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Steve Ballmer: Microsoft’s incompetent youth

May 31, 2007 by Scott Rosenberg 6 Comments

As most successful companies evolve and expand they develop some nostalgic sense of romance around their freewheeling early days. An exchange here at D with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer suggests that Microsoft is atypical in this regard. Perhaps one root of Microsoft’s paranoid corporate DNA — its collective sense that no matter how successful it is, the roof could cave in any minute — lies in an inferiority complex that goes back to its formative years.

Here is what Ballmer said, responding to a question from Walt Mossberg about managing such a huge company today: “Don’t think the early days of Microsoft, when I joined, were so great. We didn’t have great agility.”

Mossberg: “What, it was small but ossified?”

Ballmer: “The people we had weren’t as good — they just weren’t pushing as much.”

Mossberg: “Like Paul Allen?”

Ballmer: “Paul was good. Bill was good. Four out of 30 were good — and believe me, the rest are gone.”
[tags]steve ballmer, microsoft, d5, d conference[/tags]

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Chernin, News Corp., and the Journal

May 31, 2007 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

This conference is a Wall Street Journal event, so the specter of Rupert Murdoch’s buyout hovered over everything — like the Eye of Sauron turning its gaze upon, well, not exactly a settlement of happy hobbits, but, let’s just say, a crowd of sheltered journalists. (As a Journal reader, I’d hate to see the paper’s quality decline, but then again, as I’ve said, it’s only fitting that market forces should be threatening this champion of free markets.) Pushing this analogy to an extreme would cast NewsCorp president Peter Chernin, who spoke here and defended Murdoch’s bid, as the Mouth of Sauron.

Here is what Chernin had to say when quizzed about Murdoch’s plans for the Journal by Kara Swisher, who — like the rest of the WSJ journalists at the event — would work for him should the deal be consummated: “The notion that we want to buy one of the great trophies, a genuine public trust — the notion that we want to buy that to change it is completely counterintuitive. We made an offer at a significant premium. We believe it is the premier source of news and information on a specific aspect of this society.”

But what else was he going to say? “We intend to rape and pillage?” Assurances like these are pro forma.

“News Corp. is mischaracterized,” Chernin declared. “This is a very broad church.” Indeed; any media empire that can embrace moralistic right-wing politics and least-common-denominator popular entertainment has to be broad.

It wasn’t surprising that Mossberg and Swisher would be direct in confronting a News Corp. interviewee with tough questions about the deal: It’s still an open question whether Murdoch will win his bid, and everyone here had the same questions in mind. But, if Murdoch gets the Journal, is it likely that, a year from now, at the next D conference, we’ll be watching News Corp. execs get grilled on stage?
[tags]d5, d conference, wall street journal, peter chernin, rupert murdoch, news corporation[/tags]

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Jobs, Gates, and the road behind

May 30, 2007 by Scott Rosenberg 13 Comments

The much-ballyhooed joint interview with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs here at the Wall Street Journal D conference not only failed to throw sparks — it was a veritable orgy of hugs and nostalgia for the revolution the men led in their now long-ago youth.

Just this afternoon, Jobs had knocked Windows software: he’d explained why Windows users love iTunes’ jukebox software so much by declaring, “It’s like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell.”

But in the warm evening glow Jobs dropped that familiar braggadoccio and joined in the spirit that interviewers Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher set, of thoughtful reminiscence and mutual appraisal. On those terms, the event was a fascinating bout of PC-industry psychoanalysis.

Many others live-blogged the event (Engadget, the D5 blog, Dan Farber, Paul Kedrosky, Eric Savitz and more), so instead let me offer some impressions based on the unusual opportunity to observe these two industry pioneers side by side.

Gates has always tended to let his words wander into thickets of technical minutiae, but the trait only showed itself in deeper relief next to Jobs’ ability to cut quickly and cleanly to the heart of an anecdote. As Gates began to fumble through some digressive detail in telling the tale of how Microsoft’s floating-point BASIC ended up on the Apple II, Jobs watched impatiently, then finally broke in — “Let me tell the story!” — and provided the key bit of human color. For reasons nobody ever figured out, Jobs explained, Steve Wozniak had written, by hand, on paper, “a BASIC that’s like the best BASIC on the planet, it’s perfect in every way,” except it only did fixed-point math. So Apple bought Gates’s floating-point version for $31,000 — and got the Microsoft code on a cassette.

Jobs is also faster with a joke than his old rival. When Swisher asked them to describe “the greatest misunderstanding about your relationship and about each other,” Jobs deadpanned, “We’ve kept our marriage secret for over a decade.” Gates froze for a painfully long silence before mumbling something about how “It’s been fun to work together” and “I kind of miss some of the people who aren’t around any more.”
[Read more...]

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McCain in techland

May 29, 2007 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

I’m down at the Wall Street Journal D conference this week.

Tuesday night, Sen. John McCain, following up on his appearance at Google 3 weeks ago, courted the tech industry’s money and talent here. Quizzed by conference hosts Walt Mossberg, Kara Swisher and members of the audience for nearly an hour, McCain didn’t always tell the crowd what it seemed to want to hear — particularly about the Iraq war. But after a subdued opening, McCain found his voice, and a measure of positive response, by promising an administration that would tap the nation’s best minds, JFK-style.

In filling the federal bureaucracy’s leadership positions, like the Federal Communications Commission, McCain said, “Don’t pick the person who’s contributed the most or shown the most loyalty. Bring in experienced people that know the field and ask them to serve.”

“I know who the smart people in America are,” he said. He could easily have added, They’re right here! He proceeded to drop names like Federal Express founder Fred Smith (who could whip the “screwed up” defense acquisition system into shape), Cisco CEO John Chambers and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. The latter two men, as it happened, were in the room.

“I’m curious,” Swisher interjected. “Steve Ballmer as secretary of state?” (In the tech industry, Ballmer is known for his pugnacity.)

“Ambassador to China,” McCain quipped back.

McCain seemed most relaxed in these “pick your dream cabinet” exchanges, and least at ease in attempting to square his ardent free-market principles with complex questions about Net neutrality and the failure of the U.S. broadband market to match the speeds and services available in other countries. At times the senator trotted out stump-rhetoric set pieces that felt oddly stiff in this relatively intimate venue. After sketching the dangerous scenario of a nuclear-armed Iran passing a bomb to terrorists, for instance, he realized he was sounding too gloomy for a successful presidential candidate, so he hastily added, “We’re the strongest nation in the world and the best nation in every way, and we will prevail again.”

On Iraq, he restated the position he shares with President Bush: “setting a date for withdrawal is setting a date for surrender.” He recalled his record criticizing the conduct of the war, including his relatively early break with former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. But today, he said, “We are where we are. If we leave, there will be chaos in the region…and they will follow us home. Now, we have got a new general and a new strategy. It is working.”

“You really believe that?” Mossberg looked dubiously at McCain. McCain started reeling off the names of experts who, he said, share his view that withdrawal would be a disaster: Scowcroft, Zinni, Kissinger. Mossberg pointed out Kissinger’s iffy record of managing the wind-down of the Vietnam war, and McCain started to work up a heated response about that era’s history — which he knows a bit about — but then thought better of it.

The same issue came up again when Brian Dear, founder of Eventful, held up a copy of the 2000 reissue of the late David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, and reminded the senator that he’d written a preface that urged leaders to read the book twice before entering any war. “Did you urge the Bush Administration to read this book? Doesn’t seem like they did.”

“It’s a lot of pages,” Swisher pointed out.

There’s more coverage of McCain over at AllThingsD, Mossberg and Swisher’s new blog site.
[tags]d conference, john mccain[/tags]

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Links for May 26th

May 26, 2007 by Scott Rosenberg 1 Comment

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Links for May 25th

May 25, 2007 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment
  • Meditating on the Wild Side, Lou Reed — Beliefnet.com
    Reed on his new meditation-sounds album, tai chi — and quitting smoking.
  • TECHCRUNCH: A ghost from Arrington’s domain trading past — Valleywag
    : “…one of the problems with tech journalism. The career reporters show poor judgement, because they’ve never been on the inside. Some of the most interesting news, and analysis, comes from insiders like Arrington, who has been bouncing around the Valley for most of the past decade. But they suffer, not just from conflicts of interest, but also from the perpetual risk that something they write will be at odds with something they’ve done…”

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Citizen Josh

May 24, 2007 by Scott Rosenberg 3 Comments

Regular readers here know that I count Josh Kornbluth among my very oldest friends. (“Oldest” as in long-term, of course; Josh is only a month or so older than me. Why is English so balky around this?) I’m proud to say I knew Josh before he was “Josh the incredibly funny monologuist” and “Josh the guy who creates those monologues by improvising in front of live audiences” and “Josh the great interviewer on KQED.” I am one of a tiny group of people who is qualified to say, based on personal experience, that Josh is, beyond those things, also a really great copy editor. Or at least he was, way back when; who knows what the decades have done to his punctuation?

Last weekend I attended the opening of Kornbluth’s new show, “Citizen Josh,” at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. All Kornbluth’s work is autobiographical, but the new piece goes even further than its predecessors, “Love and Taxes” and “Ben Franklin Unplugged,” in making a visceral connection with public life and the political moment.

The theme is, how can a passive, inward-turning citizen find it in himself to become engaged? The tale includes, among many other things, a college thesis that is a quarter-century overdue; a prematurely born baby rescued by a father’s determination and insight; and a misshapen play structure in a Berkeley park that offers good cell-phone reception, lessons in modern art and a hidden history of radical democracy.

“Citizen Josh” has got all the stuff Kornbluth’s fans have come to expect from one of his performances: stories that loop and twist through what seem like hopelessly overextended digressions only to pull themselves together into beautiful perfect knots; veins of playful, offbeat humor running the length of the 80-minute performance, submerging for a few minutes, then popping back into the light; and a passion for trying to understand just what we are all doing together on this planet. The show is a great chance to see a great talent contending with a great issue. You should see it!
[tags]josh kornbluth, citizen josh, monologues, solo shows, magic theatre[/tags]

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