Microsoft On the Offensive
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | March 16, 2007 | Share This
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Just a week and a half after Microsoft’s legal team ripped into the Google Book program, CEO Steve Ballmer delivered another battle cry speech to business school grad students at Stanford University. Calling Google’s plan to double in number “insane”, Ballmer said,
“Google built one very good business. They only have one thing they do. Everything else is sort of cute. We do a lot of things that are cute, too. I’ll tell you about our robotics effort, for example, but that’s not paying for me to come down to Stanford.”
Ballmer also criticized Google’s organizational model, their rapid growth, and impeding stagnation.
In the meantime, Microsoft is stepping up their PR efforts to reinforce their position in search. Today LiveSide wrote about the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Global Summit,
“Consistently we heard that Microsoft at all levels are committed to win…They’ve realized that the first wave of Windows Live was a little rocky, but they’re learning from it for wave 2…Microsoft is going back to basics. Ideas are going to be well developed inside the company before pushing them out to the public, where confusion can become rampant as we’ve seen. There’s going to be a clear distinction between what’s a Windows Live product and what’s an MSN product, as well as what’s a beta product or a technical review product.”
Robert Scoble had a slightly different take on the event,
“Microsoft executives are bragging to MVPs that “we’re in it to win.” I don’t think Microsoft is. The words are empty. Microsoft’s Internet execution sucks (on whole). Its search sucks. Its advertising sucks. If that’s “in it to win” then I don’t get it…Microsoft: stop the talk. Ship a better search, a better advertising system than Google, a better hosting service than Amazon, a better cross-platform Web development ecosystem than Adobe, and get some services out there that are innovative (where’s the video RSS reader? Blog search? Something like Yahoo’s Pipes? A real blog service? A way to look up people?) That’s how you win.”
Incidentally, Ballmer told the Stanford students that Microsoft’s greatest threat was not coming from Google, Yahoo, Adobe or Amazon - but from the open source and advertising-based social media sites of the world.
Topics: Microsoft |