Steve Ballmer still clueless on how to fight Google

The fact that Google is still way ahead from his company, made Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer scratches his head in search for the answer to beat the search giant company.

But the ever-energetic and now the sole 'charismatic' leader left in Microsoft, is not completely clueless on what Microsoft should do next. "We need to do some work to fundamentally reinvent the search business model," Ballmer said during a dinner at the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley. "You don't brute-force your way into a market. You only make great strides when you redefine the category for the user." And that will take some time. "It's a five-year task," Ballmer said. But Microsoft is ready to spend a lot of money trying.

Maybe for you, that indirect statement from Steve Ballmer sounds the same old answer from CEO of a big company. But in my ears, that sounds more like this: "Yup, we're 5 years behind Google in search business. And we're gonna spend lots and lots of money, more than your monthly wage and far from how much you could possibly imagine, in that 5 years to come..." ~LOL~

When asked about smartphones, Steve Ballmer believes that Nokia, RIM & Apple will loose to him... uhmmm..., I mean Microsoft (in whole). ;-p Why? Because according to the Microsoft's CEO; those smartphone companies design their own proprietary hardware and tie it closely to their software. Nokia leads the smartphone market today with about a 30% share, he said. "If you want to reach more than that, you have to separate the hardware and software in the platform," he said.

Steve Ballmer predicts, in the end, the battle will be between the Symbian OS (which is now open source), mobile versions of Linux and Windows Mobile only. Although he then conced a horrifying fact: "Forty percent of servers run Windows, 60 percent run Linux," he said. "How are we doing? Forty is less than 60, so I don't like it. ... We have some work to do."

-- I think I heard the "hankering" Linux die-hard fanboys are screaming in happiness after knowing Steve Ballmer himself actually said that... *sigh* --

And when asked about Apple, Steve Ballmer said in great pride: "Apple's a good company, I won't take anything away from them, but they have a certain kind of strategy. They believe in putting the hardware and software together, they don't believe in letting other people make it. I'm not saying there isn't a 'threat' from Apple. But if Microsoft and its PC partners do our jobs right, there's really no reason Apple should get any footprint in the enterprise."

Yes, yes. Whatever you say Steve, whatever that pleases you and your humongous ego. Now, can we please have our PC run Mac OS X? ;-p I wonder what made him so pleasantly cute and modest, perhaps it's got to do with what they serve at the Churchil Club dinner? Read the whole interview at the Standard web page.

[blogged with my Treo 750v]