It's cold again.

Steve Ballmer says I owe him money because I use Linux. Ballmer says Linux uses Microsoft's "intellectual property". Yet, he hasn't said what code or given an example. If you don't remember, Steve Ballmer is the same guy who comes out at conferences screaming like he's trying to call a pig and jumping around like he's on fire. I don't know if he's a nut or a hyperactive, over-zealous hype-man. Never the less, if he thinks we Linus users own him money, prove it or hush.

To be honest, Ballmer's comments do strike me as desperation from M$. I am not a M$ fan. Let me say that up front. I am sick of having to use M$ for a hand full of applications. So what I'm about to say may come off slanted, but I really do think that M$'s days of top software-dog is almost over. Why? Well, they have an OS and an Office program. Who needs to upgrade Office? If you know of one company or person who needs to upgrade, please email me. Who needs to upgrade their OS? Every single Windows user. Why? Security. But I don't think most will. Vista is a strange, costly beast. It requires a top of the line computer. Sure, you can get it working on many different kinds of computers, but to get the full, pretty Vista going, you need special hard drives, lots of ram, and new video cards. If I'm going to spend that kind of money, I'd get a Mac. I think most people will. Plus, Vista is heavy with DMR and all kinds of tricky moving to another computer policies and all that icky stuff that makes it harder for regular computer users to use. So from a software point of view, what does M$ really have going for them in the future?

While I'm talking about M$, let's talk about the Zune. The Zune: It comes in brown for a reason. Why is that thing so big and has less battery life than an iPod? It doesn't work with iTunes. While I am not a fan of iTunes, if you are going to make a portable MP3 player that can buy songs, you need to have it work with iTunes. And if you are going to buy music for the Zune, you can't just pay a $1 and get a song. You have to buy points. A MP3 costs like 77 points and 77 points cost 99 cents. So you'll always own M$ money unless you buy like 450 MP3s (I heard that on an episode of TWiT). M$ really did miss a once in a life time opportunity. All they had to do was make something that could work with iTunes. That was it. Then everybody would have benefited with a legitimate alternative to an iPod. Given the choice, I'd probably go with an iPod, but I'd love to be given a choice.

When it comes to M$'s recent decisions, greed seems to be the biggest factor, survival a close second, and smarts no where on the table.  ¶ 5:55 PM