之前D6 Conference，很多記者開玩笑說Ballmer口中只要一說出G….開頭的那家公司，表情就會非常痛苦。我是記得Opening Interview其中一段，Ballmer故意Goooooo了一下(拖長尾音)，引來全場一陣爆笑。
不過昨天那一串導報導蒐集中，Steve Ballmer在Financial Times的Q&A中表現得很不一樣，被記者問道Microsoft這幾年進軍網路搜尋領域，學到了什麼，他作了這樣回答：
FT: What lessons are there from Microsoft’s late move into search?
MR BALLMER: I think we have to keep agile. I do fault us for the speed with which we dove into search, primarily because we didn’t see the business model. And I give Google credit for innovating in the business model around search. They did a nice job on that, and that’s why they won.
I think one of the mistakes we made, and I think we’ve said this before, is having a five-year gap between Windows releases did calcify our ability to react to anything, because there was a five-year window basically where a big part of our R&D resources were fairly locked in. It doesn’t mean everything should be a six-month cycle, I don’t believe in that, but we’ve got to have more flexibility in our R&D commitments than that.
我相信檢討、內部歸因，才是進步的原動力。在Microsoft，很少聽到大家在討論市場景氣。「哎呀這季雖然下滑，還不是景氣如何如何，競爭者如何如何…」那都只是輸家會掛在嘴邊的話。景氣和競爭者是要插在地上當benchmark，然後beat beat beat。
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