Steve Ballmer update on Linux

Dancing Steve has evolved in regards to Linux - https://www.zdnet.com/article/ballmer-i-may-have-called-linux-a-cancer-but-now-i-love-it/


Maybe, like me, he was getting tired of all the privacy concerns and crashes/lost partitions due to Windows Update.

 

Has he stopped throwing chairs?

 

Steve Ballmer is a genius and my personal hero.

This article is over 2 years old, Ballmerman has since won the Nobel prize and started a company called Ballmatic which takes any idea that used to suck and turns it into pure win, all through AI and deep learning.

 

LOL! The article came in my yesterday's tech news feed. I didn't even bother to look at the date. Must've been a slow news day.

 

He also made this statement 13 years ago. What bad fashions were you wearing 13 years ago? What ideas did you hold then that you've since changed your mind on..?

 

Agreed he changed his mind, but are you saying Balmer loved Linux 13 years ago ???

 

Did you read the article...?

"Reuters reports that Ballmer still stands by his cancer analogy as right for the time. Speaking at an event earlier this week, he said going to war with open source "made a ton of money" that still contributes to Microsoft's revenue. But he said he now considers that the threat from Linux is over."​

 

Yes. I read the article content which is why I posted it.

I guess I'm confused what you meant by "He also made this statement 13 years ago." To me, it wasn't clear what "this" you were referring to. I interpreted it as 13-years ago he made the statement 'he thought Linux was a cancer, but (again as of 13 years ago) loves it.'

No worries. I'm just on a different train of thought due to post interpretation.

 

Because Win 10 is unusable. He might have already switched to Linux.

 

Not Ballmer per se, but sort of related - "Microsoft's Open Source Shift a 'Profound Cultural Challenge'" https://rcpmag.com/articles/2018/09/17/microsoft-open-source-shift.aspx

 

I hope Github survives under MSFT's leadership unlike Nokia and Wp.

 

Their approach seems to be acquire and destroy, rather than making a better product. Micro$lop certainly have a knack for acquiring things that are awesome, turning them to crap and then walking away and letting them die. They are becoming the cancer. Quite a shift for a company that used to be the crown jewel of the technology world. Things started going downhill when Bill Gates began pursuing other things and stopped controlling everything at Micro$lop. But, that's often how things work when the founder of an awesome company stops being the absolute controller of everything.

 

Yes well, as the article stated, he left Microsoft in 2014 so his vision is no longer relevant. Als he may claim that going to war with linux made microsoft a ton of money that still generates revenue, but under his reign they lost 40% of their share value and that under the new CEO who embraced Open Source the share value rose with 50%. So to me he still is the same bag of wind he was before suffering from cognitive dissonance.

 

You don't seriously believe that this is attributable to Satya Nadella embracing Open Source, do you? They are doing better, but I think their success is attributable to diversification of their portfolio. It's not due to Windows 10, since that product has been mostly a failure.

 

Absolutely. And part of this has led them to embrace open source tech (and contributions to them) because they stand to gain massively from diversification.

Satya is playing Chess. Balmer was checkers.

 

That also coincides with the misguided vision for Windows 10 to be a crappy smartphone OS on a PC hardware platform. They have to do that (embrace open source) for the UWP crApp garbage to be embraced by the Kool-Aid drinkers that actually want that filth on their PC. If they make it too restrictive and proprietary, with unnecessarily complex licensing and ransom money hoops to jump through, that will accelerate the failure of Windoze OS X. If they can port that trash to Android and iOS great... more money is a good thing. It's just a shame they have to contaminate Windows in the process.

 

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

Bill Gates was a part of the self-sabotage that would eventually bring the DOJ's attention to Microsoft's shady tactics against their war on everything Linux, including the infamous "Microsoft Tax" on hardware not preloaded with Windows.

 

We might be the generation that thrived under Microsoft's glory days.
Back when Windows (XP and 7, Vista and onwards are trash) was an actually usable operating system.
At the rate in which they're flushing her legacy down the drain, Windows, as a desktop OS, is not only losing dominance, but relevance.

 

This is highly likely, and in their interests.
What they're likely to sabotage (through their embrace, extend and extinguish mantra) would be accessibility and pricing for the premium services tied to corporate users, who're most likely to pay up for it.

Money first, users second.

 

While some of it is clearly deserved, I do not blame Micro$lop for Linux not being a forced to be reckoned with. I actually liked Bill Gates' strong arm approach. He was a shrewd businessman and the leader of an empire that produced amazing software. He that let power go to his head sometimes. With a liberal, consumer-oriented civil justice system that embraces a Robin Hood mentality, it was only a matter of time until that caught up with him.

I like Linux, but it is still not, and possibly never will be, adequate to replace Windows the way I want to use a PC. Free is nice and open source is a nice concept that has its place. We all love free. Unfortunately, all of the really awesome software that I love is on Windows (free and not free). Until Linux has everything I want and need, I will have to stick with Windows. I doubt that will ever change, and if it does it is certainly taking a very long time... been waiting about 15 years... little by little, but a long ways to go. Linux needs to be more commercialized to be more useful. It's hard to get traction with a volunteer workforce that focuses only on the things that volunteer workforce cares about.

Totally agree... Windows 10, being the abortion that it is, presents the greatest opportunity ever for Linux to be more successful. There is nothing to hate about Linux except for the extreme lack of awesome software for gamers and overclocking enthusiasts (especially the latter) and lackluster driver support. There's LOTS to hate about Windows 10. For the average PC users whose activities consist primarily of email, social media and web surfing, it's already just about everything it needs to be. That said, people don't know what they don't know. A lot of education needs to take place before Linux will replace Windows for the people that don't need anything more than that. The old saying about leading a horse to water, but can't make it drink applies. So far, there's not enough effort in leading the horse to the water trough. And, the horse might not be smart enough to know that it is thirsty.

 

They deleted Chef Koch's github repo.

 

Some background info please?

Google results without that context are quite interesting.