Latest Stupid Remarks by Steve Ballmer

Microsft's CEO Steve Ballmer is known to throw some really absurd comments. Just recently, as reported by ZDNet, Ballmer spoke at the final keynote at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo in Orlando via a Q&A with Gartner analysts Neil MacDonald and David Mitchell Smith.

When Ballmer was asked how Vista was doing, he answered:

"The adoption rate of Vista is faster than the adoption rate was of XP two years in," "We had a great success with security and starting to see a ramp with adoption."

But when MacDonald countered with Gartner survey data that 61 percent of respondents are thinking about skipping Vista, Ballmer responded that Microsoft would be ready for people that want to skip Vista. In fact, Windows 7 would be compatible with Vista, he said.

I don't know what kind of compatibility he's talking about because he stated that Windows 7 would be a completely new operating system. According to him, "Windows 7 is not minor because it's a lot more work than a minor release. It's a major release."

To make it more confusing he added, "Windows 7 will be Vista, but a lot better"

Perhaps Ballmer's idiotic remark of the day came when he was asked about Google Apps becoming a threat to Micrsoft Office. He answered, "People don't use it. People try Google Apps, but they don't use it. You can't even put a footnote in a document!" said Ballmer. When asked if Ballmer was dismissing Google Apps, he said that Google has "very primitive" capabilities. "We have better competition today than Google Docs and Spreadsheets. We get more competition from OpenOffice and StarOffice frankly."

Google? Primitive? I'm speechless. In fairness to Ballmer, he was right about OpenOffice.org.