"Microsoft is planning to spend a reported US$300 in an advertising campaign..."

The U.S. economy must truly be in the toilet then....

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Guest wrote:
"Microsoft is planning to spend a reported US$300 in an advertising campaign..."

The U.S. economy must truly be in the toilet then....

it is... it's just that the government won't admit it, nor will John McCain.

Ballmer is as clueless as his pit stains are big. I do think it will be funny to watch to see how bad he screws up being like Apple. I think it could really backfire on him and Microsoft. In trying to copy Apple, out in the open this time, they are admitting that Apple is better than Microsoft. I am sure that Ballmer cannot help adding his ideas to the plan.....that will assure that it will fail.

''our commitment to choice'' -- what a joke

http://switchtoamac.com/site/apples-endtoend-model-leads-to-innovation-and-user-experience.html

Ballmer's scared by Apple? Apple step on his toes. Google are knocking him out.

Another sign of the times? I think so. Ballmer finally acknowledges that Apple is a competitor and although he tries (rather desperately?) to play it down with the old 1-billion-flies-canʼt-be-wrong-go-eat-$#!% argumentation, he has realised that it is not only about Google.

Looking at this article from Macworld and the graph it has, might explain why:

http://www.macworld.com/article/134655/2008/07/macsales.html

If their prediction for the fourth quarter is correct and if the trend will continue, Microsoft has all reasons to begin to take Apple seriously.

I think what we see now, is the walls beginning to tremble and shake and it is only a question when the pressure will be so intense that the levee will break.

What Ballmer does not understand, is that it will take a different kind of motivation to compete with Apple. They/he are/is motivated by being competitive by all means. Innovation comes second and is just another means to stay competitive. That is why Microsoft will never become a true innovator, not as long as Ballmer is at the helm, at least.

He tries. He mentions that they are going to change the world, but I doubt that he means it. I think that attitude, too, is another means to stay at the top of the competition. He is not interested in changing the world, but Apple is, so then it is a part of his strategy - to mimick them.

So, this makes me quite confident that we are going to see some huge changes rather soon now:)

The giant is desperate and scared.

back when Bill Gates made the comment about Windows possibly not being in existence within just a few short years.

If so, it must bore into the back of his mind incessantly. He's been handed the reins of one of the major world corporations, but from the sound of that pep talk, he doesn't have any true vision of where it's going. Just some vague platitudes and a little bit of envy.

How is the experience with an Apple product "narrow"? Is it because they haven't had the experience of floundering with different partnerships & media formats with iPod/iTunes, or because you can do pretty much anything on a Mac that can be done on a PC, and in most cases better?

Obviously there are many pundits reading between the lines on this, and here are my two bits: I would trade the word "narrow" for "focused", or in other words, something M$ has not been w/ Balmer at the helm.

Could it be that Bill Gates saw the decline coming and handed Microsoft off to Ballmer just before it happened? I mean Gates has all the money he can ever want, at this point he has to be thinking about his legacy and how history will remember him. By 'retiring' when he did he protected his reputation as the man who built Microsoft, and Ballmer will get blamed for running the company into a ditch. Who knows, maybe in ten years Gates might even pull a Steve Jobs and come back to Microsoft to save it. Maybe he's just waiting for the news reports about Microsoft to start using terms like floundering, struggling and beleaguered.

MSFT had some advantages in the past that they DON'T have anymore. 1) They got a head start. DOS was on the market 3 years before the first Mac, and it was backed by IBM's business cred. 2) They could sell to french-fry-stuffing DOS nerds. IT made all the decisions, and consumers bought what they had at work so they could "borrow' office software from work for their home PC's. 3) Nobody was watching. MSFT grew big well before the antitrust people noticed. 4) MSFT thought that people would be dumb enough to ignore the fact that Windows never did the transition to UNIX (the performance and security issues Windows has are probably not going away) 5) MSFT thought the internet was a fad. They have no internet strategy. They don't have a decent browser. And "the Cloud" levels the OS playing field. 6) Apple is executing like never before. OS 9 was great in it's day, but I haven't missed it at all since OS 10.1. The new Macs; the iPods, the phones-- the only SLIGHTLY decent product MSFT has is the XBox and that's a sorry runner-up to Nintendo's Wii.

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Guest wrote:
the only SLIGHTLY decent product MSFT has is the XBox and that's a sorry runner-up to Nintendo's Wii.

Of course there is that Red Ring of Death problem with the Xbox so I think that gets disqualified as well.

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Guest wrote:
the only SLIGHTLY decent product MSFT has is the XBox

Nope, not even that--noisy, hot, and one of the highest hardware failure rates of any CE device ever.

Too little, too late, and way too much shareholder $$$s wasted.

Microsoft should have asked GM 10 years ago how hard it is to shake a reputation of shoddy products once you've acquired it. It takes a none-stop slew of near-flawless products AND the passing of the generation that suffered those shoddy products.

I mean Microsoft has already lost the current crop of teenagers and young adults. They will, as long as they live, turn their noses up on Microsoft products just like GM can't convince the current generation of Honda & Toyota buyers that GM's products are no longer as crappy as they remember. (Sadly, not 'better' or even 'equal', but a measly 'improved'.)

Apple has a very real chance of hitting 10 million Macs sold this year. The levee is about to break.

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geoduck wrote:

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Guest wrote:
the only SLIGHTLY decent product MSFT has is the XBox and that's a sorry runner-up to Nintendo's Wii.

Of course there is that Red Ring of Death problem with the Xbox so I think that gets disqualified as well.

dont get me started on that thing... i (somehow?) have never gotten the infamous rrod, but my 360 fails to properly boot about 2/3 of the time

"we at microsoft will preach security. the way we will be secure is by making your end user product a brick 2/3 of the time so it will not be able to be hacked 2/3 of the time you [try to] use it!"

my favorite "security" feature on the 360 is not being able to remove a credit card once used on the system

TRO

The loud fat man is scared.