Saturday, February 24, 2007

Ballmer: I Prefer the Bottom

Steve Ballmer says that he prefers the bottom. From the article:

In a meeting with corporate customers in New York last month, Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said, "Everybody in the operating system business wants to be the guy on the bottom," the software that controls the hardware. And he vowed that Microsoft, whose Windows operating systems are the main source of its corporate wealth and market power, would "compete very aggressively with VMware."

This is response to the repeated accusations that Microsoft is making it very difficult to run Vista in a virtualized environment. The MS response is that they considered virtualization a security threat. Another security threat? This gets more mileage than the Prius; if we could put security threats in our gas tanks, the energy crisis would be over.

He's right though, this is going to be a big battle, and time is going to be on his side, with the options for not upgrading to Vista already dwindling. And with MS giving away virtual PC for 'free' and VmWare profits rocketing upwards, it will be jockeying to the finish line. Let just hope it's not a race to bottom, where everyone loses. Oh wait, that's what Ballmer wants. Well Steve, if you do in fact get on the bottom, just make sure you don't roll over on your belly. You know what will happen if you do.

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