Ballmer Says Google's Growth Is 'Insane'

eldavojohn writes "Steve Ballmer spoke to the Seattle PI this week, commenting that Google's pace of employee growth is 'insane,' and the company has few successful businesses outside of Internet search and advertising. He referred to Google's non-search efforts as 'cute.' Google's current number of employees is nearly doubling each year. 'I don't really know that anybody's proven that a random collection of people doing their own thing actually creates value.' Mr. Ballmer went on complain that, in general, competition for good programmers has become an issue. Even 'hedge funds' are looking for skilled coders, making the HR fight between the two companies that much more challenging."

The Infinite Monkey Theorem

[brsmith4]

I don't really know that anybody's proven that a random collection of people doing their own thing actually creates value.

If a million monkeys randomly typing away on a million typewriters will eventually write Shakespear, I imagine that thousands of PhD's, post-grads, and other well-educated monkeys engaged in semi-random but structured projects, working on high-powered workstations will be able to deliver as well.

There's even a proof!

The Infinite Monkey Theorem [wikipedia.org]

Re:Microsoft jokes aside,

[HomerJ]

That's what "innovation" is. Taking someone else's idea, improving on it and making it useful. Coming up with your own ideas is called invention.

Re:Slasdotters Say Ballmer Is 'Insane'

[truthsearch]

Well, no. Only Windows and Office bring profit. But every product they make brings in millions to billions in revenue. The problem for them is not enough revenue and/or very high expenses. XBox, for example, brings in billions, but they have had to spend billions to convince (and pay) developers to write games on it and to convince the public it's worth buying.

Re:Let the chair throwing commence

[Anonymous Coward]

Idiot. If you're going to make AYBABTU references, get them right. Otherwise it loses whatever shred of humor it might have had in the first place.

All your CODER are belong to us.

Re:Slasdotters Say Ballmer Is 'Insane'

[Billosaur]

Oh, Balmer's complaint is hugely hypocritical. Google also has huge sums of cash from their stock.

Exactly. When was the last time Microsoft's stock was over $100, let alone $400? Ballmer's more envious than anything -- he keeps wondering why no one at Google is reading the résumés he keeps sending.

Google will eventually hit a wall if they don't come up with other big revenue streams. And I think that's why they hire so many smart people. Even if only one in a thousand comes up with a great idea it'll all pay off.

I don't think so. I think they're pushing the wall further and further, making things less profitable for their competitors. The extra ideas they come up with, good or not, aren't hedges against a collapse but part of a strategy to quietly worm their way into every part of the Internet. Face it: Google the search engine is near ubiquitous now. If they come up with other things (mobile phones, operating systems, etc.) that attain that kind of ubiquity, eventually they'll be able to charge for them and people won't give it a second though, since they will have become dependent on them.

Re:Google looks more bloated

[truthsearch]

I didn't say market cap. I stated revenue. WRT revenue, it's irrelevant how quickly it's reached as long as it's set to continue. Sure Google's stock is bloated. But Microsoft has more than 7 times the number of employees and only 4 times the revenue.

Re:Slasdotters Say Ballmer Is 'Insane'

[um... Lucas]

When was the last time Microsoft's stock was over $100, let alone $400? Ballmer's more envious than anything -- he keeps wondering why no one at Google is reading the résumés he keeps sending.

No offense, but don't start investing.

A companies value is NOT reflected by the share price alone. It's the share price TIMES the number of outstanding shares.

Quick math:

Googles market cap is 137.43 billion; share price is 441.96; it has approximately 311 million shares circulating.

Microsofts market cap is 267.23 billion; share price is 27.31; it has appromately 9.7 billion shares circulating.

It's been argued that one of the main reasons that Google trades at such a high P/E ratio is because they've restricted the number of shares circulating... Like, if they split the stock to match the shares outstanding of other companies, there'd be so many shares circulating that the price would drop, not only just because there'd be more shares as a result of the splits, but because there would actually enough to fill the demand.

Not trully related to the discussion, but related to your comment...

Re:Slasdotters Say Ballmer Is 'Insane'

[YU Nicks NE Way]

Windows and Office are pretty much the only things making Microsoft that cash. Nearly every other portion of the company either contributes very little to the bottom line, or actually loses Microsoft money.

Um...sorry, but that just isn't true. Exchange alone make the company $1.2-1.6B per year, and SQL server (again, alone) does even better. Neither of those two products is part of Windows or of Office, yet I think most companies would be extraordinarily happy with either income stream.

The problem most Slashbots have here is that Windows and Office make such an unbelievable amount of money that it's hard to see that MS has a lot of other products in its stables making boatloads of money.

Re:And aside from that... Balmer is right

[Anonymous Coward]

linux supports more devices 'out of the box' than any other operating system out there.

Correction: Linux supports more out of date and legacy devices 'out of the box' than any other operating system out there.