[svlug] epic Windows failure during the Olympics

[Christian Einfeldt]

hi

On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 11:57 AM, Brian J. Tarricone <bjt23 at cornell.edu>wrote:

> Anyhow, I believe Alan's "petty" comment was directed at your cheap shot
> about throwing chairs, not about the Olympics themselves being petty.


IMHO, the fundamental difference between proprietary code and Free Open
Source Software is control.  Microsoft is vexed by its inability to control
Free Open Source Software.  Steve Ballmer's chair throwing incident was made
public as part of a lawsuit between Microsoft and Google over Microsoft's
loss of Dr. Kai-Fu Lee to Google.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai-Fu_Lee

The chair-throwing incident is a vignette that reveals how the CEO of the
world's largest software company views competition -- as intolerable, and
something that must be extinguished like a cancer.  The evidence of of the
chair-throwing incident came from the sworn testimony of Mark Lukovsky, and
shows how Steve Ballmer intimidates people.  He threw the chair in
Lukovsky's presence when Lukovsky said that he was going over to Google.
This statement is from the man who shapes policy, strategy, and tatics at
Microsoft:

"Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I'm going to fucking bury that
guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking
kill Google."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/05/chair_chucking/

It is important for the world to understand how the man who runs the world's
largest software company views competition -- as something that needs to be
"killed".  It is a valid topic for us to keep in mind and discuss here on
this list, because representatives of Microsoft, such as Sam Ramji, have in
the past and will in the future ask to address this group.  Our response to
their requests should keep in mind that the man setting and executing policy
for Microsoft will intimidate his employee (Lukovsky was still an employee)
by throwing a chair in his presence.  We should not trust Microsoft, because
their formal SEC filing demonstrates that they believe their Free Open
Source Software is inimical to their revenues, and because their CEO has a
character trait for intolerance of competition, and because the company has
shown time and time again that it will violate anti-trust law and stack
industry panels (the OOXML ISO ballot) to achieve its ends.

The Steve Ballmer chair-throwing incident is was not petty to Mark Lukovsky,
and we should not view it as petty, but as exemplary of the mind of the man
who runs the world's largest software company, a man who once said Linux is
a cancer:

"Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to
everything it touches"

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_cancer/

Discussing Steve Ballmer's chair throwing incident is directly relevant to
the topic of this forum.

-- 
Christian Einfeldt,
Producer, The Digital Tipping Point
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