Comments

• Chips B. Malroy

  2009-12-21 17:01:06

  Quote: "Ballmer is a lot more benign than Gates based on the court’s evidence." --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  
  Totally agree. Ballmer is just the apprentice, the real heavy thinking, planning (evilness) is still done by the Master, who still pulls most of the puppet's strings. At heart, Ballmer is only a salesman, and more like a shoddy used car salesman without morals, willing to say, or do almost anything to make the sale.
  
  Ask yourself what would make Gates come back to replace sweaty B? It would have to be a falling out between the two, IMO. Such as Ozzie being forced out, coupled with the declining fortunes of MS under the partial helm of Ballmer. Under Gates, I would expect M$ to act mostly the same, but nastier. The only real reason for Gates leaving in the first place was court cases, Antitrust worries, etc. If he comes back to run the day to day activities at MS, he will have to deal with the courts as well. Assay is probably correct in one thing, in that only Gates can come back to replace Ballmer, there is nobody else with enough votes to be able to replace him.
  
  As far as Free Software in general, we would be better off with Ballmer.

• Roy Schestowitz

  2009-12-21 18:17:11

  We would be better off if Ballmer became the CEO of Apple and drove away all their customers overnight. /sarcasm

• Yuhong Bao

  2009-12-22 02:02:08

  I think it would be a good opportunity to finally fix MS properly, and I agree that Gates is not a good choice for that. Remember when IBM was evil? Eventually they reformed though and is much better now, but not before they unfortunately inadvertently helped MS gained a monopoly. The sad thing that there was an alternative (DR), but talks with DR failed, and it is not because Gary went on an airplane, because there was Dorothy Kildall, who was pissed off during the talks, partly because of the problems in the NDA from IBM, such as the fact that it was unequal. Part of the problem is that I heard Kildall was an idealist, and Gates was an aggressive businessman, which was part of what made MS so evil.

• Roy Schestowitz

  2009-12-22 02:13:15

  He still is an "aggressive businessman" as you put it, but he hides behind a sweater and a smile (for the cameras).

• Yuhong Bao

  2009-12-22 02:48:53

  Not my point though, my point is that it helped MS win the IBM PC deal, but it helped MS to become evil too.

• Roy Schestowitz

  2009-12-22 02:55:19

  ...but it helped MS to become evil too.

  
  
  Microsoft was quite unethical before that. Consider how they 'stole' code and ideas. Also remember how Gates got started with computers.

• Yuhong Bao

  2009-12-22 02:53:35

  "He still is an “aggressive businessman” as you put it, but he hides behind a sweater and a smile (for the cameras)." Gates is not the only example, there are others too (like Mackey, I think), many from corps far less evil than MS, I would not call it hiding.

• Roy Schestowitz

  2009-12-22 02:57:10

  What I mean to say is, some people hardly hide their inner nature (Ballmer comes to mind as the example here).

• Yuhong Bao

  2009-12-22 04:32:46

  Yea, I read about Ballmer saying that "GPL is a cancer", for example.

• Yuhong Bao

  2009-12-22 04:33:31

  It is also called "business causal".

• Roy Schestowitz

  2009-12-22 09:12:55

  Yes, his remarks about the GPL are one example. Yesterday I posted the "Ballmer laughs at iPhone" video as another example.

• uberVU - social comments

  2009-12-22 02:55:20

  Social comments and analytics for this post...
  
  This post was mentioned on Twitter by schestowitz: Gates Successor May Leave, #SteveBallmer Expected to be Kicked Out Too http://boycottnovell.com/2009/12/21/ray-ozzie-rumors/...

• williami

  2009-12-22 05:42:50

  From what I've noticed, M$ seems to be going the way of Enron, which is going nowhere fast, and laying off and killing products like crazy. If this keeps up (and I hope it does), bam, bankrupt M$.

• Roy Schestowitz

  2009-12-22 09:14:52

  They have a similar problem to Novell. Their cash cows are dying away slowly.

• williami

  2009-12-23 01:18:24

  Roy, after hearing all of this news about Micro$oft shrinking and Novell bleeding to death, I think the M$-Novell deal was bad juju to both companies. And that's really good news for the free software community, as the dissaperance of a major competor is very good news.