Ballmer says Google is insane

WHEN YOU'RE a man of distinctive appearance who likes to set the speech volume up to 11, has a penchant for stage-dancing and repeating the word ‘developers' you'd better go easy with stones when you're sitting in your big glass house.

But nothing comes between Steve Ballmer and an opinion and his latest outburst has Uncle Vista calling Google's growth plans “insane”.

In a speech at Stanford University yesterday, Ballmer also depicted Google as a one-trick pony locked into search but not much else.

Well, you can imagine a time when IBM thought that Microsoft was a pretty humble bunch too. Even now you could argue that Microsoft is “only” a client/server company. In literary circles you might call this kind of argument reductio ad absurdum.

If you're in business today and want to be good at one thing, search would be very high up the list, but of course Steve Ballmer knows this only too well. Google might be insane but, unlike the old song, nobody including Microsoft seems to know how to take them away, ha-haa. µ