Steve Ballmer: Who left this man in charge?

This falls fully in the realm of opinion.

After reading Steve's ridiculous very weak defense of Vista to the angry mom yesterday reported here at Morning Paper I'm left wondering yet again why is the man in charge at Microsoft?

As reported on Morning Paper, a mother of a teenage girl was extremely disappointed in her experience after upgrading from Windows XP to Vista and subsequently upgraded downgraded back to XP after just two days with the much ballyhooed new Vista OS.

To quote our earlier post:

---"I'm one of those early adopters of Vista," said Yvonne Genovese, an analyst who was interviewing Ballmer along with fellow analyst David Smith on stage at a conference forum. "My daughter comes in one day and says, 'Hey Mom, my friend has Vista, and it has these neat little things called gadgets -- I need those.'" Said Ballmer: "I love your daughter." "You're not going to like her mom in about two minutes," said Genovese, while the crowd laughed.

After the woman explained her frustrations to Steve, the head of the largest software company in the world, had this mealy mouthed answer for some very legitimate concerns voiced other places about the lack of "wow" factor of Vista.

"Users appreciate the value that we put into Vista," he said. But, as with earlier operating system releases, "there is always a tension between the value that end users see -- and frankly, that software developers see -- and the value that we can deliver to IT."

Steve gets up and, after almost 10 months, can't even defend the lack of "wow" in a public forum. And who cares about IT when he is talking to a real, end user consumer.

And herein lies my problem.

You all know I have not downgraded upgraded to Vista as of yet. Microsoft has done nothing to convince me that I absolutely, positively have to as far as I can tell. A pretty UI and a few more security features haven't gotten me over the hurdle of the, in my opinion, cost to value. The cost is simply to high for the little value I feel I would be receiving by going from XP to Vista.

And Steve Ballmer said nothing that would change my mind.

I find it hard to believe this man should be leading a company who can't talk intelligently and persuasively about the "crown jewel" of their product line without coming off as a dofus who doesn't know seem to have been anywhere near a computer running the OS.

Steve really needs a marathon session (or two or three) with the folks in Marketing or Microsoft really needs to get a better "pitchman" as CEO for the company. They can't  let him keep putting foot-in-mouth if they really want to sell folks still using XP on this whole Vista thing.