Ballmer is a managering guy
It's candid in the "everybody knew already" sort of way to hear him wish to've put out exciting and new products that everybody wants. Thing is, they never have, never could, and likely never will.
It's always been noticing something elsewhere and then buying it outright (even DOS), aping it, promising the world a vapourware version and then scramble to catch up, and so on. The most amazing thing is not that people keep on buying that crap, but that they did once in the first place. That's some amazing marketing.
Though they never really deliver anything but chairs to the other side of the room. I recall a comment by a microsoftee that he still hoped and believed, clearly against all hope and evidence, that staying put at micros~1 was still the best way to help improve the world. In this day and age. That's some amazing internal marketing.
But it doesn't get translated into good products. What you get is crappy products that are extremely hard to /not/ buy, thus a sort of tax on the computer you buy, and you have to keep on coming back because, well. You don't really, if you had the skills to convert files and make an alternative work for you. You often enough don't get a choice due to corporate policies that assume you don't have the skills and therefore cannot be asked to even try. It's this big complex of interlocking stupidity that keeps you pinned down.
I broke out of it long ago and can only look back with pity, but that doesn't make it less real to those of us who're still stuck. Say what you will but the thing is that even "office" computing has not become easier over the last decade or two. Fancier, more featureful, ever more connected (vba, anyone?), but not in fact easier. And that "easy" part, that "intuitive" lie, is what micros~1 keeps on promising the world, and never delivers. What do you mean, "improving the world"? What /have/ you done for us lately, hm?
In that respect even this transcript is painfully bare of substance. The most important message is that micros~1, despite the enormous sack of cash and huge number of supposedly the best and brightest employees in the industry, just cannot come up with truly new things by and of itself. It cannot innovate. It cannot deliver things people really want. It's the big corporation that couldn't.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
