Steve Ballmer calls Apple's Mac growth a "rounding error" - Page 6

As Steven Wright once asked:

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

poor fellow ... He was born with an 8 bit processor.

I like Ballmer. He speaks his mind, he never holds back, and he's always entertaining. He's also a bit mad, but need mad people in top places, they make the world a more interesting place.

As for the Mac market share, from my point of view I can see things changing taking on my daily train ride to work. A year ago I would see lots of MacBooks and Blackberrys, now I rarely see anything but Samsung NetBooks and iPhones. Just my personal experience.

Don't try to sell features. I bought a laptop 1 year ago with gorgeous 16 inch screen (that is wider than 15 inch), multi-memory card slot, runs longer than any Macbook on a single charge, 250GB hard drive, has fingerprint login, for less than half ($730) the price of Macbook pro.

But still, unfortunately, runs ONLY windows, unlike the mac (any 1 year old model), that will run both windows or mac.

Good, as they say rocket science is not rocket science. You are still quite stupid and your lack of understanding of market and deluded opinions make you sound more like a paid Microsoft shill working for minimum wage posting shill messages on Apple news boards, who can't even afford to buy a real computer. You really sound pathetic.

And no engineer or even a programmer I know would be surprised by the term pure math (as opposed to applied math) enough to quote it. That puts in the high school drop out category. Check it out, a math department near you has a degree program in "pure math".

If that occurs, one can expect Ballmer to merely spin around and spout out of the opposite side of his mouth, "You get what you pay for!"

is the McCain campaign from the US Presidential Elections last year.

Balmer says "Apple has nicer hardware." Damning with faint praise, the same way the McCain campaign called President Obama a "Celebrity". Don't respond, denigrate. Both got a little traction, but didn't matter in in the end. It's the stab-in-the-dark against a more agile, better equipped enemy, Apple in this case.

I doubt the screen quality beats any Macbook Pro. One inch is negligible for screen size. Multi-memory card slot? I barely see a need for the SD slot on the Macbooks! What's so hard about plugging in your device that uses these cards? Also, I doubt your PC came standard with a battery life that lasts longer than the 15 inch's 7 hour battery life. 15" Pros also come with at least 250GB hard drives. Finger print log in? Once again, who cares? It's not necessary what so ever. I doubt more than 1% of the Mac community would ever need something like that.

HOWEVER! Can your PC run OSX? I don't think so. Macs can run XP, Vista, and soon, Windows 7, though I wouldn't ever. Odds are you'll spend almost half of the price difference in Virus and spyware protection during the lifespan of your computer. Can you bring your computer to the manufacturer's store to get it fixed? Probably not. When you send it out, how long will that take to fix? Probably over a month. Apple, turn around time on average is anywhere between 2 days to a week. When you call up tech support when your computer fails, who will you get? Probably someone in the Middle East. Not with Apple. I am 100% satisfied with my Macbook Pro 15". I paid 2000$ because I knew I was getting a solid product with a quality company to back it up.

And the whole rounding error is BULL. Market share IS rising, and faster than ever!

bullshit
if surfing the net is your thing or light buisness accounting you did well
I can't see your exact specs and i guess you won;t show exactly what you bought
but a 13 in MBP uni bpdy crushes your bloatware piece of crap
crushes in every way
goodluck sleeping with gates

Windows users who come to a Mac fan site in order to offer dissenting opinions are ultmately . . . TROLLS.

Simple as that.

Every time there's good news about Apple and lousy about MS (get used to that combo, people) they come flying in to feed us the same lame garbage MS has been trying to feed the industry for the past few years:

"We really don't suck that much, honest!"



They'll go away eventually. Just have to roll with it.

"I can see the Apple logos versus the PC logos. So we have more work to do, more work to do. Our share is lower in this audience than the average audience. But don't hide it. I've already counted them. I have been doing that since we started talking."

Another stupid line from ballmer.

The Microsoft motto:

"We have more work to do."

He really is just an irritating 5 year old with too much money, isn't he?

is Phalanx really the best Microsoft can do? Or is he just a troll not working for MS? I'm tired of the spec comparison PC v Mac. Specs don't matter when it takes forever to start up. Programs are sluggish or just crash. Hard resetting my ms laptops were just part of my workday (a necessary evil). Then I had to remember to run avg anti virus, spybot search and destroy, cleanup, windows defender every night. Oh, there's also that wonderful msconfig where I had to continually disable certain programs from startup (despite the fact that they had already been disabled).

Oh, then there's the awesome experience I had when windows genuine advantage warned me that I had counterfeit windows software when I bought the damn thing at best buy. Then vista came and that was the proverbial straw. I don't care if they tell me thy can sell me a pc with 10 terabytes of Ram and 1 million gazillionabytes of hard disk space that runs a 20 core. 1000.8 gigahertz processor. I'll take my poor unibody 13inch. It just works and that's all I care about.

trollswatter (great handle, by the way) said "For laptop brand reliability between 2004 and 2008, Consumer Reports rates Lenovo(IBM), Compaq, and Toshiba at 18. Dell, Gateway, and Apple at 20. HP at 21."

How do they arrive at these ratings? I'd like to see the number of hours a machine is used for before failure.

Funny, I have a PC and a Mac and *both* just work. Maybe you're doing something wrong?

This is what I've always thought. You hear about how PCs just go spectacularly wrong in this forum, and how the user has paid MILLIONS for virus software, yet my Windows PC 'just works' and I have a free antivirus installed. It's either ignorance, or trolling.

Ho hum, let's see him do this on my system.

Out of interest did you use Dell or HP laptops to do it?

Do they run on XP or Vista?

Both analysts and journalists seem to be caught in the "game" where they are just looking for easy quotes and simplistic explanations. Maybe it is a cyclical problem with the two industries or maybe its about having their own corporate overlords, but critical thinking and investigative journalism are not valued anymore.

Classic symptoms of an hyper-observant paranoid who has to be so entrenched in his own perspective to be able to speak the PR drivel without going nuts.

While I doubt win 7 will blow us away. It is fast on older hardware and who's to say they could not buy sinus acid division, acid/Vegas and come out with a free great word processor and iLife app combined with something that works with it in tangent with mobile me? They do have great touch surface hardware. All they need us something like iLife and a free word and excel program with iChat ti boot and the game changes. Probably won't happen, but if I were in charge if r&d, this is what I would ficus on while making the zine a portable mobile steaming media device.

Peace.

Totally agree.

In the case of Steve Balmer's "rounding error" comments, there seems to be one obvious fact that none of the pundits have brought up. The rounding errors started back in 2004!

After a long decline in worldwide market share the Mac bottomed out in 2003. Since then it has gained share every year, including 2009 (so far). That's nearly six years of compound rounding errors.

At the same event, other Microsoft execs were also continuing the FUD with their 'Apple tax" mantra. Coupled with spending over $300 million on advertising against Apple, this rounding error seems to be taking up an awful lot of Microsoft's time, energy and money.

Nepotism at it's best!

quite possibly. I'm not an IT person. I just need a solid word processor, internet machine, plus I dabble with photography and some video. (hardly a power user). I don't even need a MacBook pro. So, I have 3 MacBooks and an iMac (a couple of PCs, including an HTPC). I need PCs still since my immigration software (I'm an immigration lawyer) requires Internet Explorer (I run VMWare on the unibody but, it's still more convenient for me to start up a dedicated PC (especially when I'm meeting with clients in the conference room). I only run that PC (an ASUS EeePC Netbook) when I'm firing up the immigration software. With the HTPC, it runs XP and I only use it for home media stuff (including Netflix streaming). I don't really use that for internet surfing or anything else. So both my PCs now work given the very limited tasks I give them. When I needed a PC for general purposes, that's when I got screwed.

I have Windows 7 installed on my iMac with Sun Virtual Disk. Haven't played with it (no real reason to), but it seems snappier (who the hell knows)....

Steve balmer and gates and all the msft crew have never ever told the truth about anything. that mislead us with the truth
1/2 truths
and out right lies
In the post that I wrote is this possible .?
Well all of this strange actions mean something .
msft makes a ton of money from selling apple clients SW
And WINTEL scored big when apple went intel chip .
Now we can buy XP on the mac if we want. Wouldn't balmer be happy about this .?
So why does balmer attack its clients / attack apple computer ??
sohy does balmer open 6 or 7 ventures that cost billions and then ignore them ??
Except xbox .

GATES AND BALMER DOE'S THIS TO CONFUSE THE MARKET PLACE /GOV'T PEOPLE INTO THINKING THAT MSFT DOES NOT ACT LIKE A MONOPOLY .

Why would a company fumble for 12 yrs straight. MISTAKE AFTER MISTAKE. Remember longhorn ??
BECAUSE BALMER AND GATES ARE GENIUS ,THEY HAVE A MONOPOLY control on the OS and the work place SW and if they just had sat back and raked in the billion;'s in profit without expanding into side ventures then the glaring white klieg lights would show the world what they are and the strangle hold they have on certain parts of the market place,

So THEY misdirect us into these phony fake issues like the one here on AI ,
OVER 200 false posts .

You guys never heard of Daniel Ellsberg but this whole situation is a page out of the CIA play book .

9

I doubt phalanx is a MS employee/representative. I have two nieces that have worked for MS for several years in Redmond (one worked on the Vista development team). They both own multiple Macs (along with the necessary PC). My point is .... employees of MS know better. Phalanx is just a troll as you guessed.

Maybe you don't have a pre-teen, that is able to inadvertently infect your PC with spyware, etc. using a non-admin account just by playing Flash/Macromedia games on the web (because of zero day vulnerabilities in these tools and with Windows in general).

What I know I'm doing right is that we don't have any of these problems since he has to use a Mac instead of the PC.

Funny you mention that.... I have a good friend with a 10 yr old son. His son played online games on the company PC at work and got so many viruses, it shut down his whole network. He bought his son a Mac Mini for the office and when his son comes to visit , is only allowed to play online games on the Mini.

If you continue to make a shitty product like Windows.... and you fail to innovate....ie.... you're just another follower.... eventually you'll pay with lost market share and customer loyalty.

I think two brands with the highest customer loyalty (ie.... they will come back to buy one again) are Mercedes Benz and Apple..... I own both.... and will continue to for the exact reason above.

Ballmer is a TICK...... a technological parasite. I haven't read anything about Window's 7.... will be interesting to see if it blows chunks as much as Vista.... which would only be par for the course.

Bye bye MS..... Chrome OS is most likely going to make mince meat out of them.

So sad, so sad indeed,
Z

Ballmer certainly spends a lot of time talking about a supposedly insignificant competitor. I run a business, and I don't waste time talking about competitors in general, and certainly don't go on ad nauseum about unimportant ones.

Methinks Steve doth protest too much!

You nailed it.

This is one of the reasons why I think Ballmer has been so ineffective at leading the company.

ha ha
good one
took me A DAY TO GET IT

9

When Microsoft never used to even mention Apple???? This should tell you that things have changed!

Ballmer makes a good point about the difference between Apple's business model and Microsoft's business model. Given the fact that Microsoft is well settled in the corporate environment and Linux can't replace Active Directory without getting sued, they don't have a problem.

The consumers on the other hand are warming up to Apple. That is how Microsoft made its entry into the market in the 1980s. If Apple's traction with the consumers continues, it will eventually make a dent in the corporate sector. Given the migration to SAS instead of running your own data center, Apple might leap frog the traditional business model and get into one of the newer niches.

Personally, I don't want Apple to become another Microsoft.

Ugh. The next time I hear this drivel that Microsoft bailed out Apple I think I'm going to freak. What Windows fan site do you guys pick this up from?

Apple had 3+ billion in CASH at the time of the $150 million INVESTMENT.

I just wish someone would make Steve Balmer answer for how crappy Mac Office is now-a-days.

It was closer to $1.2 billion according to my research, which Apple could have burned through in a year or so, but the point is still the same. Apple was not on the verge of bankruptcy in 1997, and Microsoft's $150 million stock purchase did not save Apple. The entire package was a big PR boost, however, which was a turning point for Apple.

Great post! (Sorry this is an old reset, just working through the thread.)

Both he and, to a lesser degree, Bill are trained in "salesman speak" where logic and intellectual honesty have no home. I saw a roundtable on PBS one time where all the titans of eIndustry were on stage, including Ballmer, and Bill G. was on a big screen from some other location and the MC was asking each about proprietary software and open markets and when it got to Bill, he said how MS was this engine of choice and a force in innovation. The other CEO's barely contained their smirks and chuckles and the MC tried to hint at his incredulity with a polite version of "c'mon, man are you for real?!" but both he and Ballmer stoically ignored every non-verbal cue and sense of reason and in a reality distortion field that might humble Steve Jobs, they acted so matter of factly that the MC would have had to call each a liar to continue the conversation and he awkwardly moved on.

Not to pontificate, but this is such a problem with the way Wall Street and big business goes about their business. These guys have so deluded themselves into a form of selfrighteousness that it makes journalists and analysts who may have been more critical, simply move on and not rock the boat - thus Enron, thus AIG, thus GM ...

And all of the talking heads on the financial news stations just repeat this stuff as if reality and honesty don't matter. Of course Apple does the same thing, but it hasn't retarded the innovation of an entire industry in the way that MS has, plus it drives innovation, so we can cut it some slack.

Yeah, but an Apple dominated industry would look ALOT better than a Microsoft dominated one.

Yeah why is there so much emotion about it?