Steve Ballmer made a bright and bold impression at Microsoft’s financial analyst meet up yesterday. His appearance had a mix of emotions, ranging from dreams to disappointments, promises to pans.
In terms of panning, the Redmond CEO had some hard words to say about its immediate rival, Google. As a matter of pure fact, the outgoing executive publicly slammed its Mountain View based competitor, saying that Google’s practices need to be discussed with competition authorities.
No surprises here, considering Redmond very recently relaunched its Scroogled campaign.
Ballmer explained that Microsoft is currently the only company in the world that is actually competing with Google in the search engine market — no mean feat, it must be noted. But regulatory and competition authorities need to be on the lookout for Google practices:
“I do believe that Google’s practices are worthy of discussion with competition authority, and we have certainly discussed them with competition authorities. I don’t think their practices are getting less meritorious of discussion.
We’ve highlighted some of their bad practices in our advertising, in our discussions with regulators, the bundling that they’re doing with YouTube and Google Maps and some other things. Anyway, suffice it to say that I think they need pressure from competition authority. I think they need pressure in the marketplace.”
Seems like no love lost between both technology giants!
But what Ballmer said does indeed carry quite some merit. Microsoft has invested millions (even billions, over the years) in making Bing a truly powerful search engine.
And while it has made quite a few strides in the United States in the recent past, Ballmer assured the audience that the company is trying all it can to ensure that the Bing service is as good in any market around the world, as it is in its home turf.
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People at Microsoft have really been pushing this issue lately, but we all know that if the situation was reversed, no one would have to push the issue of investigating Microsoft. They’d already be all over Microsoft, but we’ve reached the point where everything is “as long as it’s not Microsoft doing it, it’s ok.” They need to investigate that how every Google product you access prompts you to download Chrome. There is an ad for icon for IE on their tools, but nothing that says “you should not be using this browser, download ours.”
In my opinion, Google is worse now than Microsoft ever was. When I noticed that I was starting to turn into a Geeple (Google sheep), I knew then that I had to back away. Just because everyone else followed along didn’t mean that I should too, without question. And when Google stated that we shouldn’t expect any online privacy, that was the coup de grâce!