dekstop: weblog

Scoble interviewed Steve Ballmer (transcript, announcement). Finally!

While watching the short video I was struck by the realization that the Steve Ballner shown here is not that different from the one in the monkey dance video. Even worse: the video shows that Ballmer is a scary, scary man. He looks like a gnome, a ghoul, with the eyes of a predator. He doesn't seem genuine, real, or honest; and he is striking an upbeat pose that does not fit.

Anyway, I watched the video and became very bored and very disappointed very quickly. Lots of marketing fluff and the empty promises of a car salesman; of course by now we know that if Microsoft promises something that is more than a year in the future, it may not happen after all. And Ballmer couldn't do anything to divert this impression, not that he tried.

Then Scoble announces "Now time for some tough questions.", and then actually only has one, and one that's pretty hard to give a stupid answer to: "On the blogs there are those that say that Microsoft doesn't innovate, can you give us some examples of where Microsoft is innovating?".

This "innovation" section pissed me off. Here we have a prime example of overly broad statements, warfare rhetoric, the use of deliberate misunderstanding and misrepresentation to prove a point. Excerpt from the answer: "What about the open source guys? Ah, the business model is interesting but we haven't seen much in the way of technical innovation." "The open source guys"? "Business model"? Wtf? But it was a silly question in the first place, with "innovation" being such an easily bendable term, and it called for such an answer.

This was no interview. This was a chance for Ballmer to do the thing he does everyday (sell stuff), but in front of a different audience.

Yo Scoble, are you afraid to confront your CEO? And if you are: should it be that way? I think not.

Amazingly the Channel 9 forum seems to love the video, although there is literally no content except the aforementioned bland marketing speak and very generalized "mission statements". The Slashdot discussion for the most part consists, as usual, of offtopic ranting and "analyses" that would either be hard to prove or easy to refute. One comment got my attention: "Ballmer's not talking about hardware innovation obviously and he's hardly even talking about software innovation. He really means 'marketshare' when he means innovation: the ability to bring the market together under one platform and to create a huge environment for 3rd party solutions on top of that." Makes sense.

And Scoble didn't ask the most important questions! What blogs do you read? Do you use an aggregator? What is your process to keep up to date with the news, with the world outside the company? How much mail do you read every day? How many websites? Have you listened to podcasts yet?

Damn, this could have been something great. Ah, well, better luck next time.

Sidenote: More of these high-profile videos! I may have disliked Ballmer's appearance, but I still think that these kinds of videos are fascinating, and give insights into a company in a way that text-based media can't. The Channel 9 developer videos are nice, but usually not that interesting to people not involved with the respective topic; this video on the other hand will interest a very wide range of people, for a wide range of reasons, and if it's only to see more of the dancing monkey.