I dont think he's short sighted at all. If he was short sighted he would be throwing out iPad competitors like Google. Instead he's working on Windows 8 which will have huge benefits over some scaled up phone OS.
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Microsoft to Acquire Skype for $8.5 Billion
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I dont think he's short sighted at all. If he was short sighted he would be throwing out iPad competitors like Google. Instead he's working on Windows 8 which will have huge benefits over some scaled up phone OS.
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo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I would. I want to be so independently wealthy that I don't care if people say mean things to me. I want to be in a position where it doesn't matter how badly I screw up, the sheer inertia of the company I'm leading plasters over my mistakes. I want to have a cadre of brilliant minds tucked away in a lab so that I can distract my critics with shiny things like Surface and WinFS to divert attention from the rot in my core business.
Rich and irrelevant. That's the life for me.
Oh, haven't you heard? Windows 8 is going to be a scaled up phone OS.
See, I can make naff jokes too.
You were joking, weren't you?
In all seriousness, Ballmer is an inarticulate buffoon. Anyone who thinks otherwise should have gone to Specsavers. I'm not throwing rocks for the sake of it - I use Windows as much as anything else, it's as important to me as OS X. I genuinely want a better Microsoft. Ballmer is an achilles heel to progress.
....and you have to click on START to stop it
I feel a ZUNE phone coming on.
Desperate move. I am always wondering why companies buy things they know nothing about.
Yes, one can learn, but if they'd spend 8.5 billion on their own developments or creativity they'd get that money back and then some.
Oh, wait ! They don't have creativity:-(
I dont like Ballmer much either, but he's not short sighted. He just isn't broad sighted.
That's dangerously close to semantics. When Apple are crucifying Microsoft, and Microsoft are failing to up the anté in return, year after year, you have to question the leadership.
Narrow focus is all well and good if you have something precious in your sights, but I'm buggered if I can figure out what Ballmer is aiming for. Windows 8 might be it, but we all heard that same argument with Windows 7, and before that, Vista. It's beginning to smell like snake oil.
Steve Jobs must be laughing his socks off that Microsoft have spent 8.5 billion dollars on a phone book (because face it, the tech isn't all that unique), where a bunch of guys in a lab came up with Facetime (yeah I cringe at the name, but hey it's there) for the price of a dozen salaries.
Apple aren't perfect of course - I don't see anyone using Facetime, they're properly failed to promote it on the desktop, and it's a mistake making it Apple-hardware-only. But it's *just* a chat program. $8.5billion. LOL.
You must be one of the few that thinks Ballmer is not short-sighted. Including many of the shareholders. But it's great for Apple if people keep Ballmer right where he is.
Windows 8, eh? It's always the "next" Windows that will perform miracles.
It didn't take miracles for Windows 7 to top OS X's marketshare about a month after its release and become Microsoft's most successful OS to date.
And you thought the Skype 5 update for Mac was a step backward...
Looking at Office for Mac, Microsoft would seem to be able to do much better than Skype 5.
Oh brother, you're stuck in the last decade. Microsoft owns the business desktop market, and they stick their OS on every PC sold even if you don't want it. It doesn't matter, though. It's telling that you cling to the one market where Apple does not compete in market share with Microsoft.
Hilarious that you tout Windows 8, and then when I question you on it you revert back to Windows 7 which evidently does not have "huge benefits over some scaled up phone OS." You can't even keep track of your own arguments.
For the rest of the world (see the stock market), Apple controls the future and Microsoft is desperately trying to catch up by overpaying for tech. Hint: Desktops are part of the LAST wave. We are in the Post-PC Era, and Microsoft has very little to compete with in this area. Thus Skype.
Hah hah. You're talking about OS X, the operating system from a company that famously was nothing ten years ago. The fact that anyone has to defend a Windows OS against an Apple OS at all speaks volumes.
And yes Apple are crucifying Microsoft. They're beating them at their own game: Making money. And in the years to come, it's only going to get worse for Microsoft unless they replace Ballmer with someone who knows how to play ball. Pun definitely not intended.
Microsoft sells software. Are they not selling their software now that Apple put out the iPad and iPhone?
You guys like to make up these fantasy scenarios where Microsoft is a direct competitor to Apple. Microsoft is far different from Apple. Apple is doing great, but it really isn't doing much to crucify Microsoft who's business is software.
Windows - OS X
iPod - Zune
iPhone - Windows phones a-plenty
Apple Store - Microsoft Store
iPad - A decade of Microsoft tablet software
Yup, all fantasy scenarios.
That's fair enough for me. Oh wait - they do compete! Nebula beat me to it.
And Ballmer's still a short sighted ass, and Skype is a waste of money.
One does have to wonder what they will do with Skype considering their own chat and xbox solutions feature text + video.
Perhaps it's the user base or some compression algorithm or some jazz like that?
And what is wrong with Messenger for Mac? I think it's great and simple..better than Skype 5
Perhaps it's the user base or some compression algorithm or some jazz like that?
And what is wrong with Messenger for Mac? I think it's great and simple..better than Skype 5
That's fair enough for me. Oh wait - they do compete! Nebula beat me to it.
And Ballmer's still a short sighted ass, and Skype is a waste of money.
They have a few competing markets, but they aren't the core business of Microsoft, meaning that they are not direct competitors. I actually don't know why Microsoft decided to make a Zune device which is the only competitor to Apple that they have done hardware+software wise.
The list was pretty bad except for Zune-iPod considering, as I said, Microsoft sells software and Apple sells bundles of software+hardware.
Ok, I'm off topic here but why do these three comments on page 1 of this thread attract so many negative marks? It's just idiotic.
Cue more negatives for me but I don't care, it's a seriously stupid addition anyway.
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I was paying attention until you mentioned hotmail.
Winni said:
I was paying attention until you mentioned hotmail.
My guess is they wanted some of the patents, the user data base and software already out in play on it. The network and ground work is in place. I am going to assume they are going to tie it into their other service and it will be pretty good.
Well lets say from Apple, Facebook, Google and MicroSoft the company that I would most want to have it Microsoft and the one I would want to least have it is Apple shortly followed by Facebook. Google is a few steps below Microsoft but there is a huge gap between Google and Facebook.
Reason Apple is on the bottom of the list is I do trust Apple to not kill the product and then limit it ONLY to apple devices and then stop anyone else. I can not think of a single thing that was multiplatform that Apple bought up and did not destroy for everything but Apple.
Facebook would not want it because they would just bloat it up and shove their damn ads down on us.
Google because they would make it a toy but they still would not destory it and bloat it up.
MS because of how they run they are pretty good at things software side and tieing things back together and lately a lot of their more bloats stuff is becoming a lot lighter and better to use. I can see MS deeper pockets doing some really good things with skype.
I wondering how many of the 8.8 million paying subscribers will cancel their subscription plan with this news.
It is true that Apple is primarily a hardware company that sells some software, while Microsoft is primarily a software company that sells some hardware. That is your point, and it's a valid point.
But they are very much competitors regardless. Microsoft controls the desktop OS market. They won. But that's the old news. The new waves are in phone and tablets. Microsoft wants to use its horizontal market approach again, where lots of hardware guys make the boxes, but they all run Microsoft software and services. Standing in their way is Google (following a similar approach to Microsoft, but free, which is hard for Microsoft to undersell) and Apple, which is taking a vertical market approach where they provide the software, hardware and services.
Wall Street cares about the future, and it's in this context that Apple and Microsoft are very much in competition.
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Really?
And what did Microsoft get in exchange?
AppleScruff1 said:
Really?
And what did Microsoft get in exchange?
I'll agree with you on that. In terms of Microsoft's business, Zune and even Windows Mobile are small fry - attempts to coin in on the latest fashion. Big mistakes, they wasted money they needn't have, and that was probably when the comparisons to Apple started kicking up, because they put themselves out there and failed. (they're doing it still with Windows Phone 7)
Microsoft's core market is it's enterprise business - and that's great because Apple aren't actively interested in it.
However Microsoft aren't pushing the envelope. We get new versions of Office, but they're not that much different to the versions before -- in some ways they're actually worse. Ballmer doesn't understand how innovation works - he waits until a technology or market is already out there and being used (Azure anyone?), and tries to clamber onto the bandwagon.
The Microsoft of old, under Bill Gates, would have been buying up all these small developers - and they weren't afraid to upset a lot of people doing it. Ballmer wants to be big and cuddly, everybody's friend. Cuddly Microsoft is standing in the shadow of empirical Apple, and Apple are very sneakily getting their goods into the pockets of executives everywhere.
Apple may not want to (openly) go to the business sector, but the business sector may unwittingly come to Apple. Mountains and prophets.
The unavoidable fact is that Apple have all the headlines, they're winning hearts, minds, sofa time and very slowly bits of office time too.
Microsoft have all the resources to be able to grab the spotlight again - and the spotlight is incredibly valuable. They just need a new leader, someone with vision, leadership skills and charisma, to take them there. Until they get that, Apple will be seen to be winning, regardless if you or I think they're in competition.