surprised and a bit angry asks his son "Why would you want to be that?"
To what the kid answers: "Well, every time we are on the street, if you see a guy with a great car you say 'what a fucking loser'. When we see a guy with to girls you say 'look at that fucking loser' and last time we went to the supermarket and you fought with the manager you said 'I hope that fucking lo
sooooooooo (Score:3, Insightful)
because he has gained a ceo position, he cant be a moron ?
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Re:Moron (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because he got that job (from hist long-year friend und co-partner), doesn't qualify him to be _not_ a moron.
Bastard? Sociopath? Arsehole? Prick?- maybe.
Moron? I'd say no. A *moron* would have fouled it all up somehow, either not getting the job in the first place or not retaining it for the last 8 years. He didn't.
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A *moron* would have fouled it all up somehow
Have you ever _used_ Vista?
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Have you ever _used_ Vista?
Has anyone?
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Re:Moron (Score:4, Funny)
Have you ever _used_ Vista?
Has anyone?
What else should I run my Windows ME emulator on?
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Not me. I waited for Mojave to come out.
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It was a pane in the glass.
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Have you ever _used_ Vista?
Is that even possible? I thought that that OS was ran by a computer instead of the other way around. I somehow needed to buy a new computer to run the OS.
Hello... earth to you people; an OS is there to run a computer. If it can't run a 3 year old Dell business desktop (Pentium D with an Intel onboard GPU) you know there's something wrong with it....
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O RLY? And how do you explain this guy's [wikipedia.org] job performance? I agree that Balmer is certainly not a moron, but keeping that kind of job for 8 years doesn't prove it.
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Re:Moron (Score:4, Insightful)
From a tech CEO perspective: yes. For everything else; no.
Don't confuse business with technology. The only reason that Microsoft is even in business today is because most people are morons when it comes to anything remotely logical and technical... But that also doesn't mean that most people are morons.
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The alternative being excessive compensation for those who /are/ talented? Not that the alternative, "to each according to his need," has ever been practised on a huge scale: even the so-called communist countries paid more to those whose skillset would also likely gain them more in capitalist countries.
Re:Ballmer must *love* developers (Score:5, Informative)
After all, VB6 couldn't be automatically upgraded to VB.net. .Net. VB.Net is essentially just an alternate syntax of C#, plus optional parameter support.
That's because just about every detail of how VB6 worked was a consequence of either how older MS Basics going back to 1975 had worked (the bizarre boolean rules) or how COM works. The different memory model alone would make it nearly impossible to automatically upgrade projects directly, and is why Office (still COM) Automation still doesn't work well under
Neither C# nor VB.net forms projects can be automatically upgraded to ASP.net
You mean automatically converting WinForms projects? How could that possibly work? WebForms already denies the basic properties of the web way too much.
Yes, we're all enjoying the benefits of that wonderful CIL. It's just provided the folks on the ground *so* many benefits like, um, er...
Real inheritance.
Collections other than arrays and "Collection".
Fewer arbitrary "you can't combine these features because we didn't think of that" restrictions.
Better performance without the COM reference-counting overhead.
Much better string performance if you learn how to use it.
Worthwhile built-in libraries.
Dynamic form controls without invisible "control array" seeds.
Initial values in variable declarations.
Not so much of this kinda thing: "Left(Upper(LTrim(RTrim(txtStuff))), Len(LTrim(RTrim(txtStuff)))-1)".
XCopy installation.
Console app support.
IDE tooltips showing any expression's current value.
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