Summary: With or without a patent strategy (attack on competitors) and with or without Steve Ballmer, cash cows decline in terms of their potency and there is no easy way to replace them with other cash cows

MICROSOFT'S RESULTS will be published very soon and after several downgrades (e.g. [1, 2, 3]) the company may have to make additional cuts by cutting down (laying off) staff.

Steve Ballmer has come to the UK and Hugo from the FSFE writes about this particular article: "another brilliant picture of Steve Ballmer (at London School of Economics)"

It is amazing that such an eccentric person is allowed to run Microsoft. Here is another funny new photo which shows bizarre gestures and facial expressions. It is not a good time for Microsoft and Ballmer is well aware of it. There is this internal Microsoft document (maybe leaked) which reveals an admission from the company itself that it is having real trouble. The person who mailed us a pointer to this article chose the subject line "End days for Ballmer?" Here is a little bit from the article:

An internal document, seen by The Register, was farmed out today to Microsoft flacks at the event, which explained in stark terms what the firm needs to do in order to move away from its current identity crisis.

Many subjects were covered in this event and OpenBytes focused on some negatives, including the patent part:

Yes Ballmer, we see that with the way you sign “deals” with HTC et al in regards to alleged patent infringements. It seems the current system is working very nicely for you since it’s a way you can attempt to tackle competition, competition I may add which doesn’t produce disasters like the Kin or sends its bloggers off to a Linux powered competitor because it wants to kill off another of its services (and you can read about the Microsoft Live spaces closing here)

The Register claims that Microsoft has warned about an "identity crisis." This makes a lot of sense now that Microsoft operates more and more like SCO by just suing rivals. ⬆

"The antitrust litigation currently in the federal courts in the U.S. against Monsanto will be the test case in the life sciences, just as the Microsoft case was the test case in the information sciences."

--Jeremy Rifkin