After much anticipation ActiveWin.com was able to sit down and interview Steve Ballmer, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Microsoft. In this interview, they discuss his greatest achievements, Linux strategy, the role of MIS/CS educational programs and much more.
ActiveWin: Interview With Steve Ballmer
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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“An absolute necessity is to learn basic principles of building trustworthy systems – such as how to write secure code, and how to model potential attacks on a system so that you can anticipate them and build in resistance to those attacks.
Even I have to call WTF on this statement. Not leaving services in running by default in listening state is the absolute first rule in security, and Microsoft ignored it with windows XP up till SP2.
The shipped a _client_ operating system with several remote vulnerabilities. Microsoft should be ashamed of this mistake yet Steve thinks he is some sort of position to tell people how to write secure code??
I’ve never had a virus on windows because I am not retarded, if other operating systems were more popular I think more virus writers would target them. But leaving services in listening state on a client operating system is something that will take me a long time to forgive them for.
Ballmer: “It’s important to underscore why activation is so important. It confirms for the customer that their copy of the product is genuine – so they know the PC they purchased is legitimate and that they got what they paid for.”
Customer #1 opens up his brand new Pentium 4 from “Dall Cnomputers” and plugs it in. On closer inspection, the mother board is actually just some cardboard and the cpu is just a dorito.
“DAMN YOU DALL! Why must you sell illegitimate cnomputers!”
I call bull on Ballmer, Product Activation protects the company’s intrests. Which is a completly legitimate reason in my books. None of this ham-fisted “it’s to the benifit of the users” bullcrap.
And, not to sound bitter or anything, he completely dodges talking about Linux in the interview.
“Completely integrated software”: How to maintain a monopoly.
Please read between the lines.
The 1st photo looks like steve has dropped a few. Where’s the old loveable steve (3rd photo) that was out of breath after waving his arms around for 20 seconds ala the monkeyboy video?
Where’s the old loveable steve (3rd photo) that was out of breath after waving his arms around for 20 seconds ala the monkeyboy video?
Not forgotten, that’s for sure:
http://www.macboy.com/cartoons/ballmer/
“Completely integrated software”: How to maintain a monopoly.
Please read between the lines.
Yeah, I’m telling you, that Steve Jobs with his iLife, iPod, OSX and all that other integrated, cannibalistic stuff are truly evil. Wait. Who are we talking about?
Yeah, I’m telling you, that Steve Jobs with his iLife, iPod, OSX and all that other integrated, cannibalistic stuff are truly evil. Wait. Who are we talking about?
KDE?
you must be talking about every corporate entity in software out there…. live free!!
I don’t think he effectively answered a single question…
The best one is the question on what has Microsoft actually ‘innovated’ and all he could come up with is how much they spend on R&D ???
and I don’t think integration can be classed as anything remotely innovative.
date
The difference being is I can write an app that intergrates as much as any app can when it comes to KDE and Linux. Try that with OSX or Windows…
“Completely integrated software”: How to maintain a monopoly.
Please read between the lines.
Damn straight. If people aren’t running Linux From Scratch, they shouldn’t be using a computer.
The system seems to have eaten my previous post.
I wrote that Ballmer is beginning to sound like the Iraqi Information Minister by not giving clear answers to clear questions. Additionally, I stated that even though Microsoft’s cash will keep the company afloat for many years to come, the software industry and Microsoft itself will be very diffeent ten years dow the road.
“An absolute necessity is to learn basic principles of building trustworthy systems – such as how to write secure code, and how to model potential attacks on a system so that you can anticipate them and build in resistance to those attacks.
Even I have to call WTF on this statement. Not leaving services in running by default in listening state is the absolute first rule in security, and Microsoft ignored it with windows XP up till SP2.
Gee is it possible the guy is talking from the experience of his company having made these mistakes ?
The guy is spot on in those remarks and if thats what MS learned then good – it will do the industry some good.
I’ve always liked their site. They’re not the flashiest, but they’re consistent and informative.
But I found this interview disappointing because they let Ballmer off too easily. Questions like “why doesn’t Microsoft innovate more” aren’t tough for a seasoned CEO – that’s like asking John Kerry why he’s considered soft on defense. Those guys know how to put those questions away. And we learn that Ballmer still comes to work stoked about the possibilities of each day – well I would hope that Microsoft’s CEO feels that way!
Instead, maybe more drilling on Windows security problems – does Ballmer realize that solving this is probably more important to the average user than the entire Longhorn feature set? And topics like the API mess (Win32-COM/WinForms/WinFX) that Joel on software recently brought up.
Instead, maybe more drilling on Windows security problems – does Ballmer realize that solving this is probably more important to the average user than the entire Longhorn feature set?
No, it’s not. The average user couldn’t give a rat’s arse about security – consciously or otherwise.
:Damn straight. If people aren’t running Linux From Scratch, they shouldn’t be using a computer.:
who the hell are you to tell people what they should be running. lfs is there for a purpose.
1: Raise your left hand over your head and hold it there.
2: Raise your right hand over your head in a sinilar fashion and hold it there.
3: The next time someone makes a sarcastic comment that goes completely over your head, at least attempt to intercept it.
“Specifically, our focus is on integrated innovation, making our products and services work together and understanding how customers use technology and information to improve their lives.”
I would call that “synthesis” as in “synthesizing several independent threads of thought“, rather than “innovation“.
Not that I’m disparaging it, mind you – “synthesis” is just as innovative as “analysis” – “analysing something into its components“. It’s just that too much of Microsoft’s own synthesis of stuff, isn’t vary innovative, full stop.
What’s worse is that he talks like a politico, never answering the question.
Windows spyware, adware and viruses have reached epidemic proportions. Most people become aware of it when their browsers keep getting redirected to some crazy search site (no, not google or yahoo) and they spend more time closing popup ads than they do reading web pages. Beyond that, as you point out, they may be blissfully ignorant of viruses running on their machines, forwarding their data, mailing lists, and keystrokes to some unknown site. But they certainly notice when a big Windows virus takes down an entire department in their company for days, as it did twice where I’ve worked – for Code Red and Nimda.
Microsoft brought the H232 standard which is one of the main protocol for VOIP other than SIP. Microsoft invented DHCP protocol these are two things i can recall off my head but then again, please tell what has Apple invented or for that matter Linux too.
Also, in my views unifying all the language with one CLR aka .NET is an invention which programmers never really thought of so many years and always tried tricks like extern “<put language here>” and other hacks like that.
Microsoft has done so many small little things to make life better for average user that we wouldn’t have seen in many years. Do you ever think we would have had desktop OS so cheap and so accessible without Microsoft on the horizon.
I agree they have done bad things as a part to grow but that doesn’t mean they haven’t done anything good. They have really made PC accessible to so many users which is the biggest innovation in my eyes.
I salute Microsoft for making OS a commodity and not somehting which only high-tech people want.
Now flame me because i know many people can’t just appreciate.
someone needs to go back to school and relearn the history of computing.
Windows spyware, adware and viruses have reached epidemic proportions.
Unfortunately, the vast bulk of them aren’t spread because of security flaws, they’re spread because of deliberate user action (although generally not deliberate user intention) or software bugs (which are a separate issue to security).
But they certainly notice when a big Windows virus takes down an entire department in their company for days, as it did twice where I’ve worked – for Code Red and Nimda.
This is true, but the point is here they only care about it when it happens – they don’t care about trying to prevent it. So, features mainly concerned with prevention aren’t particularly interesting to them.
Do you ever think we would have had desktop OS so cheap and so accessible without Microsoft on the horizon.
It’s interesting that the price of hardware has gone down so far and the cost of software gone up. Which part is it that Microsoft contributes again?
I think Microsoft’s biggest ‘innovation’ was eliminating printed manuals from $300 software. Who else could have gotten away with that?
Damn straight. If people aren’t running Linux From Scratch, they shouldn’t be using a computer.
Don’t you have anything better than flamebaiting?
Was Ballmer ever a developer? He seems to talk about security as if it’s a debugger you run on your code. That’s just the feel I get from his attitude, he’s such a salesman: I don’t like salesmen (even though I am one at one job).
I guess you need to learn it before commenting. Microsoft did the initial intiative with voice conferencing which was later on taken by ITU and put up as H232 protocol. And if you think DHCP is not invented by Microsoft then i can say you are not even worth my time. What other part do you disagree?
And yeah for sure we had OS X or Solaris on x86? It was Dos and Windows that made x86 the popular choice among people and more demand cheaper hardware. Now you can say OS2 could have been there and then you would have been saying loudly that OS2 didn’t invent anything. I guess people just need a way to diss big companies. Tomorrow if Linux gets popular, i bet people will have 100 reasons to dislike it too.
On another note, I agree that most of the innovation is done by either AT&T and universities and somewhat by IBM. But Microsoft has invented less given its size but then Microsoft always focussed on making computer as easy to use and their focus was always home users and in that field they are the champions and i appreciate them for being the best in their field. And please don’t give me the bullcrap that BeOS was better or OSX rocks, because had they been so popular, then you would have said things for them what you today say for windows.
PS: English is my second language so excuse me for that.
And if you think DHCP is not invented by Microsoft then i can say you are not even worth my time. What other part do you disagree?
DHCP was developed from BOOTP which was, IIRC, invented by Sun back in the mid 80s (for their diskless terminals).
RFC 1531 is the first to define DHCP. Judging by the date (October 1993) I highly doubt Microsoft had a great deal to do with it, since they didn’t really embrace the whole TCP/IP thing for another year or two and their incumbent network protocol at the time didn’t require the functionality DHCP provides.
Don’t confuse technical innovation with business innovation.
Microsoft have innovated plenty on the business side which is why windows is where it is today, it has nothing to do with technical superiority over other OSs. I played with macs wwaaaayyyy back and they killed early versions of windows, but apple dropped the ball on how to force feed it to the world at large, which is what MS pulled off.
History is littered with technically better products (i.e. innovative) that have been destroyed by more powerful lobby groups with dodgy offerings.
“On another note, I agree that most of the innovation is done by either AT&T and universities and somewhat by IBM”
Microsoft has some of the best researchers in several areas, like digital signal processing, statistics, etc…
For example. Bishop is one of the most respected researcher in the area of graphical modeling and bayesian network :
http://research.microsoft.com/~cmbishop/
Or Malvar, one very famous researcher in sound processing (he is one of the inventor of the MDCT, which is used in most of the audio codecs I am aware of, from mp3 to ogg, for example)
http://research.microsoft.com/users/malvar/
So you can say their products are not innovative (but no product is innovative; innovative science cannot really done with a precise product goal in mind), but some of their people are doing really cool stuff.
I found Steve’s responses cluless and typical marketoid, prepared in advance stuff. After all, what the hell could a suit like him _really_ know about all those things mentioned to him by the interviewer? He uses computers less, and for fewer uses, than an average secretary or a clerk, and the only OS he’s ever used was some sort of MS Windows with a handful of MS apps (PowerPoint being the most used, I presume).
Customer #1 opens up his brand new Pentium 4 from “Dall Cnomputers” and plugs it in. On closer inspection, the mother board is actually just some cardboard and the cpu is just a dorito.
“DAMN YOU DALL! Why must you sell illegitimate cnomputers!”
LOL!!
At least you would know when you have overheating, from the burned dorito smell
This sounds like one of those cartoons at homestarrunner.com
Actually Ballmer sounds like one of those characters, a mix of StrongBad and the the king maybe.
/offtopic
dang, it was just market speak. I feel stupider for haveing read that interview. He doens’t say anything informative at all. They should’ve just interviewed a microsoft brochure.
I hate this piece of BS:
At the same time, it’s important to underscore why activation is so important. It confirms for the customer that their copy of the product is genuine – so they know the PC they purchased is legitimate and that they got what they paid for.
How stupid does he think we are?
I’ve never had a virus on windows because I am not retarded, if other operating systems were more popular I think more virus writers would target them.
Definitely, but they would be much less successful than on MICROS~1, because there are some other systems which are just designed more secure.
And yeah for sure we had OS X or Solaris on x86? It was Dos and Windows that made x86 the popular choice among people and more demand cheaper hardware.
Yes of course. Only a crappy “operating system” like DOS could push such a crappy hardware platform.
“The system seems to have eaten my previous post.”
Actually you posted that on the sharpdevelop thread!
Once again the system get’s blamed for something that’s the users fault. lol
I think Microsoft’s biggest ‘innovation’ was eliminating printed manuals from $300 software. Who else could have gotten away with that?
Dude they did one better than that. Back when it was $100 software you got the manuals.
Not only did they RAISE the price to $300 but they deep sixed the printed manuals also.
Talk about pulling one over.. damn…
Well, in Microsofts defense, they did come up with doctype switching. I think it first appeared in IE (5?) for Mac, and was quickly adopted by other browsers.
In my opinion, the interview questions are good, but Ballmers answers leave a lot to be desired. He’s vague as usual. I don’t think he’s a very technical individual, and he surely is not a coder.
One would think someone can come up with well formulated, clear and to the point answers when said person has the luxury of writing them down..
But maybe he has someone else doing these kind of interviews
I use Firefox to browse and I tend to read all my
stuff offline, usually if for whatever reason the
machine I’m at doesn’t have it, I’ll download it.
If I try saving a site in IE it’ll ocasionally tell
me no, but using Mozilla Firefox always gets around
that — not so this time! Like the subject line says,
WTF!