The one connective tissue is the tectonic shift in technology caused by the iPad, or as @Scobleizer pointed out, the iPhone. Though @DannySullivan and @KevinMarks insisted on extolling the virtues of the free and open Web, there’s no doubt in my mind that Apple’s (and particularly Steve Jobs’) combination of design, control of a hungry niche marketplace, and political savvy adds up to a defining moment that rolls up media, technology, consumers, and the enterprise. And instead of running plays from their own playbooks, Apple’s competitors are working to undermine or dilute the impact of iOS.

Schmidt was not so much a victim of the Apple blitzkrieg as the notion of Google inevitability, or certainly invincibility. No one event or fumble seemed to add up to a reason for the firing, but rather there was the feeling of the absence of a strategy, a game plan, a vision if you must, of how to move beyond the lock on the world’s search market. It felt like the way the pioneers must have felt when they ran out of land at the Pacific Ocean. Cut off from China, shut down by the consumer electronics manufacturers with Google TV, and facing a developer base confused by old style jousting with Apple around H.264 and HTML 5, Brin and Page decided to graduate from middle school.

Whether Brin can nail social any more than he has tried for the last few years, or Page can soften up the media against his DNA, the striking question we had was not whether the Schmidt move was too radical but rather why not do the same thing with Ballmer. As @JTaschek ticked off the definition of what a modern CEO does in the Age of Facebook and Twitter, it occurred to me that both Google and Microsoft should look toward someone who comes from the the Industry Formerly Known as the Media to turn things around. Besides, Ricky Gervais is out of work.

We hear lots about Android these days as a million tablets bloom at CES. But the world we’re hearing about is the one where Apple lives in a one-carrier model. It’s a Model T world where you can have any color as long as it’s AT&T. Every day people walk into any other carrier store and walk out with Android, because they don’t know the difference. Contrary to the pr, the Android sell to the broad market is not about Open v. Closed, or store v. market, or any of the direct feature comparisons.

That’s because the features are comparable, the experience is similar, the sell is based on stepping up to the iPhone experience whether it’s called Kleenex or Cheerios or the supermarket knock off. The knock off becomes the brand. But in doing this jujitsu, Google has created a climate where the knock off is vulnerable to attack if the rules that got them there change. Google having given the carriers a reasonably indistinguishable knock off to sell, Apple can now safely drop the exclusive wedge for disintermediating carrier profit margin havens such as tethering and IM and eventually VoIP.

Snap. Verizon offers iPhone 4. Forget the slight redesign, forget the lack of multitasking between data and voice, forget the pricing models for unlimited, tethering, and video chat over 3G. Now the store brand is competing directly with the actual iPhone. Naturally the pent-up demand by Verizon contractees will blow out the overall numbers. But much more importantly, Apple is free to ship an iPhone 5 across the board, where existing contractees can be marketed to with bundled services, i.e. the new TV, the new Enterprise, the new Office. One device, with the carriers battling for the most attractive rendering of services.

This is where we switch over to Google’s H.264 move. Faced with ship or get off the pot, Google will do whatever it needs to do to establish its platform as a unique and valuable proposition. With H.264 store brand adoption over 50%, Apple has reached the point where its Flash blockade is no longer painful to the majority of iOS users. With a broad non-exclusive base opening up, Apple is free to blow out the market unless something radical is done — destabilize the inevitability argument around Flash-is-dead by a weird combination of OpenFUD and brute force. Never mind that it tells its developers and Chrome adopters to never believe a word Google says about its motivations and reliability of partner strategy.

In effect, Google is broadening its mission statement from “What’s good for the Web is good for us” to “What’s good for the Web and bad for Apple is good for us.” At best, it’s Google water-testing VP8 to gauge its patent liabilities; at worst it’s a weak signal if they reverse course. It suggests a certain thin-skinnedness over the Verizon deal and its bandwagon implications, and underlines the alacrity of the timing (over the next two months) within which Chrome will be crippled. And the short term fix is to continue to support Flash as a way around having to download another plug in. The weird thing here is that this begins to feel like a Google version of a Silverlight play, starting with video and Chrome and then marching through the other browsers via YouTube.

Silverlight is seen by some as the reason Bob Muglia was sent packing, most likely by Steve Sinofsky consolidating power to succeed Ballmer. Muglia and Ray Ozzie were surprisingly in synch around using Silverlight as a stalking horse for embedding Windows in an uber Web OS, disagreeing (or subtly agreeing) only over the timing of the transition. While Ozzie owned the vision and strategy, Muglia owned the execution and a rising revenue base in the Servers and Tools Business. The black helicopter noise suggests Muglia was undermined by the retrenchment around Silverlight he surfaced in an interview with Mary Jo Foley, but here again Apple’s Verizon deal around iPhone 4 and a Verizon iPad threatens Microsoft much more directly by accelerating iOS and damaging both Windows Phone and the MIA Windows tablet.

Just as with Android market success, Ozzie and Muglia’s success at destabilizing private cloud margins for servers and the increasingly irrelevant and collaboration-free Office platform in order to save the company has created an Azure economy that needs to be managed by a new breed of president, or by Ballmer directly. Google has moved way past Microsoft in mobile, and now Apple is moving back out in front of both. Ironically, Ozzie leaving cut Muglia’s legs out from under him, as his P&L looks good compared to everybody else but Sinofsky’s.

In the Ozzie/Muglia era, Microsoft learned how to speak a newer language of openness and resolve to move forward into the cloud. In the Sinofsky/Ballmer era, they get to keep the cloud because they have to, and try and manage their way out of the collapse of their enterprise channel before Office is pulled out from under them. Meanwhile, a new generation of store brand social workers are using a new message bus, with Apple driving the innovation curve around a realtime set of dynamic objects. FaceTime, AirPlay, the Mac AppStore, the Twitter realtime Mac app, and so on.

Once again: Verizon capitulates on behalf of the carriers to Apple. Google, flush with having educated the market across the carriers about the superphone, suddenly shows weakness and collapse of trust messaging by trying to damage Apple via a phony open source/standards gambit. Microsoft, flush with barely being all in on the cloud, fires its cloud chief to appease the old guard’s Ballmer heir by completing the Silverlight coup, papering over its mobile collapse, and rolling back to the state Ozzie had rescued them from. iOS wins 2 out of 3 phone sales, 4 out of 5 tablets, transforms its Mac OS to the new iOS mobile AppStore, and competes head to head with Google and its old Microsoft model. Thanks, Verizon.

Again, this is speculation drawn from an off the cuff comment from a crazy man, but the basic idea is Microsoft hasn’t completely bailed on the idea of creating an Xbox designed strictly for media, ala’ AppleTV. Here’s what was actually said:

“In the case of the TV we’ve got both strategies. We actually have a TV implementation in some senses built into Windows,” Ballmer said. “It works really well for small screen TVs that you might call a PC, but for that big screen device here’s a piece of hardware that we build, there’s no diversity. You get exactly the Xboxes that we build for you. We may have more form factors in the future that are designed for various price points and options, but we think it’s going to [be] important.”

Of course, does this mean anything? Probably not, but it’s Friday afternoon on a slow news day, and we all need something to talk about right?

[Via Gearlog

As the Xbox team stated at E3 two weeks ago, we are not even halfway through the current console generation lifecycle and believe Xbox 360 will be the entertainment center in the home for long into the next decade. Project Natal will be an important part of this platform, but we have not confirmed a launch date at this time.

“Apple gained about one point, but now I think the tide has really turned back the other direction,” Ballmer said, via webcast. “The economy is helpful. Paying an extra $500 for a computer in this environment — same piece of hardware — paying $500 more to get a logo on it? I think that’s a more challenging proposition for the average person than it used to be.”

via TechFlash

And now, the end is near;
And so Apple faces the final curtain.
My friend, I’ll say it clear,
I’ll state my case, of which I’m certain.

It’s lived a life that’s full.
It’s traveled each and ev’ry i-highway;
And more, much more than this,
It did it Jobs’ way.

The economy is why it’s damned,
It’s hard to convince consumers to pay,
$500 for a just a brand,
but we did it Jobs’ way.

And sure, OS X is strong,
and Vista sucks, what more can we say,
but we can’t trust fanboy blogs,
So we’ll do it Jobs’ way.

Regrets, they’ve come up short;
But then again, too few times to mention.
It allowed Microsoft to port,
Office 10 without exemption.

It planned each iTunes tune;
Each careful step along the byway,
But more, much more than Zune,
It did it Jobs’ way.

Yes, there were times, I’m sure you knew
When it bit off more than it could chew.
But through it all, when the future was hard to know,
It stole BSD and added Cocoa.
It faced it all and it stood tall;
And did it Jobs’ way.

“They can hire smart guys, hire a lot of people, blah dee blah dee blah, but you know they start out way behind, in a certain sense.”

He also questioned their financial strategy, claiming that Android has no revenue model and that carriers will take android and then charge Google big bucks to carry their search on the standard Android deck or UI.

“Google doesn’t exactly bubble to the top of the list of the top competitors we’ve got going in mobile. They might someday. But right now..” he said at Telstra’s investment day.

Steve, Steve, Steve… Windows Mobile is popular for one simple reason: it seems to work reasonably well with Windows. This is fine for the fleet IT market – there’s no shame in buying up 500 Palm Pros for your entire executive staff – the low-end feature phone market is a mish-mash of OSes, including WinMo and to some extent Symbian. Mostly, however, you find OSes that are unsupported and essentially proprietary.

Android will replace those OSes first. Carriers won’t care – or will care less – when face with the cost savings of installing Android vs. rolling their own OS and the charges for search placement will be a wash. As Android bubbles up, WinMo will get bit first, then Symbian, then, dare I say it, RIM. While I’m not in love with Android, I know a contender when I see one. Hopefully Steve’s posturing will buy WinMo enough time to escape off into the woods to die.

Microsoft is ceding a huge lead to OS X in this area, as Cupertino works to accommodate multiple cores in Snow Leopard, the first OS X release I’m excited about in years. Seriously, Ballmer — Intel is too big to bully, even for you. Adapt or die.

Microsoft CEO Steve “Sweat” Ballmer said that the financial crisis will “sap consumer and business spending,” leading to a downturn in Microsoft’s revenue. He explained that no company will be immune to the crisis although analysts predict an 8 percent rise in revenue this quarter.

He explained that none of the business units within MS will go to “0″ but that companies holding down spending while the crisis blows over will definitely not be buying Windows Vista Ultimate. This goes double, obviously, for consumers.

“On the other hand, when businesses have less money — they can borrow less money, they can spend less money — that can’t be good. When consumers feel the economic pinch, house prices come down. That can’t be good,” Ballmer said.

For all the — ahem — gentle, good-natured ribbing that we give Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer here, I don’t know if he deserves to have eggs thrown at him. With this latest incident and the Bill Gates pie-in-the-face incident, are any top-level Microsoft executives really, truly safe from the onslaught of surprise food-based attacks?

The Hungarian man in the video “accused Microsoft of stealing millions from the country’s taxpayers,” referring to a recent software agreement between Hungary and Microsoft, according to InformationWeek. After his verbal tirade, he threw three eggs at Ballmer, missing each time. After the man left, Ballmer seemed good-natured about the incident, commenting that the man “broke his train of thought.”

Just wanted to update everyone on the awkward slow-dance going on between Yahoo! and Microsoft. According to the New York Times, Microsoft apparently upped its offer to buy Yahoo! from the initial $31 per share to an undisclosed amount. Yahoo! believes itself to be worth at least $37 per share and The Times is reporting that “Microsoft suggested it was willing to pay more than $33 a share,” according to sources involved with the negotiations.

Yahoo! has been repeatedly declining offers from Microsoft, although co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang has said that it’s not because Yahoo! doesn’t want to strike a deal, it’s because Yahoo! feels that Microsoft’s initial bid “substantially undervalued the company.” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told his employees last Thursday, “I know exactly what I think Yahoo is worth to me. I won’t go a dime above, and I will go to what I think it’s worth if that gets the deal done.”

Will Microsoft extend the life of Windows XP after all? Steve Ballmer told reporters today that “If customer feedback varies, we can always wake up smarter,” according to the Associated Press.

He conceded that most of the customers who are still buying XP are IT departments but said that “most people who buy PCs today buy them with Vista. That’s the statistical truth.” Gee, thanks Steve. I’m not sure about the last time you were in a Best Buy store, but you may have noticed that XP isn’t an option on most new computers unless you order them online and/or customize them yourself.

Okay then. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently told a group of Microsoft MVPs (Most Valuable Professionals) that Vista is “a work in progress” and then asked, “Can we just sort of kiss that stone and move on? Because it turns out many things become problematic when you have those long release cycles.”

Here’s an excerpt from Ballmer’s speech, according to Ted Bishop at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer,

Windows Vista: A work in progress. [Laughter, applause.] A very important piece of work, and I think we did a lot of things right, and I think we have a lot of things we need to learn from. Certainly, you never want to let five years go between releases. Can we just sort of kiss that stone and move on? Because it turns out many things become problematic when you have those long release cycles. The design point, what you should be targeting. We can’t ever let that happen again. We had some things that we can’t just set the dial back, but I think people wish we could. Vista is bigger than XP. It’s going to stay bigger than XP. We have to make sure it doesn’t get bigger still, and that the performance and that the battery life and that the compatibility, we’re driving on the things that we need to drive hard to improve.

And yet, we did take some important big steps forward with Vista. So, I know I can get a lot of feedback from this crowd. The No. 1 point of feedback always for MVPs is on Windows. I know I can get a lot of feedback. I bet if I look I can get a little bit of good feedback. I’m sure I can get a lot of constructive feedback. And believe me, top of mind for me, for Ray [Ozzie], for the senior team here, is making sure that we continue to drive forward and take the good work that we did in Vista, take the chance for improvement and progress and drive forward.

In the meantime, we have some customers — a lot of customers — using Vista. A lot of customers. And we have a lot of customers that are choosing to stay with Windows XP. And as long as those are both important options, we will be sensitive and we will listen and we will hear that. I got a piece of mail from a customer the other day that talked about not being able to get XP anymore. We responded, XP is still available. And I know we’re going to continue to get feedback from people on how long XP should be available. We’ve got some opinions on that, we’ve expressed our views. .. I’m always interested in hearing from you on these and other issues. So the desktop business, it’s our heart, it’s our soul, we continue to drive forward from this foundation.

So you’ll notice that he didn’t say that Microsoft will be extending the availability of XP past the June 30th cutoff date, but he did acknowledge that he knows that people still want to be able to get XP. It also appears that this whole Windows 7 thing might be a reality as far as its launch date is concerned, given Ballmer’s “We can’t ever let that happen again” line referring to Vista’s five-year release cycle.

At any rate, I guess it’s nice to see some honest, candid comments from Ballmer about Vista — however horrifying they may be to paying consumers. Perhaps Microsoft’s just going to accelerate the development of Windows 7 instead of spending a lot of time on Vista. It may turn out to get swept under the rug like Windows ME (ME lasted less than two years). The big question for Microsoft will be whether or not to extend the life of XP out to the release of Windows 7 or to pull it from the shelves at the end of June after making sure that the current “work in progress” gets finished finally.

In honor of it being Friday, I believe it’s time for another top ten list. This one comes to us today from ValleyWag, who’s wisely compiled a list of the top ten videos of Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, losing his shit.

If you’ve never seen it in person, you’re really missing out.

Above is just one, but they’re all worth watching. And then think to yourself about Vista: Would you really trust your computer to this guy?

Steve, we love you man, but take a Xanax.

Ten best Ballmer-goes-nuts videos [ValleyWag]

Ballmer: “We’ll support Blu-Ray” [GamesIndustry.biz]

Steve Ballmer was surprisingly candid — yet still fairly quiet — about Microsoft’s plans to port Silverlight to the iPhone. He basically said “Yeah, maybe, if we want to.” As for ActiveSync, he also said “Yeah, maybe, if our partners want to.” As we all no, competitors rarely comment on others developments for fear of sounding like a whiner. Let’s just say that this is well in the realm of possibility and leave it at that.

Ballmer on Apple’s iPhone announcement [News.com]
TC Mix Coverage: Keynote 1, Keynote 2

Peter and I got in too late to go to any of the first day stuff — we were stuck in a goddamn airplane the size of a raisin box — but it seems Steve “The Animal” Ballmer got up and whispered sweet nothings into Angela Merkel’s ear.

He began by describing the next wave in computing involving wireless broadband everyway and natural user interfaces AKA not Windows. He then when on talk about social networking, education, and going green, a charming sentiment to be sure. He then strummed a lute and intoned:

As computing continues to become more powerful, more affordable and more connected, it will not only enable those of us who live in places like Hannover and Seattle to lead better lives, it will give billions more people around the world a chance to take advantage of incredible new social and economic opportunities so they can lead better lives, too and that, will truly be revolutionary.

Nice talk from a guy whose lunch is being eaten by Google.

Opening Speech Steve Ballmer [CeBIT]

This is how you know you’ve made it. That tattoo of Clippy is pretty awesome, too.

Zune Originals ‘Ballmer’ Frigtard [iPhone Savior] Thanks Rymon!

Okay, remember a little over a week ago when the CEO of Mandriva François Bancilhon sent an open j’accuse! letter to Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer  saying that Microsoft convinced the Nigerian government to use Windows on its computers instead of Mandriva Linux even though Mandriva and Nigeria already had a deal? 

Well apparently "the government agency funding 11,000 of these schoolroom PCs wants them running Mandriva." I’d be interested to know whether or not this change of heart came about because of Bancilhon’s letter or if someone at the top of the food chain saw that the order was changed to Microsoft software and was like "what in the hell does the night shift team think they’re trying to pull here?"

Ballmerized Nigerian PCs might run Mandriva after all [Register]

Man. Google can’t get a break. First Nokia and Symbian are all like “POOOP!” and then Steven F is like “Weener!” and then the WSJ is like “WOMP STUPID WOMP” and Peter Ha is all like “I need to go to the bathroom” and I’m all like “Post!”

Anyway, Steve Ballmer says:

“Well of course their efforts are just some words on paper right now, it’s hard to do a very clear comparison [with Windows Mobile].”

“Right now they have a press release, we have many, many millions of customers, great software, many hardware devices and they’re welcome in our world.”

Which isn’t quite as sensational as saying:

GOOGLE I WILL EAT YOUR BABIES AND YOUR MOTHER! I WILL TEAR OFF YOUR HEAD AND USE YOUR GUT AS A PIGGY BANK! GOOGLE EATS ROADKILL AND PUKES IT UP AND EATS IT AGAIN! I WILL DESTROY YOU! ANDROID IS A PRESS RELEASE AND YOUR BRAIN IS AS BIG AS A RAT TURD!

So I’m not sure why the Slashdot folks made it sound like he said the bottom thing and not the top thing.

Google’s Android just a press release, says Ballmer [ComputerWorld via Slashdot]

You don’t need me to tell you about how Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer hates, hates, hates Linux. His company’s actions, it could be said, speak louder than words. But that doesn’t stop François Bancilhon of Mandriva from laying it all on the table.

It seems that after Mandriva completed a complex deal to deliver Linux PCs to school kids in Nigeria, MS went behind their backs and convinced the goverment to install Windows on the machines over the Mandriva Linux distro.

François Bancilhon is angry at Steve Ballmer for Microsoft’s tactics. MS has never been one to play softball, but François Bancilhon is taking it public in this open letter that’s worth a read by everyone.

An open letter to Steve Ballmer [Mandriva's blog]