8 ms·

Steve Ballmer: Chrome And Safari Are Rounding Errors

53 points by dwynings 17y ago

sonofjanoh 17y ago
Most of the people I come in contact with don't even have the faintest idea what IE or Chrome is. They might complain that their "facebook" does not work anymore knowing nothing of the changes occurred to their browser. It's not relevant to the masses who is giving the browser. If Windows will continue to dominate the laptop/desktop market then it matters nothing if the browser comes from a different source because it is not the browser that costs. Who wouldn't protect their own market share? I don't think any startupers will welcome a new thing that takes over their business slowly. When it's on a small scale it makes up a good story when it is global it's war. Good for the consumers though.
lliiffee 17y ago
Isn't it an accepted journalistic standard of some kind to smooth out the many stutters and small grammatical mistakes everyone makes when speaking verbally? Exact, word to word transcriptions like this are actually a classic dirty trick for news organizations to try to embarrass politicians they don't like. (Ballmer does much better than most.)
- jimfl 17y ago
  TechCrunch seems to revel in the abandonment of accepted journalistic standards. Story embargoes for example.
  - jrockway 17y ago
    To be fair to TechCrunch, embargoes are a dumb idea. If you don't want people to know about something until a certain date, don't tell them until that date.
    - rbanffy 17y ago
      Embargoes allow real journalists to do better research, to make sure they understand what they are writing about and to, in general, provide higher quality information than TC would ever consider doing.
      - jrockway 17y ago
        Perhaps, but most bloggers wouldn't bother doing the research anyway. There are two kinds of news sources these days; blogs for instant facts, and real news sources (NYT, etc.) for actual thoughtful analysis. I would never expect the NYT to be first on any story, but I do expect it to be a good read. Usually my expectations are met. Anyway, TC is not journalism, it's a blog.
        ujibuip 17y ago
        There are two kinds of news sources these days; blogs for people who have personal experience of the topic, and real news sources (NYT, etc.) for reprinting press releases of those companies that don't compete with their parent media group.
      - anamax 17y ago
        > Embargoes allow real journalists to do better research That's true, but basically irrelevant because "real journalists" (by that definition) are only slightly more common than unicorns. And it's irrelevant even wrt real journalists because the significant value that they actually add is their "scoop". If readers don't care, if they're satisfied with the reprinted press-release, ....
ZeroGravitas 17y ago
"And Microsoft’s competitors are doing exactly what Microsoft is prohibited from doing – bundling an operating system and a browser." Yes, and ordinary people are allowed to step within 200 yards of schools. Other people, those tried and found guilty of certain crimes, are not. I despair that even tech journalists can't grasp the basics of what is one of the biggest tech news stories of the last twenty years.
- oneplusone 17y ago
  That is ridiculous. They got punished because they were ahead of the times, not because they were evil. What they did by bundling IE with Windows was the right strategic move. They understood that the browser was an integral piece of the experience before anybody else.
  - protomyth 17y ago
    They got punished for making deals that locked Netscape out of the market by making OEM's pay more for including competitors products.
    - leej 17y ago
      Intel gives incentives to OEMs to lock out AMD. Google pays Mozilla to lock out other search engines on Firefox start page and search bar (and it does not allow customization at install time). Apple does not allow 3rd party apps colliding with Apple produced ones on App Store. Any comments on these other monopolies' actions? Every company does the same.
      - stepherm 17y ago
        The difference is Mozilla and Apple don't have 9X% market share.
        InclinedPlane 17y ago
        And google doesn't have 9x% market share?
LogicHoleFlaw 17y ago
Wow, as much crap as my slashbot self has given Ballmer over the years, this interview really shows him having his act together.
- pohl 17y ago
  I had a similar reaction: that he really had his "talking points" together.
- flatline 17y ago
  He had some good points. The Chrome/Android split I agree with him on - not sure what Google is doing there - but I wouldn't bet on it being a long-term mistake like Ballmer is doing. He also continues touting Windows and the Windows Mobile platform. That's obvious, but what are they actually doing to innovate or compete? He just talks about attack vectors to the behemoth that is Microsoft. I still think that Ballmer just fundamentally does not "get it".
  - warfangle 17y ago
    There's probably not much "reason" behind the Chrome/Android split. It's likely that they were both once someone's 20% project, and simply bubbled up through different portions of the infrastructure.
    - jrockway 17y ago
      Google purchased Android.
      - warfangle 17y ago
        Thanks for the correction.
  - sjs 17y ago
    Despite Ballmer's attempts at FUD[1] until we see the source code we don't know that Chrome OS is entirely different from Android. They both use the Linux kernel and Chrome OS's new window manager just might be inspired by Android's window manager. Eric Schmidt himself said: > “There’s a great deal of commonality,” Schmidt said. “Eventually they may merge even closer.” http://paidcontent.org/article/419-googles-schmidt-on-chrome-android-they-may-merge-even-closer/ http://paidcontent.org/article/419-googles-schmidt-on-chrome... [1] "I think that’s a little tougher for them now because they basically tell the hardware community Android is dead, Chrome is the thing or maybe Chrome isn’t the thing. Maybe it is Android. The cacophony there is probably helpful to us in the grand scheme of things and I don’t know why they would have chosen to do it, at least the way you read the press. It probably has a lot to do with internal squabbles, but I just don’t know."
acg 17y ago
Much as I like them, you have to question whether Google are going to be smart/rich enough to flank Microsoft. Or whether they can co-exist in some of these markets in the future.
- greyman 17y ago
  My prediction is that Google will not be able to beat Microsoft, and it doesn't help that they are smart or rich. IMHO, their strategy to making OS irrelevant by having everything run from Chrome OS might not succeed in the end. Just one example: Some time ago, I wanted to become more independent from MS and store my files online, so I started to use Google Docs. It's quite usable for home use, but currently, I switched back to my old Office 2000, with the difference that my files are not only on my harddisk, but I share them on the cloud with Live Mesh. This is a some kind of foreplay for the next year, when MS will come with Office 2010 and also Online office. So MS will have both the native windows client and the online application, while Google has only the later. I really don't see how they can compete here. The danger for Google lies in the fact, that all their online assets are copy-able, and MS are slowly becoming able to achieve that.
  - stcredzero 17y ago
    But to win this fight, all Google has to do is to be better able to respond to customer needs than Microsoft. Maybe you're right, and they're going to lose. Customers stand a good chance of winning either way, though.
    - gaius 17y ago
      The difference is that the feedback loop for Microsoft for, say, Excel is that they want to sell 50,000-seat site licenses to accounting firms and will do what they need to do technologically and commercially in order to do that. As an aside, Excel becomes a superset of what other users need. The feedback loop for Google's spreadsheet is... what? Remember Google's users are not its customers, they're its product.
  - acg 17y ago
axod 17y ago
If you believe webapps are the way of the future, then the browser stats are completely different. Then IE is a rounding error. IE simply doesn't cut it with js speed/stability etc
- blub 17y ago
  Big if. Wikipedia: Netscape began to experiment with prototypes of a web-based system, known internally as "Constellation", which would allow a user to access and edit his or her files anywhere across a network no matter what computer or operating system he or she happened to be using. Industry observers confidently forecast the dawn of a new era of connected computing. The underlying operating system, it was believed, would become an unimportant consideration; future applications would run within a web browser. This was seen by Netscape as a clear opportunity to entrench Navigator at the heart of the next generation of computing, and thus gain the opportunity to expand into all manner of other software and service market.
gstar 17y ago
We have one and a half operating systems, Windows and Windows Mobile. Windows Mobile is kind of a half because it’s not entirely the same as Windows. And everyday, I say I’d love to get those two things to share more. Say, like Apple, Steve?
jws 17y ago
Has Ballmer lost a finger? For safari+chrome to be a rounding error you have to be using a single digit of precision in a number base lower than 10.
Estragon 17y ago
If their market shares are rounding errors, MS's market cap is a dropped decimal. :-)
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
fragmede 17y ago
Chrome and Safari might be rounding errors, but resources wasted on supporting 'your' browsers definitively are NOT.
makecheck 17y ago
He is focused on browser market share, when ironically that is precisely what's forced Google into this position. If IE6 wasn't a ridiculous percentage of the market, its brokenness wouldn't matter enough for another company to fix it. Google doesn't care whose browser is used, they care about a sane foundation on which to deploy web apps. Steve shouldn't sound so hurt, it's not as if the entire industry hasn't been "asking nicely" for years to have IE catch up. They can't cry now that someone has taken them by force. Steve also goes into all the wonderful things happening in IE8 and beyond. And they're irrelevant, for the same reason: IE6 is still the breaking point. Any "innovation" in IE that doesn't come in the form of a free update to IE6 that works on XP, doesn't matter.
InclinedPlane 17y ago
Ballmer is misguided on several counts: Chrome, firefox, and safari are much, much more likely to be used by the technically elite. These are the people who fix their friends' and relatives' computers, who design and build websites, who write about technology, they have the ability to influence the less sophisticated in browser choice. More importantly, browsers are free (except Opera), and in the internet age the process of changing your choice of browser is about as difficult as posting to facebook. This makes browser market share potentially highly volatile. Firefox and chrome are slowly but steadily making gains in market share, and firefox is already within striking distance of becoming the dominant browser. There is very much the potential of reaching a tipping point where the featureset of IE becomes so outdated that it no longer becomes a viable browser choice. And if we ever reach that point, and I believe we very well could given the differential in pace of development of firefox/chrome/safari vs. IE, then the entire browser marketshare arena could be turned upside down overnight. One need only to look at the growth in popularity of twitter, for example, to see how fast things can change in the modern internet world.
- Perceval 17y ago
  Opera is free for personal use. It has been since version 8.5, released in 2005.
butterfi 17y ago
If chrome and safari are rounding errors, sign me up for some of that rounding action. On my site, year to date shows IE "rounding" down by some 20%. Most of it to FF, but Safari and Chrome are both growing. Seems like only yesterday Ballmer was dismissing FF as well. I'd say Ballmer's hubris has remained steady though.
- allenbrunson 17y ago
  you can't really blame him. ballmer's primary job is to be a cheerleader for microsoft. ballmer also said that the iphone would get absolutely no market share at all. i doubt even he believed that. the practical upshot is that you can't trust high-tech ceos to tell you which way the wind is blowing.
skalpelis 17y ago
It might explain why his software is hated so much, if it routinely rounds off 5+%.
leej 17y ago
On the Ballmer side, he is such "great" at this kind of sentences that two of his greatest hits: (Google is a) deck of cards. (iphone) does not appeal to biz customers.

53 points by dwynings 17y ago

Most of the people I come in contact with don't even have the faintest idea what IE or Chrome is. They might complain that their "facebook" does not work anymore knowing nothing of the changes occurred to their browser. It's not relevant to the masses who is giving the browser. If Windows will continue to dominate the laptop/desktop market then it matters nothing if the browser comes from a different source because it is not the browser that costs. Who wouldn't protect their own market share? I don't think any startupers will welcome a new thing that takes over their business slowly. When it's on a small scale it makes up a good story when it is global it's war. Good for the consumers though.

lliiffee 17y ago

Isn't it an accepted journalistic standard of some kind to smooth out the many stutters and small grammatical mistakes everyone makes when speaking verbally? Exact, word to word transcriptions like this are actually a classic dirty trick for news organizations to try to embarrass politicians they don't like. (Ballmer does much better than most.)

jimfl 17y ago
TechCrunch seems to revel in the abandonment of accepted journalistic standards. Story embargoes for example.
- jrockway 17y ago
  To be fair to TechCrunch, embargoes are a dumb idea. If you don't want people to know about something until a certain date, don't tell them until that date.
  - rbanffy 17y ago
    Embargoes allow real journalists to do better research, to make sure they understand what they are writing about and to, in general, provide higher quality information than TC would ever consider doing.
    - jrockway 17y ago
      Perhaps, but most bloggers wouldn't bother doing the research anyway. There are two kinds of news sources these days; blogs for instant facts, and real news sources (NYT, etc.) for actual thoughtful analysis. I would never expect the NYT to be first on any story, but I do expect it to be a good read. Usually my expectations are met. Anyway, TC is not journalism, it's a blog.
      - ujibuip 17y ago
        There are two kinds of news sources these days; blogs for people who have personal experience of the topic, and real news sources (NYT, etc.) for reprinting press releases of those companies that don't compete with their parent media group.
    - anamax 17y ago
      > Embargoes allow real journalists to do better research That's true, but basically irrelevant because "real journalists" (by that definition) are only slightly more common than unicorns. And it's irrelevant even wrt real journalists because the significant value that they actually add is their "scoop". If readers don't care, if they're satisfied with the reprinted press-release, ....

ZeroGravitas 17y ago

"And Microsoft’s competitors are doing exactly what Microsoft is prohibited from doing – bundling an operating system and a browser." Yes, and ordinary people are allowed to step within 200 yards of schools. Other people, those tried and found guilty of certain crimes, are not. I despair that even tech journalists can't grasp the basics of what is one of the biggest tech news stories of the last twenty years.

oneplusone 17y ago
That is ridiculous. They got punished because they were ahead of the times, not because they were evil. What they did by bundling IE with Windows was the right strategic move. They understood that the browser was an integral piece of the experience before anybody else.
- protomyth 17y ago
  They got punished for making deals that locked Netscape out of the market by making OEM's pay more for including competitors products.
  - leej 17y ago
    Intel gives incentives to OEMs to lock out AMD. Google pays Mozilla to lock out other search engines on Firefox start page and search bar (and it does not allow customization at install time). Apple does not allow 3rd party apps colliding with Apple produced ones on App Store. Any comments on these other monopolies' actions? Every company does the same.
    - stepherm 17y ago
      The difference is Mozilla and Apple don't have 9X% market share.
      - InclinedPlane 17y ago
        And google doesn't have 9x% market share?

LogicHoleFlaw 17y ago

Wow, as much crap as my slashbot self has given Ballmer over the years, this interview really shows him having his act together.

pohl 17y ago
I had a similar reaction: that he really had his "talking points" together.
flatline 17y ago
He had some good points. The Chrome/Android split I agree with him on - not sure what Google is doing there - but I wouldn't bet on it being a long-term mistake like Ballmer is doing. He also continues touting Windows and the Windows Mobile platform. That's obvious, but what are they actually doing to innovate or compete? He just talks about attack vectors to the behemoth that is Microsoft. I still think that Ballmer just fundamentally does not "get it".
- warfangle 17y ago
  There's probably not much "reason" behind the Chrome/Android split. It's likely that they were both once someone's 20% project, and simply bubbled up through different portions of the infrastructure.
  - jrockway 17y ago
    Google purchased Android.
    - warfangle 17y ago
      Thanks for the correction.
- sjs 17y ago
  Despite Ballmer's attempts at FUD[1] until we see the source code we don't know that Chrome OS is entirely different from Android. They both use the Linux kernel and Chrome OS's new window manager just might be inspired by Android's window manager. Eric Schmidt himself said: > “There’s a great deal of commonality,” Schmidt said. “Eventually they may merge even closer.” http://paidcontent.org/article/419-googles-schmidt-on-chrome-android-they-may-merge-even-closer/ http://paidcontent.org/article/419-googles-schmidt-on-chrome... [1] "I think that’s a little tougher for them now because they basically tell the hardware community Android is dead, Chrome is the thing or maybe Chrome isn’t the thing. Maybe it is Android. The cacophony there is probably helpful to us in the grand scheme of things and I don’t know why they would have chosen to do it, at least the way you read the press. It probably has a lot to do with internal squabbles, but I just don’t know."

acg 17y ago

Much as I like them, you have to question whether Google are going to be smart/rich enough to flank Microsoft. Or whether they can co-exist in some of these markets in the future.

greyman 17y ago
My prediction is that Google will not be able to beat Microsoft, and it doesn't help that they are smart or rich. IMHO, their strategy to making OS irrelevant by having everything run from Chrome OS might not succeed in the end. Just one example: Some time ago, I wanted to become more independent from MS and store my files online, so I started to use Google Docs. It's quite usable for home use, but currently, I switched back to my old Office 2000, with the difference that my files are not only on my harddisk, but I share them on the cloud with Live Mesh. This is a some kind of foreplay for the next year, when MS will come with Office 2010 and also Online office. So MS will have both the native windows client and the online application, while Google has only the later. I really don't see how they can compete here. The danger for Google lies in the fact, that all their online assets are copy-able, and MS are slowly becoming able to achieve that.
- stcredzero 17y ago
  But to win this fight, all Google has to do is to be better able to respond to customer needs than Microsoft. Maybe you're right, and they're going to lose. Customers stand a good chance of winning either way, though.
  - gaius 17y ago
    The difference is that the feedback loop for Microsoft for, say, Excel is that they want to sell 50,000-seat site licenses to accounting firms and will do what they need to do technologically and commercially in order to do that. As an aside, Excel becomes a superset of what other users need. The feedback loop for Google's spreadsheet is... what? Remember Google's users are not its customers, they're its product.
- acg 17y ago

axod 17y ago

If you believe webapps are the way of the future, then the browser stats are completely different. Then IE is a rounding error. IE simply doesn't cut it with js speed/stability etc

blub 17y ago
Big if. Wikipedia: Netscape began to experiment with prototypes of a web-based system, known internally as "Constellation", which would allow a user to access and edit his or her files anywhere across a network no matter what computer or operating system he or she happened to be using. Industry observers confidently forecast the dawn of a new era of connected computing. The underlying operating system, it was believed, would become an unimportant consideration; future applications would run within a web browser. This was seen by Netscape as a clear opportunity to entrench Navigator at the heart of the next generation of computing, and thus gain the opportunity to expand into all manner of other software and service market.

gstar 17y ago

We have one and a half operating systems, Windows and Windows Mobile. Windows Mobile is kind of a half because it’s not entirely the same as Windows. And everyday, I say I’d love to get those two things to share more. Say, like Apple, Steve?

jws 17y ago

Has Ballmer lost a finger? For safari+chrome to be a rounding error you have to be using a single digit of precision in a number base lower than 10.

Estragon 17y ago

If their market shares are rounding errors, MS's market cap is a dropped decimal. :-)

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

fragmede 17y ago

Chrome and Safari might be rounding errors, but resources wasted on supporting 'your' browsers definitively are NOT.

makecheck 17y ago

He is focused on browser market share, when ironically that is precisely what's forced Google into this position. If IE6 wasn't a ridiculous percentage of the market, its brokenness wouldn't matter enough for another company to fix it. Google doesn't care whose browser is used, they care about a sane foundation on which to deploy web apps. Steve shouldn't sound so hurt, it's not as if the entire industry hasn't been "asking nicely" for years to have IE catch up. They can't cry now that someone has taken them by force. Steve also goes into all the wonderful things happening in IE8 and beyond. And they're irrelevant, for the same reason: IE6 is still the breaking point. Any "innovation" in IE that doesn't come in the form of a free update to IE6 that works on XP, doesn't matter.

InclinedPlane 17y ago

Ballmer is misguided on several counts: Chrome, firefox, and safari are much, much more likely to be used by the technically elite. These are the people who fix their friends' and relatives' computers, who design and build websites, who write about technology, they have the ability to influence the less sophisticated in browser choice. More importantly, browsers are free (except Opera), and in the internet age the process of changing your choice of browser is about as difficult as posting to facebook. This makes browser market share potentially highly volatile. Firefox and chrome are slowly but steadily making gains in market share, and firefox is already within striking distance of becoming the dominant browser. There is very much the potential of reaching a tipping point where the featureset of IE becomes so outdated that it no longer becomes a viable browser choice. And if we ever reach that point, and I believe we very well could given the differential in pace of development of firefox/chrome/safari vs. IE, then the entire browser marketshare arena could be turned upside down overnight. One need only to look at the growth in popularity of twitter, for example, to see how fast things can change in the modern internet world.

Perceval 17y ago
Opera is free for personal use. It has been since version 8.5, released in 2005.

butterfi 17y ago

If chrome and safari are rounding errors, sign me up for some of that rounding action. On my site, year to date shows IE "rounding" down by some 20%. Most of it to FF, but Safari and Chrome are both growing. Seems like only yesterday Ballmer was dismissing FF as well. I'd say Ballmer's hubris has remained steady though.

allenbrunson 17y ago
you can't really blame him. ballmer's primary job is to be a cheerleader for microsoft. ballmer also said that the iphone would get absolutely no market share at all. i doubt even he believed that. the practical upshot is that you can't trust high-tech ceos to tell you which way the wind is blowing.

skalpelis 17y ago

It might explain why his software is hated so much, if it routinely rounds off 5+%.

leej 17y ago

On the Ballmer side, he is such "great" at this kind of sentences that two of his greatest hits: (Google is a) deck of cards. (iphone) does not appeal to biz customers.