I’d almost be disappointed if there wasn’t a thematic finish.

Ballmer ’s hardball playing at the beginning and “microsofteded ”his stance to sweeten the deal to $33 later and finally gave all up, all proved that Ballmer was not a good dealmaker or negotiator and might have taken a myopic view.

Was it due to his personality or due to culture issue? Maybe both. MSFT shareholders may take a deep relief for the short while YHOO’s may take a hit. But Keep in mind, the market is to reflect a company’s long term value instead of the short eventually.

Ballmer said MSFT can go forward without YHOO. Hope he is right or he may have made a big strategic mistake by walking away as time waits for no one.

Link

There are many REAL stories from the tech people to CEO’s who will NEVER EVER trust M$ again with data, and business practices. Google, etc, only needs to get those published, but then again, those who know, know. Others know, but are just staying the course, until they get to retire soon. Change sucks. The Paradigm shift is in the middle.

When the USA starts to get serious about its IT infrastructure and place in the world, like the space race, arms race, etc, M$ will be in trouble for a while. Open source is turning sour from M$, [translate radar] something that is a viable threat to the national security of this country. Finally, some are starting to get it. You can only fool the people so long, especially when the fall is coming.
Innovation STOPPED in lots of fields and quality died from M$ and the other leaders in 2003. IDIOTS, history will mark some years, as the dark years, where USA threw its golden era into the lead era.

Many other interesting comments await, funny such a silence still evokes from the air…Then again, so found at some plants…
Only with a systematic failure of the entire USA, could a M$ be so pervasive and amazingly negligent.

IMHO Microsoft do not believe in choice. They seem to want to do *anything* to hang on to power and at the moment that means using every anti-competitive practice known to man to stop anybody competing fairly with them.

(Also an opinion) some of the more serious problems within Microsoft seemed to start when Bill Gates handed the day-to-day running of Microsoft over to Steve Ballmer. Bill is a geek and likes technology. Steve is a businessman and doesn’t seem to care about technology (except in that his business depends in it) but does care about keeping market share at all costs.

Microsoft *has* to develop and sell new versions of their operating systems, office products, databases etc not because anybody necessarily *needs* more functionality but because Microsoft need the money to survive. Microsoft Office 2000 is still good enough for the majority of workprocessing/spreadsheet tasks of many businesses but users have to upgrade both their software and hardware simply because Microsoft need them to supply the money.

Free/Open Source software as a contrast develops because that is what users want. That is why there are so many versions of Linux and BSD/Unix and why you can get a Linux that will run on:

* a tiny AVR based single board computer with 16Mb RAM
* an ARM based NAS with 32Mb RAM
* an old Pentium I laptop with 64Mb of RAM (including graphical desktop)
* modern laptop/desktop (with eye-candy to rival Vista)
* 16 processor server with SANs and 64Gb RAM

I know because I have installed/used Linux on all of the above. Microsoft has problems competing with this since their business model is stuck in the past and their operating systems (Vista, Windows CE, Embedded XP) are monolithic, lack flexibility and are more difficult to modify.

I do not doubt that many people genuinely like Vista but there will also be many others who ‘like Vista’ simply because it is all that they know. Steve Ballmer has contributed to the problem by remaining stuck in the past rather than trying to transform Microsoft into a more forward thinking and co-operative company.