back to article Ballmer will not appear at Apple conference

Update: Microsoft says that Steve Ballmer will not be appearing at Apple's WWDC Conference. "Steve Ballmer not speaking at Apple Dev Conf. Nor appearing on Dancing with the Stars. Nor riding in the Belmont. Just FYI," the company said in a post to Twitter. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will take a seven-minute segment of Steve …

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  1. Herer
    WTF?

    Mario and Sonic working together was the sign of this coming

    Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!

    Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes...

    The dead rising from the grave!

    .. dogs and cats.. living together...

  2. richard 69
    Jobs Halo

    you're pulling my plonker...

    your argument makes sense but it's the sight of monkey boy ballmer on stage that would be bad for apple. having the huge mug of silly billy up there all those years ago was bad enough, but apple were in the shit then....

    i just think, although it makes sense and google is now THE threat, it would be a bad publicity image to have monkey boy on apple's stage.

    1. Curtis Crowson
      Happy

      I completely agree

      look what having Balmer on stage has done for Microsoft. So wait maybe Jobs is going for contrast, show the dumbest CEO on earth (Balmer) and Jobs will look even more intelligent and thoughtful.

    2. amehaye

      You missed the point

      Now that the ads are stashed, they are going to do the 'I'm a Mac, I'm a PC' gig live on stage.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Welcome

    Enemy of my enemy...

    Clever moves in an ever escalating Great Googleplexor Wars of the 21st century.

    Just think all those developers of visual studio trained and ready to go... the eco system is about to grow from being pimordial bacteria in to a larger life form.

    When do we expect the Apple search engine to come along hmmm???

  4. Lou Gosselin

    Two wrongs don't make a right

    I can't deny apple has been successful with it's business model, but it is very sad that they had to do it with such a closed model. I doubt they want to change it now, unless they're feeling some pressure from washington.

    "What better for Apple to stress its 'openness' by not only allowing third-parties to create iPhone OS development tools but for the first of them to be the old enemy - a company that now has a smaller market capitalisation than its arch-rival?"

    Reminds me of the old expression, see title.

  5. Doc Spock

    OK, but...

    I can buy the thesis that Jobs is trying to mitigate any antitrust complaints and also to piss in Adobe's cornflakes, but there's one thing that doesn't sit right:

    Microsoft are about to release their own shiny new phone OS, and desperately need as many developers as possible to write software for it. Why would they want to make it easier for such developers - many of whom presumably use MS Visual Studio - to write software for their main rival in the smartphone space?

    On the other hand, maybe Ballmer realises that getting existing iPhone developers to use Visual Studio instead of XCode makes it more likely that they will write W7Phone apps too?

    Either way, I hope the rumour is true.

  6. Ruud Noorhoff 1

    maybe

    WWDC focus is mobile, iPod, iPhone, iPad.

    Apple will abandon the desktop, it has in fact already stopped making Mac Pro's, iMacs, and OSX.

    MacBooks already run Windows just fine.

    Apple will change its name to Apple mobile Devices Inc.

    Developers for Apple's devices need to have somewhere to go: MicroSoft.

  7. albsure

    damn...

    I'd be absolutely shocked if this happened but after thinking about it, it would actually make sense.

    The amount of extra money Apple gets from developers buying a mac just to develop iphone apps must be minimal. The reality is Apple mac sales come from people who are either design based or consumers who just use software. Allowing windows users to develop for iphone/ipad is a win win for Apple and MS. It will accelerate app development on the platform and really f*ck with google.

    For MS it's going to be a weird concession to make. Realistically, MS is saying we have no hope of producing a competing ipad like device in the forseeable future so we might as well partner Apple on this. It will also signal a departure from MS's strategy of "finger in every pie" to "lets just eat well" and have them focusing on the core businesses.

    As much as Xbox is popular etc.. what has it done for them? They make a bit of money now but lost billions doing it. I dont think Apple have the appetite for that again. Apple have shown that you can grow a company without losing money in the short/medium term. If MS never made anything other than Office + Windows stuff they would probably have more dough and be more profitable. Thats the reality.

    Now if MS used with webkit for ie9 and Apple used bing as default search I think google would be petrified... The message would be "dont fu*k with Steve Jobs, you have no idea how far he will go to destroy you"..

  8. DZ-Jay

    Why?

    Why does it have to be some sort of Machiavellian conspiracy? Was there ever written somewhere that *nobody* was allowed to use anything but X Code to write iPhone applications? As far as I know, that was the only environment available, so it was just an assumption that many made that it was not possible to use anything else. And we're talking developer tools that build native applications and use the frameworks provided by Apple, not bespoke frameworks and runtime libraries from third-parties.

    It seems obvious to me that there was a void in the market, and Microsoft--the other major integrated developer tools provider--jumped in to get a piece of the pie. Has any other tools provider tried this?

    -dZ.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    £59 not to build an app

    The fee is so you can get the app onto the App Store. You can download the SDK for free.

  10. Kebabster
    Thumb Down

    Costs...

    It'll soon stop developers moaning about the £59 AppStore entry fee. Have you seen the cost of a Visual Studio 2010 development license (£700+)? You could very nearly buy an entire Mac for that money AND you get XCode thrown in.

    Perhaps MS should spend time improving their native C++ support in Visual Studio rather than wasting it trying to support 2 new OS's...

  11. TeeCee Gold badge
    Coat

    I hope they've got plenty of bogs.

    7 minutes isn't a long time for an entire developer conference to get up and go for a slash in.

  12. dave 93
    Thumb Up

    There's news, and there's NEWS

    "a company that now has a smaller market capitalisation than its arch-rival?"

    Apple is now the world's biggest technology company.

    Don't you think this deserves a story all to itself, no matter how much crow El Reg has to eat?

    A significant bit you don't mention is that with Visual Studio available as an IDE for iThings, it is much easier to create apps for jail broken devices without infringing the EULA that comes with Apple's SDK. Anti-trust will more than likely force Apple to allow users to install apps from outside the AppStore eventually

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hmmm... Silverlight?

    Could this be a move to kill Adobe/Flash with an adoption of Silverlight? H.264 et al?

    I can't quite see how this fits with Windows Mobile 7... would either Apple or Microsoft really be happy with a write-once approach for apps on WM7 & iPhone?

    But it would make sense on other fronts and with public comments coming from both parties recently.

  14. Curtis Crowson
    Happy

    gritting lorries

    Translate to US English: Snow Plows/sand salt trucks (Freezing in Hell). I know it says co.uk at the end. So I am not complaining that I don't always understand the references. I just Google this stuff.

    Of course thinking that "Piggly Wiggly" was a fake US grocery chain was comic payback (Relatively big supermarket chain based of course in Alabama, their convenience stores were called Hoggly Woggly. I swear, you can't make this stuff up.)

  15. David Kelly 2

    .Net?

    The whole purpose of Microsoft's Visual Studio Suite seems to be to generate .Net code (which is not native Intel), as at least that is the default in VS 2008 Express. Seems to be equally as evil as FLASH.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Erm

      .NET executes as native code and can pre pre-compiled to native code not to mention it still supports C++.

      1. Steen Hive
        FAIL

        Erm?

        ".NET executes as native code and can pre pre-compiled to native code not to mention it still supports C++"

        Of course it executes as "native code" - no cpu can execute "non-native code".

        The humungous byte-code interpreter and .NET runtime are neither here nor there, I suppose.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Flame

      Utter Rot

      .Net is managed code. Like Java is Managed code.

      Managed code is the cornerstone of enterprise computing for the simple fact it mitigates much of the risk of writing large scale applications. e.g. let Microsoft worry about security - it's a moving target anyway. Managed code, also abstracts you away from the device - essential in a world where devices are being replaced and upgraded just as fast as software.

      Flash is not managed code in the same sense as Java and .NET are.

      Managed code is not evil. Those against it simply because managed technologies do not create native code are in fact extremely stupid. The benefits of managed development technologies are too numerous to list.

      Managed technology such as .NET or Flash - is easily the best solution for the majority of mobile phone applications from a development point of view. The only exceptions would be things like realtime graphics/audio applications - and that's where Flash/Silverlight etc come in...

      So David Kelly - you are talking out of your backside....

  16. Peter 39

    other parts of the deal

    Maybe Apple gets a better position at the corporate level as their part of the deal?

  17. Ruud Noorhoff 1

    or maybe

    7 minutes for Bing.

  18. Slartybardfast
    Happy

    Get me the machine that goes - Bing!

    Got to be Bing search for the iPhone

  19. jubtastic1

    Don't you people recognise

    Linkbait when you see it?

  20. jonathanb Silver badge

    Another theory

    Elsewhere, I've seen suggestions that it is to launch Office 2011 for Mac, or maybe a Bing App for iPhone and iPad.

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Hey, Ballmer, how much is your company worth?"

    There aren't going to be enough chairs in Moscone West to deal with that particular temper tantrum

  22. Anonymous Coward
    Megaphone

    @ Steen

    You missed the point of this post:

    ".NET executes as native code and can pre pre-compiled to native code not to mention it still supports C++"

    - It is true that .Net can be pre-compiled to Native code- thus not requiring "The humungous byte-code interpreter and .NET runtime" in order for it to execute.

    Check out solutions such as Salamander.NET - which is one of the options for creating Native applications using .NET languages.

  23. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    The 2 Steve Ball Job

    is hereby the unofficial name for this alliance :-)

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Chowdry is full of shit

    http://twitter.com/Microsoft/status/14850981422

  25. Anonymous Coward
    Jobs Horns

    Never gonna happen....

    http://digioz.blogspot.com/2010/04/microsoft-visual-studio-2010-for-mac-os.html

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