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Comment by aroon | Hacker News Reader

I'm amazed at how many words can come out of Ballmer's mouth without him having actually said anything...

You shouldn't be. It's quite normal. If someone recorded and then transcribed normal conversation of your's (or anyone else's), you'd be appalled at it. I know I was when mine was recorded! Someone once complimented Cary Grant by saying he wished he could be as witty and suave as Cary was on screen. Cary replied that he wished he could be, too.

There's a good reason why politicians carefully script and rehearse their remarks in advance, even the supposedly 'extemporaneous' ones.

Well compare it to the utterances from the "other Steve" (Jobs) who takes brevity to the point of terseness. Compare, for example his D8 interview with, well, anyone else's.

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.

Well put. For reference, the transcript of the D8 interview with Steve Jobs: http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/01/steve-jobs-live-from-d8/?...

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.”

Did Jobs prepare those statements? Probably. Caching is the secret to articulacy. I think the human brain is just too damn slow to come up with really good things to say on the fly. You have to know about it, think about it, talk about it. Again and again. You have to know what people will ask you.

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.

Also called the "5 Ps", Prior Preparation Prevents Poor Performance.

I also think it's because Steve Jobs thinks about that kind of stuff all the time. It's something he's genuinely interested in.

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.

Steve Jobs is both a salesman and CEO. He needs to think so much about what the company does that the answers come easy, he also is very curious and had read a lot.

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.

This is not really the same thing. Ballmer was answering a question from someone in the audience. The context and amount of preparation is certainly different. You would think he has some good clear prepared statements on a subject like the iPad and Microsoft's tablet offerings.

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