Rachna Uncut #1

Me: this is weird
Me: there's a stork-like bird in our backyard
Rachna: have you been naughty mr johnny?

In all fairness to Steve Ballmer

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer took a lot of stick lately when media outlets ran stories about his criticizing of Google at a lecture at the Stanford GSB. Now I've always heard stories and accusations by people of how the media twists their words and spin them whichever way they think best serves their headlines. It was cool to see it in person.

A statement of Ballmer's, that many articles took him to task on, was his description of Google as a one trick pony - that they're only good at the online ad business and they're just milking it right now. Several articles took the milking reference to be a derogatory one, but Ballmer had actually used the milking term to help describe his view of the entrepreneurial life cycle - find a new idea, then milk the hell out of it. According to him, that was what Microsoft did before they decided they needed to reinvent themselves.

Then there were the articles that bashed him for labelling Google products as "cute". In all honestly, Ballmer came off as a real crowd charmer. The man had the entire audience in the palm of his hand for the full hour - they laughed when he wanted them to, they clapped when he deemed it. But the only time that he seemed to lose some of his poise was when students asked questions that were a pointed reference to Google. Microsoft's been fighting its image of the evil empire and with Google being the media darling that it is, he's often had to deal with questions asked by people enamored with Google and not necessarily Microsoft.

His method of dealing with it seemed to be to not refer to Google by name, instead calling them Microsoft's most visible competitor. But when the pointed Google question got asked, there was no getting around it. Ballmer did say that Google only had one major commercial product and that everything else that they had was "cute" and served as filler around that one product. He had, however, earlier mentioned that this was what all companies did - find their major product, milk the hell out of it, work on developing their next big idea, and invent cute stuff in the meantime to fill in the spaces around the flagship product.

Lost in all the criticism of Ballmer is his very valid questioning of Google - what comes after AdSense? Some say you don't need anything else. Online advertising is only just taking off as a market, and Google is at the forefront. There's also his reference to the one trick. Every company needs to reinvent itself to stay alive and it's a fair question to ask what Google's next trick would be. However, it seems too soon to level that charge at Google. There's a long way to go before it really needs another trick.

The Status Quo

In case you're wondering, this is what's going on right now.