How Steve Ballmer told me what to do with my iPad
markwilson.co.uk
markwilson.co.uk
The (fledgling) start up I'm working on is built on .NET. I'm a BizSpark member and my 9 to 5s have all been in .NET shops. My senior project in college was written on .NET which led me to contracting at Microsoft for a while while I finished my degree. And while I was there I was continually impressed by the quality of the people I interacted with and how dedicated and passionate they were to and about their technologies.
I can talk all day about what I like and what I don't like about specific technologies they put out but my comment today isn't on the quality of their products. It is on Steve Ballmer's atrocious presentation skills.
The way this man talks is like a marketeer in that doesn't really "get" technology and dances around the technical aspects with marketing speak and hand waving. He cannot afford to continue to deny that his competitors are beating the shit out of them in a number of markets that they oh-so-badly want to participate in but just cannot execute in for one reason or another. And beyond that, in 2010, when your CEO competition is Zuckerberg, Jobs, and Schmidt, you really really can't afford to not really get technology.
Microsoft if you're out there, if you're listening to me, please for the love of the gigantic, rich, strong community that surrounds your company and technologies, please PLEASE eject Steve Ballmer. He's been slowly sinking the ship for 10 years (yes, it is mostly his doing) and you can't keep this up.
And everyone at WWDC can laugh all the way to the bank every time Apple sells another million iPads.
The customers have spoken. Is denial really Ballmer's best option at this point?
Momentum takes a while to reverse.
Here is an article talking about market share http://annasoft.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/report-ios-driving-...
and here is one which doesn't mention mobile: http://www.statowl.com/operating_system_market_share_trend.p...
Mac users were always defending the boutique, specialist, quality over quantity arguments on the desktop and then suddenly it was all a numbers game for a while there.
The truth is, that the kind of people who say things like that are the kind of people who look for opportunities to argue about that kind of stuff and your statement reads like you have a clear bias. That's not a very objective perspective to my mind.
-sent from my iPad
-sent from my Amiga
Ballmer here is claiming that nobody wants the iPad form factor. That's just patently false and you only need to point to sales numbers to show that.
Me, I carry a (non tablet) thinkpad x60s running Linux. it gets maybe 4 or 5 hours on the extended battery, and I carry one extended battery and two (half the charge) regular batteries. (I'm a big guy and the thinkpad x series is small, so the extra weight doesn't really bother me. It's still lighter than my girl's giant T series laptop w/ extended battery. That thing is heavy.) Also, the thing is cheap enough that I don't get too bothered at the idea of it getting destroyed.
Ballmer talking shit about the iPhone - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=So7qrFO_p44
Its going to be very satisfying to watch them eventually realize they've been left behind.
Actually, this is a really good point. In 1985 Microsoft was Facebook and Microsoft continued to be Facebook-y 'till, what, 2002?
There's a good reason why politicians carefully script and rehearse their remarks in advance, even the supposedly 'extemporaneous' ones.
Ballmer is a disaster for Microsoft and living proof of why you should have a product guy (not a business wonk) in charge of a technology company.
Selected quotes:
[On competing with Google] “We want to make better products then them. What I love about the marketplace is that we do our products, we tell people about them, and if they like them, we get to come to work tomorrow. It's not like that in enterprise... the people who make those decisions are sometimes confused.”
“We never saw ourselves in a platform war with MSFT, and maybe that's why we lost.”
[On tablets replacing laptops] “I'm trying to think of a good analogy. When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy.”
I think that even if you are a bad public speaker you can compensate with good preparation. You can fine tune and cache your answers. It’s hard work but it pays off.
If you ask me a difficult and deep question about a topic I think about all the time, I'll probably come up with a nice and concise answer.
I really think a good CEO is someone envisioning the future all the time. That's what makes the difference. Once you know where you should go, execution comes naturally.
I thought I was a bad writer(in other language, not English) until one day I won a contest,over 400people without effort, I just loved the topic so much words flew as a torrent, faster that I could write it down.
He(Steve) loves to be on the spotlight, and show them how fantastic is what they have done.
Sounds like this guy's real problem is battery life (and, to a lesser extent, slow resume from sleep), not keyboard vs. no keyboard. The iPad gets 16 hours or whatever in part because it has a 9.7 inch screen compared to his laptops 15 inches or so. My netbook with a 10.5 inch screen gets 8 real hours of battery life.
So yes, keyboardlessness is good insofar as it enables you to have a tiny screen (since a tiny screen with a usable size keyboard would be awkward). But I only use my netbook 6 or less hours a day, so for me I easily trade the difference between 8 and 16 hours for a real keyboard. As battery life gets better, that will make sense for more people, unless keyboardless entry starts making big progress (which is possible). But even then, I'd still rather have a larger screen and $200.
(and, to a lesser extent, slow resume from sleep)
That's no small thing. Not only does this change the usability of the machine tremendously, it has quite a big bearing on battery life. In fact, battery life is directly affected by how it is used.
The iPad can be used in a way which is fairly close to how one would use a notepad. You click the "sleep/standby" button and off you go. The netbook/laptop is a workstation and so wants to soak up all of your attention for some interval of time.
Also, I bet that that $200 advantage is going to disappear in short order.
I'm not saying it's a small thing. This isn't a netbook vs. iPad argument. I'm saying the resume-from-sleep speed has to do with good Apple engineering, not the keyboardless form factor (which is what the OP was defending).
That strikes me as a lot of redundancy. So, I see Balmer's point when he said, "I think we can make life a little simpler for people, if we do the right job."
Yes, I would have to agree.
Indeed, Balmer's use of the conditional, "if we do the right job," might signify he has made similar observations, and perhaps be taken as evidence that Balmer is not cut from the same cloth as some other CEO's.
It's more of a fluff sentimental piece about a guy operating multiple gadgets while not sitting down comfortably.
I used to really debate whether or not I needed my computer when I left the house, but now I tend to not think about it (3.5 pounds is pretty negligible, where 5.5 was verging on uncomfortable to shoulder), and I need to worry a lot less about preserving battery power than I used to. In that respect, I definitely see the argument for the iPad in his situation (though it's still apples to oranges), but if what he really wants is a long battery life and portability, there are pretty viable options out there that are still full-fledged computers.
So wait... Will there be Big Buttons?
Aside from that, it feels like He's focusing on this one area of UX design. I hope this doesn't forecast an imbalance in the experience of the finished product.
It reminds me a little of Web 2.0:
"Web 2.0 is shiny and rounded, and when people say `shiny and rounded' they really mean `shiny and rounded buttons.'"
At least, I hope he is. This is Ballmer, after all.
This seems like a very telling phrase. If they partner with someone to build a great tablet device, running a great Windows OS, they won't need to encourage development for it - the demand will be obvious.
The article has him saying "Media Center is Big Buttons", as if media center could solve their problems. I want to give them points for trying, but really the needs of an interface that's ten feet away and controlled with a remote are vastly different than one at your fingertips. Yes, they both need to be bigger in certain ways. But the similarity mostly stops there.
I hate to keep dragging out the Steve Jobs quote, but I really can't think of a better way to put it. "Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
I read a transcipt of Ballmers public speaking before and I was then also shocked by the poor quality of it.