Who do you know that loves Microsoft? Surely there are plenty of detractors and proponents of the Windows maker. Who loves Microsoft so much that reality is truly distorted? Guess. Bill Gates? I think you’d be wrong.

The public hasn’t heard much from Bill Gates in the past two years, but we’ve heard plenty from his CEO successor.

Microsoft’s head honcho, Steve Ballmer, is the ultimate cheerleader, despite the company’s ongoing woes. Woes? What could possibly be wrong with a company that has so much money, is so profitable, and has such a huge market share?

Good question. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide use Microsoft’s products; from Windows to servers to developer tools to game boxes, and now music players. Do Microsoft’s customers carry the same passion and loyalty for the company’s products as Apple? That’s another good question.

On the surface, I’d argue an unqualified “no” but if we add up all those worldwide who swear by Microsoft’s products, the numer may likely exceed all those who love Apple, the Mac, the iPod. See the problem? Success has different definitions.

Microsoft decided to counter Apple’s success in the portable music field with the no-quite-so-popular Zune; available in white, black, and brown.

It can’t be that the company needs the money. It can’t be that the company needs even more bad press (the Zune has gathered plenty in just weeks).

So, why does Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer smile so much? Why does he seem so supremely confident in public interviews? Good question.

Maybe it’s easier to smile when you’re richer than God, and few men on the planet are richer than Steve Ballmer.

ZDNet has an online interview with Ballmer regarding Windows Vista, the Zune player, and Microsoft in general. Ballmer’s answers to ZDNet questions do not indicate a Microsoft struggling to re-define itself.

There’s the usual talk of resources, development, blah, blah, blah. Page 3 of the interview gets down to the nitty gritty. Apple. iPod. iPhone.

Parts of the interview make it sound as if Microsoft sees a bigger market in cell phones than in PCs.

“Let’s say the PC market is roughly 200 million units these days, and let’s say the PC market goes great guns over the next several years and grows 14 percent or 15 percent a year. Those are big numbers. You go great guns, China booms. You get maybe over 400 million in a few years. The cell phone market is already a billion units a year, and the truth of the matter is that what I’ll call “smart devices,” as a percentage, the total is rising dramatically.”

So, there’s a market opportunity for Microsoft that dwarfs that of portable music players. Cell phones. Microsoft is already there. Apple is not.

Does Ballmer think Apple can repeat iPod success in other markets? Does he think Microsoft can take on a resurging market leader in portable music? Will there be a Zune “halo effect?”

“Well, sure. I can’t say there is, yet. Eventually, there needs to be, will be. But we’ve got to get out and establish Zune. We think we have a great initial proposition, and we’re happy with the initial response. But we don’t fool ourselves. There’s a guy who’s got a lot of share, and we’re coming later in the day. Things boomed on the back of the iPod, so we have our work cut out.”

Hmmm. What’s wrong with this picture? Ballmer’s responses appear to be pragmatic, straightforward, reasonable. So, why is this man smiling?

Want to really get under Balmer’s skin? Just mention the rise of Linux and how M$ is losing ground. I’ve read some articles where Balmer would just go bat sh*t crazy at the mere mention of Linux. Balmer is clueless. Throw that on top of other unflattering adjectives such as uncharismatic and you have someone who clearly is the anti-Jobs.

First of all let me say that I seem to be chasing Kacy all over these boards, and it is getting quite amusing. I’m the more eastern one, so I should be posting first, darnit!

OK, on to other matters. I read the Ballmer interview (skimmed, read, grabbed the lowlights, whatever), though I slowed down for page three. His comments about Apple were, much to my surprise, reasonably respectful. You know, for Ballmer. (It just struck me, but does it bother anyone else to think that the person who has to prep that man’s corpse is an embalmer? Now, that’s an unfortunate pairing.) In his comments about the iPhone, I detected a whiff of what I’ll call “fear.” He really seemed to be pushing the niche market angle, playing up how Apple won’t grab hold because it will not commodify its products (like those commodity iPod devices called the, um, iPod.) It’s southern-cheeks-on-hands blabbing to me, and he may not be so pleased with the outcome.

Better still, he’s boasting about how he can sell things to the Chinese as the Chinese are pirating his stuff and his company is considering pulling out of China. And this is how his numbers look good? While I do not feel the individual employees are inherently evil (or the company, for that matter), Ballmer has assumed the mantle as Dark Overlord, if I may be permitted to mix titles so, without the charm than made fictional characters such as Dante’s most famous forked-tongued smooth talker and Saddam Hussein so appealing to some.

Steve Ballmer may be rich but hes one FUGLY person… he needs to use his money on some plastic surgery.

So if there is a Zune “Halo” does that mean that Vista will fail as miserably?  I work with a guy that ran out and bought a brown Zune as soon as it came out, and now he’s really sorry he did.

Ballmer isn’t my favorite person, but he’s not a stupid man and he has a few aces up his sleeve. What Jobs & Co have coming will only be known after MWSF in a couple of weeks and maybe not even then. Apple sometimes has ‘Special Events’. Also watch to see what Apple has at the CES.

Microsoft has one thing that Apple does not that could seriously bite them on the backside below the belt-line- a full ecosystem of operating systems that scale from embedded to PDA/Smartphone to UMPC (small form handheld) to tablet, to client to server and they all work very well together. That is a great deal of power in the marketplace.

With X-Box and Zune they have their foot in (unprofitably) the gaming and mobile media markets, with MSN they control a major IM protocol and web family and have managed to get their media technology included in HDV formats. They also control the most widely used productivity suite in the world- Office and make sure it’s full power is only available on their OS. No other company has that depth, breadth and reach. More power.

He knows that the future of a great deal of computing is going to migrate to Thin Client setups, handheld tablet devices and smart-phones. Guess who the only company in the world is that has the software in place to support these technologies. Fighting Microsoft across the board is like playing whack-a-mole and even as Apple has gotten up off of the floor with OS X, MS has been widening it’s OS platforms and the Office franchise with acquisitions and development.

If Apple ever seriously wants to compete in the big leagues of enterprise they are going to have to come up with an embedded OS, a tablet/hanheld OS, a thin client OS and a smart-phone PDA OS. I would also suggest they get busy with their FileMaker sub and develop a serious Office Suite or begin to work with the Open Office Crowd. An Apple dependent upon Microsoft in any way will always be playing catch up- no matter how innovative they are.

Software drives hardware sales and MS has all the critical areas covered while Apple has only a Client and Server OS.

That is why Steve Ballmer is smiling. He knows OS X is killing Desktop Linux and other UNIX. He also knows a secretive and closed Apple OS will never appeal to OEM’s needing to build proprietary software to run on computers shipped with their high $ equipment. The consumer market is another matter.

Actually, Hardware sold software, if you think about it. In the past, MS licenses dictated that DELL and others include a copy of Windows on every chunk of PC Hardware leaving their factories. Consumers weren’t given a choice.

This was the brute power of MS in the early days. And a huge part of their success.

But MS is not able to weld that power in every market they enter. Plays-for-sure, the MS music store, the Zune… failed or failing. Even in gaming consoles, MS has lost billions of dollars and still hasn’t achieved dominance.

The emperor, it turns out, is wearing merely a thong. And it’s a tight one. That’s why he’s smiling.

Balmer in a thong? Now thats some right handed material that will definatly help me get through those lonely nights…

bugsnw - 10 December 2006 09:23 AM

Actually, Hardware sold software, if you think about it..

You do not buy a Mac or a Windows PC to run the OS. You buy the computer to run applications software. When the apps require greater horsepower, you buy new hardware.

NoPCZone - 10 December 2006 01:47 PM

bugsnw - 10 December 2006 09:23 AM

Actually, Hardware sold software, if you think about it..

You do not buy a Mac or a Windows PC to run the OS. You buy the computer to run applications software. When the apps require greater horsepower, you buy new hardware.

Too tell you the truth I bought a Mac because I was tired of XP and the hassles that came along with it and wanted something different and I like how reliable OS X is.

bugsnw - 10 December 2006 04:23 AM
Actually, Hardware sold software, if you think about it..

You do not buy a Mac or a Windows PC to run the OS. You buy the computer to run applications software. When the apps require greater horsepower, you buy new hardware.

The point is, you don’t have a choice. With the manufacturer of every PC stuck with MS’s illegal licensing program, that meant every PC coming out of factories the world over had Windows installed, whether you wanted it or not. That is, unless you bought an Apple.

MS doesn’t make any $ selling hardware. But that old license agreement is where they obtained their power. They didn’t have to compete with other OSes for space on New PC Hard Drives. That’s why Ballmer is smiling. It was the deal of the century for MS! Even though they ran afould of the law and parts of that license were later removed or altered, the damage (or reward, from their perspective) had already been done.

There’s been dozens of OSes over the years that offered plenty of software for what the majority of people do on a computer. But the one that was in their face, a PC loaded with Windows, won out the vast majority of time. Most buy what they see when they walk into Best Buy.

http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=3762910

http://news.com.com/2100-1040-943955.html

http://www.linspire.com/lindows_seagate.php

http://www.alvio.com/config.aspx?t=&product_ID=317883

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-Details.asp?EdpNo=1511696&sku=N52-3038

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060108-5928.html

Plenty of non-ms choices for anyone who takes a minute or two to shop around.

Of course there is always my favorite choice… http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore