Having a Ballmer

“I would love to see all open source innovation happen on top of Windows”

Ballmer: All open source dev should happen on Windows | The Register

Obviously all that flapping up and down screaming “Developers, developers, developers, developers” (see after the break) has starved Steve Ballmer of critical oxygen supply to his brain of late.

He continued with his declaration that he will buy 20 web companies over the next five years. Wired reports a budget of between $50m and $1bn according to TheRegister.

“Those will be good acquisitions, and they’re important to us,” he said. “And they’re of strategic importance.”

Ballmer: I will buy 20 web companies a year | The Register
That just screams “Well you know we’ve got 10s of thousands of developers working for us, just a shame our culture isn’t providing the flexibility to allow them to come up with interesting new ideas, so we’ll just get other people’s ideas instead”.

Adam‘s over at the CTIA Wireless conference this week and listened to a keynote from Mr Ballmer. He says:

“The first thing that came into my head as he strode out and launched into his speech was that he was one scary man. You could almost see the veins in his temples pumping as he delivered the wireless world according to Microsoft.”

Adam Bird – Where the Internet and Telecoms meet

So apart from being poles apart from the outwardly gentle Bill Gates, what is Microsoft getting from Steve Ballmer? He seems to be the embarrassing sheep of the family, who goes around speaking his mind while the rest of the company cowers waiting to see what next gem he’ll come out with.
Or is it just a diversionary tactic to make people look at Steve while Microsoft tries to work out where its going in the future? Or trying to hide from the poor take up of Vista?

I doubt for a moment that they’ll be powering the mobile revolution. Apple have opened up the iPhone for 3rd party developers and its AT&T’s biggest selling product. Adam pointed out that this iPhone success may not be mirrored over in Europe until we get 3G on it which is a fair point. Hotspots are far too expensive over here at the moment, and despite O2′s plans to allow you to use The Cloud’s hotspots for free, you’re still paying for it through your contract.
So whilst Nokia seem to be finding their feet again, Sony Ericsson keep plugging away, and Apple are muscling in on the territory, I’m not sure Windows Mobile (with its inherent bloat) will make much inroads into mobile market share.

Let’s remind ourselves of the ‘Developers Developers Developers Developers’ performance, courtesy of YouTube.