Category: Web Life

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Steve Ballmer – Brash, Passionate, but definitely not Stupid

There was an interesting story in today’s news about Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s outburst at an iPhone-carrying Microsoft employee.  Apparently, Ballmer was addressing a company gathering when the employee pulled his iPhone out to take a picture of him.  Ballmer went nuts.  He grabbed the phone, ridiculed the employee publicly, then pretended to stomp on the device.  You can read the full story over on Engadget.  There is even an alleged photo taken as Ballmer reached for the device.

Ballmer is an interesting character.  Certainly there is plenty of evidence on YouTube of his over-the-top antics as he revs up Microsofties with his ranting and raving, screaming and yelling.  And who could forget his chant of “Developers! Developers! Developers!” at a gathering of software developers, as he tried to make the point that Microsoft’s success was partly due to its army of, well, developers.  It’s even spawned a remix version.

Even back on the very early days of Microsoft, Ballmer was seen dressed up as a cheesy salesperson, doing the whole “How much would you expect to pay?” spiel as he promoted Windows 1.0, throwing away dollar bills in an over-the-top display of sales showmanship.  If you don”t know much about Steve Ballmer or where he fits into the Microsoft story, I’d recommend you watch the excellent video series by Robert X Cringely, “Triumph of the Nerds“.  It’s a wonderful record of the first 20 years of the personal computer revolution, and if you call yourself a geek, you absolutely should see it.

I got thinking about Ballmer as I read through the comments on the Engadget blog.  One person made the comment that Ballmer was stupid. Another came to his defence, noting that Ballmer was overly brash and passionate, but not stupid.  The Sydney Morning Herald even ran a story with a psychologist analysing Ballmer’s crazy antics, concluding that Ballmer isn’t crazy, just an attention seeker.

I actually met Ballmer once. I was at a fairly intimate Microsoft function in Sydney for the launch of Office 2003, and I managed to sit in the very front row directly in front of Ballmer as he gave his address.  He spoke to the small crowd in a very reserved tone, talking earnestly about the development of the new software, and giving some background into the challenges and successes of getting it to market. I was actually quite impressed with Ballmer, and was struck by his obvious passion and belief in what he was doing. When he finished his talk, he asked if there were any questions, so I stuck my hand up and asked one.  To be honest, I thought it was a bit of a curly question and I was sort of hoping to stump him a little.  To the contrary, Ballmer looked right at me and fired back a detailed and well-thought out answer, explaining how Microsoft was addressing the issue I’d raised.  He outlined three aspects to his answer and confidently explained each one.  There was no fumbling or dodging the question. He knew what he was talking about and clearly had given a lot of thought to the issues I asked about. I was actually a little surprised at just how well he responded, and at the quality of his answer.

I was impressed not only by the clarity and detail of his answers, but also by the fact that, as CEO of Microsoft, the intricacies of how the software works and a detailed answer to the question I asked (which was related to how Microsoft was addressing the issues faced by software training providers and how it was coming up with ways of making it easier for users to learn to use new software versions) were not typically the sorts of things you’d expect the CEO of the company to be so close to.  Ballmer is a hands-on kind of guy and he’s clearly passionate about Microsoft. And he knows his stuff.  As the Engadget commenter remarked, he may be brash and passionate, but he is clearly not stupid.

I’ve seen the thoughtful, intelligent and focussed side of Steve Ballmer, and I’ve seen the outrageous, wild and crazy side of Steve Ballmer.  Perhaps the yelling and screaming, the running around the stage like a sweaty crazy person, the (pretend) iPhone smashing behaviour, the silly comments about the iPhone, the blunt denigration of anything non-Microsoft, is all a bit distracting from just how intelligent Ballmer can really be.

Most people who read this blog will know that I’m not much of a Microsoft fan, but as the Engadget commenter says, “You know, I like Ballmer – he’s brash and in your face but he believes in what he does and has the guts to be passionate about it. I respect that.”

Me too.  Stay crazy Steve.

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Cache me if you can

I’ve been in a few conference presentations lately where the topic of geocaching has come up.  Usually, the presenter asks the question “who knows about geocaching?” and about three hands go up.  The presenter then tries to give a quick explanation about it for those who haven’t heard about it – “it’s like a treasure hunt”, or “it’s a game where people hide things for others to find”, or other similar explanations.  While these summaries are mostly accurate, they don’t really give enough information and many people seem interested to know more about it.

Thanks to a long involvement with 4WDing, I’ve been playing with GPS and digital mapping for a while now, and I’ve done quite a bit of geocaching over the last few years, including placing our own.  When I started I was using a Garmin GPS V, a great little GPS that can basically do it all – multiple datum switching, realtime path tracking, waypoint extrapolation – you name it, it does it.  Trouble is, it’s not connected to the web, so “going geocaching” had to be a preplanned activity.  I had to look up geocaches in advance on the official website at www.geocaching.com, print out all the information sheets, and then manually enter the GPS coordinates into the Garmin.  Once the cache was found, when I got back home I had to go back to the website to report the cache found.

Lately, I’ve been having a lot of fun with a terrific little iPhone app called, simply, Geocaching.  On the 3G connected and GPS enabled iPhone, you can pull the device out of your pocket, press the Find Nearby Caches button and it will take your current GPS coordinates, go to the website and find all the nearby caches. Pick one, and the app will grab all the relevant data, draw a map, plot your position and the position of the cache, give you a compass to guide you, and it will lead you right to the cache. Once you find it, you have the ability to report the find directly in the app, making it a seamless end-to-end experience. Although the iPhone app lacks some of the more sophisticated features that a “real” GPS offers, the convenience factor that comes from being able to do the vast majority of geocaches anywhere, anytime, without any special preparation, makes up for these shortcomings.  It’s not free, but for me, has been well worth the $12.99 it cost me on the Apple app store.

Linda and I were out walking today so, geeks that we are, I pulled the iPhone out and did a quick search to find that there were two caches within 500 metres of where we were. We found them both of course, but on the second one, I made this short video that hopefully explains a little more about geocaching and how it works.

If you haven’t tried geocaching yet, give it a go.  It gets you out into the fresh air, is an interesting use of technology, and most of all it’s great fun.  I reckon it offers some terrific opportunities in education, and is a way to integrate technology in a really hands-on way that brings a whole lot of skills together – mapreading, fitness, resourcefulness, even a bit of maths. I’ve always had a hard time getting it introduced into schools because a class set of GPS units can be a bit expensive, but with the development of apps like Geocaching for the iPhone (and similar apps for other devices, such as Geocache Navigator on Nokia S60 phones) maybe it’s not such a stretch for kids to have these tools on their own phones instead.

What’s that? What do you mean your school bans phones!?

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So Much Silicon

Being a bit of a technology geek, one place I’ve always wanted to visit is Silicon Valley.  Stretching southwards from San Francisco to San Jose, the Bay Area and Silicon Valley are home to many of the world’s major computing and technology organisations. Birthplace of companies like Apple, Adobe, Google and Twitter, breeding ground for new ideas at universities like Stanford, and host to big annual tech events like MacWorld and WWDC; the SF Bay Area really is a slice of geek Mecca.

So I’m pleased to say that I’ll be spending the next week or so here.  I’m actually here for the Adobe Summer Institute, a 5 day conference and workshops held at Adobe’s San Jose offices as part of their Education Leaders program.  We get to spend all week immersing into the serious end of fun stuff like Photoshop and Flash.

This afternoon I visited Wikispaces, a company based right here in San Fran only a few blocks from my hotel.  Wikispaces put a message out on Twitter a while back asking for volunteers in the bay area for anyone interested in taking part in some usability testing for some new Wikispaces features.  Purely on the off-chance, I dropped them a line and mentioned I’d be in SF in mid July, and Adam from Wikispaces replied back to say sure, drop in and be part of it.  So I found my way down to their office this afternoon, met Adam, James and Jess and spent about 90 minutes doing some really interesting usability testing, talking about some cool upcoming stuff in their products and having a great chat about usability, interface design and web navigation in general.  It’s always good to chat with super smart people doing cool stuff, so I was really pleased to have had the opportunity to drop by.

I had a bit of a wander around Union Park, dropped into the Apple Store on Stockton to leech a bit of free wifi while I listened to some of their free presentations. Then it was back to the hotel for a couple of hours of sleep before going for a walk through Chinatown and up to North Beach.  The place was buzzing… but I really do hate traveling alone!  There’s something about sitting in a restaurant on your own that is just kind of pathetic… Instead, I bought a couple of hot pizza slices and kept wandering, taking in the atmosphere, trying to appear only slightly less pathetic.

Anyway, I’ll try to put up a few short posts while I’m here just in case anyone is interested.  Big day of sightseeing tomorrow, and still trying to wrangle a visit to the TWiT Cottage on Sunday to meet @leolaporte… not sure if that will come off or not, but it’d be kinda fun if it does…