05.10.11
Steve Ballmer as King of Novell
Summary: Blast from the past as Microsoft’s CEO is a speaker at Novell’s event (about 20 years ago)
BROUGHT back from the dead some days ago in YouTube was this three-part video of Steve Ballmer speaking at BrainShare [1, 2, 3]. Here is part one.
Eventually, in part thanks to Ron Hovsepian, Ballmer turned Novell into some kind of Microsoft subsidiary. █
twitter said,
May 10, 2011 at 10:21 pm
When you download the files using clive, you see that they are Windows Media. “BalmerGrainShare92Pt1wmv.xxx” where xxx is the format you chose. There is only one audio in one channel. How Novell.
The talk itself is interesting for showing where some Google envy comes from. Balmer starts the talk off with a joke about Novell’s neutrality before he gets to making big promises. In 1992, Microsoft was promising “information at your fingertips”. He wanted people to go to their PC to get answers. “I should be able to turn to my PC and pose a simple query that says, ‘show me all references to discussions with Novell in the last year,’” is the example he gives of what everyone in the industry wanted to deliver. It was about “letting PC users work together more,” and connecting to other systems. Of course, he wanted the full spectrum of media. Windows 95 was advertised as being these things but it came with no web browser. People now turn to Wikipedia and Google for the simple language query because they are neutral and don’t try to sell a “decision engine” to advertisers.
How funny it is that Microsoft fought tooth and nail against the technologies that answered everyone’s wish. Microsoft ignored the world wide web, choosing to publish a third rate encyclopedia on CDs instead. Microsoft then fought to dominate browsers but only shot themselves in the foot. Google and Wikipedia would not exist without free software is spending every dime of their monopoly rents to kill free software and everything associated with it.
Another funny thing is that the total user base for windows and dos back in 1992 was claimed to be about 100 million computers, with only 9 million being windows users. He was probably lying at the time but the internet was not around to document it yet. The funny part is that there are 23 million Fedora who have registered themselves.
OMG, he promised them that Windows 3.1 users would never suffer an “unrecoverable error” again. That’s it, after 1992 there were no blue screens of death. I have to make a clip of that.
So many broken promises. Balmer likes to talk about “open” stuff. … They never got there. They have a very different idea of “file sharing” and “network independent networking” than I do. Oh wait, they did provide Solitair while people waited for their computer to not answer their question. Ah, the “client – server” model. That was their vision and they would like to pervert the internet to be that. “X:” “Y:” and “Z:” drive that’s all your computer can see, there are not enough letters for your floppies! Split frames in file managers was a good idea, too bad they did not keep it. True Type fonts. They still play games breaking other people’s fonts, sigh. OK, it’s torture. I’ve had enough.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz Reply:
May 11th, 2011 at 2:20 am
It was not long before antitrust. Back in 2007 I posted Comes vs Microsoft exhibits about Novell.