Posts Tagged ‘Steve Ballmer’

An op-ed piece in The Washington Post by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), which praised President Barack Obama for his Jan. 12 speech at the memorial service honoring those slain in the shootings in Tucson, Ariz., Jan. 8, was the most-shared news link by bloggers, while Apple once again topped the list of most-Tweeted news links, and the most-watched news and politics video on YouTube was footage of flooding in Toowoomba, Australia, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism’s New Media Index for the week of Jan. 17-21.

McCain’s op-ed accounted for 17 percent of news links shared via the blogosphere, and it was followed by: video of a BBC interview with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, appearing for the second week in a row, at 16 percent; another Washington Post op-ed piece, this one by George Will, who wrote that Congress has bequeathed much of its lawmaking power to the presidency and other government agencies in recent years, at 15 percent; health care, at 14 percent; and the economy, at 8 percent.

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The Jan. 8 shootings in Tucson, Ariz., dominated news links shared by bloggers, while new offerings from Google accounted for the most-Tweeted news links, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism’s New Media Index for the week of Jan. 10-14.

The tragedy in Tucson accounted for 57 percent of news links shared via blogs, and it was followed by: the violence in Zimbabwe blamed on followers of President Robert Mugabe, at 15 percent; video of a BBC interview with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, at 10 percent; soccer superstar David Beckham and supermodel wife Victoria Beckham expecting their fourth child, at 5 percent; and an interactive Web page from the Los Angeles Times allowing users to try to balance California’s state budget, at 3 percent.

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Two top executives from public-relations and communications firm Burson-Marsteller will deliver a keynote presentation on digital communications in politics at BlogWorld & New Media Expo 2010 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, joining the previously announced list of keynotes and speakers.

Burson-Marsteller CEO worldwide and Penn Schoen Berland CEO Mark Penn and worldwide vice chairman Karen Hughes will discuss results from a study of social-media use during the midterm-election races, analyzing how candidates used Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and texting, and how they integrated their messages on other sites and social-media outlets. The keynote is scheduled for Friday, Oct. 15 at noon PT.

Penn has served as a senior adviser to Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Bill Ford, President Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair. He is the author of best-selling book Microtrends, a regular guest on cable television, and a columnist for The Wall Street Journal.

Hughes served as under secretary of state for public diplomacy from August 2005-December 2007 and as counselor to President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2002, where advising the president on policy and communications.

ABC’s Charlie Gibson fired up his Webcam to interview Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer about his company’s new search engine Bing. (Here’s the CNet review).

Ballmer was only cautiously optimistic that Bing can top Google at its own best game. But Ballmer says he’s certain his company has a clearly different point of view on how to do a web search.

Here’s the first part of Gibson’s interview:

The “World News” webcast is available every weekday at 3pmET as a live stream embedded on the homepage of ABCNEWS.com. After the initial streaming, the webcast is available for replay on ABCNEWS.com, as a video podcast on iTunes, via RSS readers and on mobile phones.

So, in addition to CES, there’s this other conference going on in Las Vegas this week. In fact, CES is sharing some of the same space, the Sands/Venetian Expo Center, with the Adult Entertainment eXpo. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer brought it up last night at the start of his keynote. Ballmer joked that Bill Gates had messaged him to make sure went to CES, “not that other convention.”

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, his first time at CES, gave the pre-opening night keynote at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. Since we haven’t followed the intricacies of Microsoft (except when it was the MS in MSNBC) we’ll leave it to VentureBeat to give you the full story.

I did Tweet the event (on, of all devices, an Apple iPhone). The most recent tweets are up top:

• Ballmer on Trends: “screens and displays will be everywhere.” Communications will move seamlessly. Voice, video, and text.

• New for XBOX: 1 vs. 100 coming to Live Experience in March. Kodu, community platform, to launch. Where users create their own games.

• Best holiday ever for XBOX. Expecting “accelerated progress.” Zune social now has 2 million members. Two new titles in Halo series in ’09

• After Windows 7 demo there’s a musical interlude from Tripod. That makes Microsoft ultra-cool. Not easy to incorporate xbox in lyrics.

• Ballmer on Windows Mobile: 20 million windows mobile phones sold in the last year…As I Tweet this from my iPhone.

• Ballmer: Windows Live enhancements include deals with facebook and Dell.

• Ballmer announces Windows 7 beta to be made available worldwide on Friday.

• Ballmer: “At this time economically, the choice that offers the most sense is the PC. That’s why I am a PC.”

• Ballmer: Bringing together PC, TV & phone and the Internet “cloud” is the last step to connectivity. Windows is the way to get there.

• Ballmer: “It’s no longer about the desktop.” Computer, phone, and TV are part of a “Single, seamless ecosystem.”

• Ballmer: “so this is CES.” Talks about Gates’ “incredible work” across the globe. Jokes that he ignores Jerry Yang’s Facebook friend reqs

• A CES “rap” preceeds Steve Ballmer keynote in packed Palazzo ballroom at the Venetian. What recession?

Internet exec Ross Levinsohn has called a recent Times of London report that Microsoft and Yahoo signed a $20 billion deal for the latter’s search business “total fiction,” according to AllThingsD.

The article said that the other key players, including Microsoft and Yahoo reps, all backed up that comment, for numerous reasons: first, no one is talking, according to both companies. But more than that, Yahoo’s current total market cap is around $16 billion, so why Microsoft would pay $20 billion for just a piece of the company is beyond comprehension.

None of this means that a deal still won’t go down in the future, despite what Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says to the contrary, and despite the fact that Jerry Yang is finally leaving.

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said last night while in Australia that a Yahoo acquisition is no longer under consideration—and that’s no matter what Jerry Yang may be saying to the press.

VentureBeat reports that Yahoo’s stock price has plummeted another 15 percent today, as reports of the “non-news” circulated around after rumors earlier in the week that the two companies were in fact talking again.

“Look, we made an offer, we made another offer,” Ballmer said yesterday at the Committee for Economic Development of Australia in Sydney. “It was clear that Yahoo didn’t want to sell the business to us, and we moved on… We tried at one point to do a partnership around search, not advertising. That didn’t work either, so we moved on, and they moved on.

“We are not interested in going back and re-looking at an acquisition,” he said. “I don’t know why they would be either, frankly.”

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that in the end, his company may be the only one with a chance to rival Google in search over the long term, although he also acknowledged it will take “several more years and a whole lot of money,” according to CNET News.

“It’s a five-year task,” he said in the report. “It’s a long-term task.”

He said that Microsoft will have to figure out how to change the experience and the economics of search. “You have to redefine the category,” Ballmer said. “We’ve taken some steps in that direction… you don’t really brute force your way into any market,” he said. We wonder what Netscape, Stac Electronics, and Caldera must think of that comment. (I’m probably dating myself with that one.)

According to new data from Hitwise, Google continued to grab Internet search market share at a record pace during the month of July, with Microsoft’s MSN search engine taking the biggest hit as a result, Macworld reports.

Despite Steve Ballmer‘s fiery bluster about MSN and Windows Live, Google accounted for 70.77 percent of all online search engine queries in the U.S. for the four weeks ending July 26, Hitwise said Tuesday. That’s a significant jump over the 64 percent share Google had at the same time last year. Meanwhile, MSN is down to just 5.36% of all U.S. search queries, down from 8.79 percent one year ago and 10.35 percent back in January of 2007.

The report said that the decline in U.S. search share may be one reason Microsoft “was so keen to acquire Yahoo’s search technology.” Google’s nifty Beijing Olympics graphic (pictured) can’t hurt either.