I've never met him but Ballmer does strike me as being a bit unhinged at times. The video of him jumping around the stage like an utter lunatic at some MS gathering is classic and anytime I see him mentioned ANYWHERE, that footage frames the context in which I read his quotes.
That said, he appears to be to Microsoft what James Carville is to the DNC. Microsoft's newest OS "Longhorn" is due to ship in '06 and one of the major "features" is to be a "comprehensive" Digital Rights Management scheme code-named PALLADIUM (now apparently named "Next-Generation Secure Computing Base for Windows").
One of the duties of this scheme is to provide "protection" for commercial data (read: video and audio) from the hardware level on up giving access to that data only to "trusted" hardware and software. Not trusted "users" but trusted hardware and software. Worrisome to some but a suspected boon to copyright holders is the possibility that MS and/or the copyright holder could remotely disable playback at will by determining MP3 and video players as well as optical drives and hard drives "untrustworthy" when they wish.
Enough doom and gloom about MS' DRM scheme. From what I've read, MS has promised that PALLADIUM will be opt-in but it seems pretty unlikely that content providers will ever allow high quality audio and video to legally reside on your PC without PALLADIUM as a mandatory requirement.
Ballmer's swipe at Apple and the iPod look to be the opening shots in a campaign to position MS as a more trusted distribution channel than Apple who obviously have the upper hand insofar as portable MP3 players is concerned. I have heard no rumors of MS launching an iPod competitor but pure speculation on my part tells me that there may be a future where Apple's iPod could be put on that "Not Trusted" hardware list in the future. MS has done similar things in the past by crippling third party software...could they be telegraphing such a move now by courting squeamish record labels and Hollywood with a warm and shiny thing called PALLADIUM?
Could they also be looking to cripple iTunes, Napster and other "Pay for Play" services or are they taking a verbally hard-line now looking to negotiate themselves into the revenue stream as a softer fallback?
Ballmer is the type that gives bald, egotistical, maniacs a bad name.
How can you call this 'unhinged'?
http://www.tarmo.fi/arc/monkeydance.mpeg
Screw you, Steve. You're just upset that iTunes and iPod are starting to erode the image of Microsoft as a computer OS.
Your forecast sounds quite plausible, though it seems it would entail a very risky MS strategy of aggravating it's consumer base in order to appease the media corporations.
"My 12-year-old at home doesn’t want to hear that he can’t put all the music that he wants in all of the places that he would like it," he joked.Your 12-year-old is more market-savvy than you are, you bald, shrieking ape.
Hmm..wonder what they think of the rest of us guys who are smart enough to get our tunes from Usenet? :)
If iPod users are theives, what does that make Microsoft that pretty much stole every original idea out there....just ask Netscape!
I have, over a significant period of time, converted many of my LEGALLY PURCHASED CD's to ".mp3" format to keep on my computer. If I own an iPod and load those tunes, that makes me a thief/pirate? I don't think so.
Let's also take a look at the Microsoft DRM scheme - that is extremely easy to break. How is the MS scheme any more protective than any other? It's not.
I am wondering just how Mr. Balmer knows this.
All the music on my iPod (11 GB and growing) is my property, either purchased from the iTunes website, or from compact discs that I legally ripped for my own use.
These people are getting nuts about this kind of thing. Before long, we won't be able to enjoy any interesting gadget without being taxed to death for the sake of protecting people from "stealing" music.
For instance, my business buys all the software it can afford. We don't steal software, but however nice a feature a new piece of software provides - it goes unused and untested by us. I will bet that the total entertainment budget of 8-22 year olds, who I would guess do most of the music file swapping, is also pretty much fixed, as it was when I grew up.
When I grew up, a lot of groups got free advertising and publicity because we swapped recordings of records around. Some of those groups, out of nostalgia, we have bought on CD as we got older. At no time could they have charged us at the time for the "value" of the music they produced.
In fact, part of the value of a record in the marketplace was that you could make a couple of copies and share it with your friends and they made a couple of copies of something else and shared it with you. If the technology had existed to prevent any copies, the net result might not have been 3 sales in place of 1 sale, but NO sales in place of one sale. Regardless, total sales among my friends could not have gone up because we spent all the money we had.
Use Windows to stay pure.
I'm a big Microsoft fan but such a move would have me buying an Apple computer just so that I can continue using my iPod and iTunes. This would be a PR disaster for Microsoft of the highest order, especially considering that millions of Windows users already own iPods and millions more will by the time Longhorn is released in 2006 (or 2007).
Meanwhile, no one in the music industry can whine anymore about iPods and illegal downloads eroding sales. Here's why:
U.S. album sales up 5.8 percent in first nine months of 2004
Um, isn't Microsoft an investor in Apple?
Methinks he protests too much.
I've been a huge Microsoft supporter over the years, but the idiocy (not to mention bad products) coming out of Redmond lately is getting too much to handle. I own an iPod and ever bit of data on there is legally owned by me.