The gambit?

Sorry for letting the topic fall into the AFB Abyss (aka second page)

The conference with Mr Ballmer is taking place today, and I’ll be taking my camcorder with me (OT: it’s a Samsung camcorder which only has codecs for windows, but I’ll maybe find a way to convert it and make it YouTube-able…)

Question-wise, I’m going-in armed with all your suggestions, and I’ll be adapting my tone according to how the conference goes! Thanks for all the input!

I like the idea of asking “what if there hadn’t been a microsoft, where would you be (which company), where would the industry be?” but if we get into technical details, I might add a sting here or there concerning DRM, the Zune, the XBox or Vista (tough topics that can be swatted aside with a non-answer if not asked correctly)

Apparently MS has figured out that the internet is going to become important.

They are planning to get 25% of their revenue from advertising in the next few years.

[quote author=“MaCroissant”]Question-wise, I’m going-in armed with all your suggestions, and I’ll be adapting my tone according to how the conference goes! Thanks for all the input!

Hopefully you didn’t get sweat on. Oh to have been a fly on the wall! Hee hee.

Sorry for my late reply, the rest of the week was pretty busy and I had to travel to a town near London for a wedding this weekend!

but here’s finally a first summary of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Steve Ballmer’s appearance

The Good: the conference was recorded and should be surfacing on Microsoft’s website sometime soon! I’ll keep you posted, I should be able to get a link in the next days/weeks
I recorded a fair bit of the conference, if I find an easy way to edit it (currently, I only have sound when I play it through QT) I’ll upload a few excerpts, but I’d prefer to give you a link to the complete version (better sound, etc…)

The Bad: Ballmer came and went in a flash (40 minutes), thus only six questions were picked, amongst them the awful “what are you planning to do versus macintosh computers which are on the rise”.

The (very funny) & Ugly: Ballmer referred to to the widespread YouTube video (quote) “where he was a little bit too excited”

For all who have some time on their hand, here’s a full version online of the Steve Ballmer conference at the University of Sciences Po in Paris. (Real Player required unfortunately)

It’s about 40 minutes long, with the first 1/4 being informative but not a must-see (Ballmer telling grandpa stories from the 1980 & today), the other 3/4 have some general information, nothing spectacular but IMO worth a watch if you have time!

...and don’t mind the French guy brabbling at the start, he’s mostly there for your enjoyment

And here’s (via IV) a UK Q&A session with Ballmer video (13:46 complete with a guy in trilby walking around behind him) ( Betanews commentary: Microsoft Scrambling to Explain Ballmer ). It’s caused a bit of stir because Ballmer implies MS will take Linux users to court for patent infringement:

“People use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property in a sense have an obligation to eventually to compensate us”

[quote author=“MaCroissant”]For all who have some time on their hand, here’s a full version online of the Steve Ballmer conference at the University of Sciences Po in Paris. (Real Player required unfortunately)

It’s about 40 minutes long, with the first 1/4 being informative but not a must-see (Ballmer telling grandpa stories from the 1980 & today), the other 3/4 have some general information, nothing spectacular but IMO worth a watch if you have time!

...and don’t mind the French guy brabbling at the start, he’s mostly there for your enjoyment

How do you open the link to Ballmer’s video on a mac?

[quote author=“Hamourabi”]How do you open the link to Ballmer’s video on a mac?

You need to install RealPlayer, which is a miserable experience with repeated attempts to force a paid subscription on you, and to default all your content to being played by Realplayer instead of Quicktime, but it can be done. I usually start from the BBC News tech help pages, because they link you into a working starting point to download just the free Realplayer you need.

One could ask him why the Microsoft common stock (MSFT) is not keeping up with US-inflation since December 2000, or for the period of last 7 years? In addition, European long term investors have lost more than 50% on the MSFT stock as the USD has dropped more than 50% in the period. Those are back to 1997 values.

Are there any bright future outlooks for the Microsoft stock? How do you think the MSFT stock will respond to a 5% points loss of market share over the next 3 years?

Is Microsoft trying to go smaller since Microsoft has done so little to defend their market position over the last 5 years?