Baneki Privacy Labs 4 hours ago

Ballmer was great at using Microsoft’s OS leverage to abuse vendors, extort customers, and squeeze every dollar from the technology market – at the cost of real innovation for all the rest of us – for years and years. He even managed to buy his way out of multiple felony counts – after Microsoft was convicted at trial of being a predatory, illegal monopolist – through “investments” in the Republican party at just the right time. Yay for him.

That worked for a long time.

Now, however, the world is over Microsoft’s shit operating systems. There’s many alternatives that work better, cost less, and aren’t security nightmares… and that’s not even counting Microsoft’s admission that it has been giving 0days to spy agencies so they can use them to gain backdoor access to the machines of dissidents and political opponents worldwide. Who would want an OS that is closed-source, bloated, expensive snitchware? Increasingly, not many people want that – and their OS monopoly is in tatters. Ballmer rode it out as long as he could – and the shareholders paid him to do exactly that, so he did his job.

But to run an actual technology company that produces and markets actual, useful technological improvements? Are you kidding – Ballmer couldn’t be less qualified to do that if the Board tried to find someone specifically discongruent with the job requirements! Being good at squeezing the markets for monopoly profits – and dodging the clear statutes that make such behavior illegal, federal felonies even – is a skillset… not a very friendly skillset, but there you go.

Making good, constructive, healthy technologies that the world wants to use is a totally different skillset.

Maybe Ballmer can take a job at the NSA – a nice little perk for all his years of bending Microsoft over so the US government can ream it for useful information to deploy against political opponents worldwide. He can even get some of that ‘ole “threaten and punish” energy back if he’s got an NSA gig, abusing the power when nobody’s watching. Apart from that, there’s just no role for him in the real technology industry. He’s an ass – and the tech world mostly needs people who aren’t asses at this point in time. Sorry, Steve.

In the meantime, Microsoft’s patsy Board should be publicly humiliated for their clingy reluctance to fire his sorry ass. Nobody in the tech world – and perhaps nobody in the larger, global business landscape – has ever failed so comprehensively at so many new products, over such a period of years, as Steve has. Nobody. It’s an unprecedented losing streak – impressive in its own sad way. And the Board signed on the dotted line for each and every one, by their choice to keep a predatory monopolist in charge of these technology-centric markeitng efforts.

Surface RT? Windows phone? LOL.

Here’s a fun game: add up the hundreds of millions (billions?) in marketing money Steve has burned as he’s tried to pound the world into submission and aquiescence – which is the “marketing strategy” Microsoft has favored since the mid-1990s. Bombast. Obnoxious half-truths. Patronizing, drippy condescention. That’s all Steve’s hallmark style of marketing – and he’s burned great, big piles of shareholder cash doing so for years on all these failed projects. Add it all up – how much of it has been burned? Sure, compared to the tens of billions of illegal monopoly profits from the old Windows scam, it’s a pittance… but still. A few billion here and there, and it begins to add up.

Microsoft’s Board could have donated those wasted billions to charities, or opensource proejcts, or hell they could just have big bonfire in Redmond and literally burn the bills. It’d all be more productive than Steve’s pathetic efforts at launching actualy technology projects… which end up just being painful to watch. It’s like seeing a donkey do his best to master tensor calculus – sort of impressive he’s trying, but totally predetermined outcome: failure. Best he go back to the sorts of things donkeys do well, eh?

In the projects we sponsor and incubate, we go to enormous lengths to ensure there’s not a line of Microsoft code anywhere in the infrastructure. We’re far from alone in this standard. We know that, if we let in even one Microsoft product, it’ll try to leverage itself into a strangehold over our architecture – a stranglehold that will be used to leverage cash from us, and prevent us from using alternative technologies that enable far greater flexibility and creativity. So if one of our junior folks tries to solve a particular problem with a shiny-pretty Microsoft bauble, we give her The Talk: this is how Microsoft works, they give you one shiny thing and if you make the mistake of swallowing it, the hooks come out and you’ll never disgorge it… eventually bleeding out from the massive ruptures it causes as it metastizes and attempts to grow into an Empire of Steve within our systems. Don’t do it. Ever.

Oracle is similarly aggressive about their efforts to colonize and subvert – but they’re honest about it, and claim their code is good enough to make it worth the trade. Right or wrong, you know what you’re getting. Fair enough. Steve’s Microsoft is deceitful, dishonest, mendacious, and entirely willing to trick it’s way into your backend before crashing your future with its efforts to straitjacket you into his closed, failed world. No thanks.

We’re just a little project incubator, nothing really in the larger world. Steve’s got his billions of monopoly-earned, illegal (but washed clean by bribes, err “campaign contributions”) cash to roll around in gleefully, Scrooge McDuck-style. Good on him – he must feel great about himself: “I managed to avoid federal prison for monopolistic felonies, and I got away clean with billions… billions!!!” Good for him. Must be so proud.

But here’s the thing: the world has now moved past Microsoft, as so many of us in the tech world knew it would, sooner or later. Monopolists are a speedbump, a moment in time – they come, and they go. Innovation rolls forward, just like in any living ecosystem. Even the dinosaurs couldn’t survive the big asteroid impacts… and the clever little rodents that came along in their wake. And dinosaurs are creative, flexible, brilliant strategists compared to Steve’s Microsoft – no question there. So we’ve finally worked our way around Steve’s monopolistic roadblock: there’s nothing any tech company does today, anywhere in their infrastructure, that requires – actually requires – a Microsoft product. Nothing. Everything can be done without them… and those of us with long memories go to great lengths to do exactly that.

Each of us is just a little, scurrying rodent doing our best to nurse our babies and stay alive in the shadown of the giant dinosaurs. But there’s lots of us, and we’re quick, and we’re clever, and we’re the future. That big dinosaur – Steve’s Microsoft? It’s time has come, and gone.

~ Baneki Privacy Labs | http://baneki.cultureghost.net | http://twitter.com/Baneki