Steve Ballmer is a Funny Guy

I doubt that he really is trying to be as laugh-inducing as he is, but he makes me laugh on a regular basis. Most of the time it's by making himself look more than a little foolish. For example, I'm not the only one who enjoyed the video of his "Developers, Developers, Developers" hype. He dances at least as bad as I do. Sometimes I just shake my head in disbelief at events surrounding his leadership at Microsoft--times like a very unhappy Hungarian lobbing eggs at him, his training for the Chair Throw event at the next Summer Olympics, or his comparison of Linux to a virus. Today, I'm doing both.

Apparently, Windows Vista sales are really good in Steve's opinion. More and more often I hear about low opinions--often very vocal ones--about the latest desktop OS from Redmond. This article was quite an enjoyable read. Why? It shows just how much of the Kool-Aid he really has drunk. He's happy that Vista is selling really well because of OEM preloading it onto machines. I wonder what he would say if he had to depend on selling Windows than depending on OEMs to do the dirty work for him by not offering customers a real choice. Here's where I translate the marketing speak Steve used into real English:

Steve: "Application compatibility in Vista was not as high as many of our customers would have liked."
English: People didn't like that we broke as many programs as we did.

Steve: "I think we’re going through something of a process whereby Vista users are still getting used to Vista after moving from XP"
English: People are going to have to get used to all of the changes we made, whether or not they're good ones.

While there are those people who wanted it for whatever reason, many consumers who bought it with a computer don't necessarily know the difference between Office and Windows, but they knew something was wrong when their hardware wouldn't work and a comparatively smaller number of people don't want it at all. He really thinks that a lot of people like Windows Vista and wanted to upgrade it. Now that's funny.