Microsoft Ups Online War, Says Google's 'Failing' 220
CWmike writes "Raising the stakes in its war of words, Microsoft said on Tuesday that Google simply doesn't understand what businesses need, and is failing at pushing its way into the enterprise. In this edited version of his interview with Computerworld, Microsoft's senior director of Online Services, Tom Rizzo, talks about Google's privacy issues, scanning user data, the difference between consumer and corporate needs, and his doubts about Google surviving in the enterprise space. He also said he thinks Google will be shocked to see Microsoft's momentum into the enterprise cloud sector."
meh (Score:5, Insightful)
when your shit stinks, focus attention on someone else.
What passes for dreams at Microsoft: (Score:3, Funny)
Translation: "I wish I worked for a functional company that has a technically knowledgeable CEO."
Re:What passes for dreams at Microsoft: (Score:5, Insightful)
I think we ALL would be surprised to see Microsoft have momentum into the enterprise cloud sector, or any other server related sector...
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They almost certainly have more servers deployed than anybody, thanks to SharePoint, ActiveDirectory, etc.
Re:What passes for dreams at Microsoft: (Score:4, Funny)
They most certainly have more servers deployed than anybody, thanks to poor scaling and higher need for reboots.
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Not sure what SMB stands for?
But, for the past couple decades, any server room I've dealt with, for any major data throughput (mostly Oracle stuff, and application servers like Web Logic) all are running back in the day on Sun...and these days, most of them are all RHEL.
Sure worker bees
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99.9% (0.999) is three nines, not one nine.
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Their cloud seems to be an ugly combination of Amazon VM cloud and Google App Engine. It looks like it is designed to charge as much as possible (IE you have to choose a VM size, and I suspect pay for it no matter how much you need it). All of the things that people complain about Google, they are there in M$ offering (Just look at how they want you to store data. #1, use Blob, #
Re:meh (Score:5, Informative)
when your shit stinks, focus attention on someone else.
It's more than just that. There was a time when declarations like this from Microsoft would actually garner them more business and fulfill their "prophecies" of such. It seems some at Microsoft still think they have that pull, but reality says such efforts by them are largely far less effective than back in the 90's when it used to work. It's all part and parcel to their extravagant claims that they dont/wont cite figures for, and claims of things lacking on Google's end that have already existed for ages.
Nor does it seem he's got much of any idea what cloud computing is anyway... he compares it to their very botched acquisition of Hotmail in 1997 (err... 1998? Nope... 1997 guy!). I was there (UUNet*) when that acquisition completed. In some ways, their actions then were very much like these current ones. They were deep into extolling the virtues of Windows NT Server, started gaining some marketshare, and got lambasted for not using their own product for Hotmail (as well as being lambasted for all the engineers there who were still running OS/2). They switched Hotmail to Windows, with a massive increase in machines (hundredfold, if memory serves), and still had massive issues with their setup not scaling. Sadly, them extolling how much better they were than the competition, even in light of the reality of their own problems with their own platform handling such traffic, worked pretty well, and Windows Server continued to make inroads.
This is more of the same... claim the (very premature) death of a competitor, the "far better" features of your own product, talk about your competitor's privacy issues when they are willing (and have, numerous times) to sell your data to anyone who's a "Business Partner" and on and on. Nothing new... except this time (as with similar cases recently) it's not working the way it did in the past.
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*For those who don't know or didnt remember, "we" at UUNet actually provided much of the services for MSN... backbone, dialup, routing, and many others (and AOL for that matter... AlterDial was actually ours too). Some who remember that day and age may also remember that there were a few non-dedicated numbers (our overflow numbers) shared by UUNet, AOL and MSN... the logins would determine how we routed them and what service we presented. That's how a few "outsiders" started making the connection between it all.
And if you believe this (Score:5, Informative)
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I have a bridge to sell ya!
By 'bridge' you really mean another Microsoft middleware product, don't you?
Re:And if you believe this (Score:4, Funny)
I won't sleep until it is.
Re:And if you believe this (Score:4, Funny)
I'll fight for my right to it... oh wait!
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Succesful troll is failing (Score:5, Insightful)
Given the market share that Google has in contextual advertising, I tend to disagree with Microsoft's conclusion. Of course I could be wrong, but I highly doubt it.
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has any fortune 500 company gone Google Apps? (Score:3, Interesting)
i know government agencies have but that is mostly because it's a pain in the a$$ dealing with union employees
Re:has any fortune 500 company gone Google Apps? (Score:5, Informative)
Don't know about Fortune 500 but if you look at:
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/customers.html [google.com]
you can filter by business type - and there are some well-known names there.
I can't say I'm surprised. The value for money versus any Microsoft product is night and day - you get more services for about a third the price. (The balance has started to tilt back; when I first said that the closest alternative was hosted Exchange from a major reseller, that's not the case any more).
Know what? I think Ballmer knows, somewhere in his wizened black little heart, that quite a few of Microsoft's products are not actually particularly good.
That's not been a huge problem in the past, mainly because the competition was frequently just as awful and even if it wasn't, their position in the market meant "nobody got fired for buying Microsoft" became the mantra for many IT directors of the late '90s-early '00s, just as "nobody got fired for buying IBM" was the mantra for their predecessors. Now we're finally starting to see some healthy competition opening up in parts of the industry where previously there was almost none, and my God it's a breath of fresh air.
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In Europe the demands on privacy and data are much different to what the US is offering and forget about China.
I know some US companies will work under the so-called Safe Haven rules but lets be realistic, once it's in the US there are numerous agencies that claim to have access because they protect the homeland.
And what happens when the company that gave the Safe
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Very easily.
The real world is a lot more pragmatic than a lot of people on /. would like to admit. You're not expected to physically go and meet everyone you buy services from and analyse how their product is delivered with a fine-toothed comb, and you're certainly not expected to run everything yourself. It's quite adequate for them to offer a contract which says "we'll keep your data confidential".
You can't stop someone suing you if they want to but you can show that contract to a judge and demonstrate
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It could be rather bad for a company to be found in breach.
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Spoken like someone who has never had to deal with European (and French and German and Italian) privacy laws. to say it is a PITA is an understatement of gigantic proportions.
That having been said, i am guessing that many online vendors have contingencies for this exact issue. (server hosted in the EU or country in quesiton. It would still be a pain, but less than you might think.
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Google?
Re:has any fortune 500 company gone Google Apps? (Score:4, Interesting)
i know government agencies have but that is mostly because it's a pain in the a$$ dealing with union employees
By "it's a pain in the a$$ dealing with union employees" you really mean "because bribing a government employee is harder than a corporate CIO," right?
Government agencies are looking to cut costs right now, given that their budgets are likely to be slashed in the coming years, and Google services are cheaper than rolling your own. Government IT workers are digging in their heels, both to preserve their jobs and to avoid having to be retrained, but the momentum these days in the public sector is going cheap, and that means Google.
For all the ranting about special interests and lobbying in the public sector, private companies have even less accountability. There is nothing preventing the MS sales rep from taking the company CIO on a complimentary golf game and getting an exclusive contract, even if Google or someone else could save the company millions.
Enterprise space? (Score:2)
"Number one, meet me in ten forward!"
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I was on a cruise liner where the bridge was on the forward area of deck 13.
Seems kind of prophetic in a number of ways really...
Re:Enterprise space? (Score:5, Funny)
"Fire at will!"
Just once, I wish Worf would have pulled out his phaser and shot at Riker.
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Everybody knows he'd have fired at Crusher......for the lulz
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You must watch some very... interesting porn.
Momentum isn't everything (Score:3, Insightful)
He also said he thinks Google will be shocked to see Microsoft's momentum into the enterprise cloud sector.
Maybe, but that's ignoring the already massive size of Google in "the cloud." The only thing better than being about to unleash a can of whoop-ass is to be currently whooping ass.
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Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
What enterprise momentum in the cloud sector? What CIO is seriously going to shunt critical infrastructure into some cloud environment? Seriously? Who? Backups...maybe? Personal photos and email? Of course. But, trade secrets? Human Resources info? Salaries and performance evaluations? To the cloud? Really?
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To the cloud? Really?
Yes.
And it sucks! I hate the whole cloud concept.. but it has achieved buzzword status so expect it to be everywhere fairly shortly..
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And like most buzz words, it will be nowhere shortly after that.
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Grid computing achieved buzzword status too...among suits. People dumped money into it and it fizzled. Who is still doing grid computing...except for SETI or Folding? Eventually, this will go the same way.
I suspect that it will take one thorough breach of just one of these cloud platforms to make everyone realize that this is bad bad idea. Even just one employee accessing "the cloud" from their home PC that happens to be rooted with a keylogger installed is enough. Then that delicious "access from anyw
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The problem is, it's already everywhere. Every time you use virtual machines, san's, offsite backups, whatever, you're working in magic cloud land as far as the phbs are concerned.
Since that's all it takes, just take the amorphous buzzwordy shit and turn it around on them, and sell them on the "local cloud" a wholly incoherent idea if you really understand the point, but one that the absurdly vague nature of the buzzword makes completely plausible.
I did that earlier this year, and got myself a nice new blad
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"Local Cloud"
That's pure genius! I am actually going to start using it.
Scary thing is, I can _actually_ see it working! Sell it as a "cloud based solution without the liability" or something :D
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Sure, I talked to the person who handles MS at my company. There are many clients asking for Office365 with hosted files and BPOS are having trouble keeping up with demand I'm told.
It could all be bull, but I don't think so. Especially BPOS. I have som experience there and it seems to me like they're stalling, probably to get everything up and running.
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Yes, and it's been that way for years. Taleo, for instance, does HR (they call it "talent management", but whatever), and they handle everything you mentioned, including compensation.
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Two issues at stake here:
1. Outsourcing is not new. Outsourcing of something which includes confidential information isn't that new either. If it wasn't, there would be no such thing as external companies providing HR advice, payroll services, there wouldn't be patent lawyers, independent accountants....
2. The great majority of businesses aren't Fortune 500 megacorps. They're small businesses - under 100 staff. They almost certainly outsource a number of services anyway - and they certainly don't hav
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The same CIOs that will gladly ship stuff off to some cut rate outsourcing service half way across the planet.
You have a rediculously rosey view of how corporations work and why they do things.
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Not rosy. But I do expect CIOs to project a bit more foresight than this. But with all of the Chinese hacking and Wikileaks in the news, maybe it will fan the paranoia and knock some sense into them. I'd love to see "the cloud" go poof in a new Red cyber-scare.
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You would actually be surprised. A lot of cloud providers will say, "trust us, we use passwords and encryption and even electronic locks for physical security", and clients will happily hand over their data. They even pitch SOX and HIPAA compliance without even citing the relevant parts of the law.
So, people trust cloud providers without looking at the SLA. Then when the cloud provider goes bankrupt, all their private HR info, their customer sales rolls and such now is public info, and there is not a sin
No different than any other data center. (Score:3)
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This. I had one twit looking for a sysadmin who wanted me to put his entire business "in the Cloud". I asked him what his product was. He couldn't tell me. But he wanted all of his infrastructure "in the Cloud" - intranet, development, production, Everything!! I pleaded ignorance and got off the phone.
No serious CIO or sysadmin puts all their critical services and ultra sensitive data on someone else's hardware, trusting their entire future to Company Z's business plan. Hell, I didn't hear about *any*
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Well, sure. But notice: just because the CIO *wouldn't* doesn't mean he *shouldn't*.
Let's consider a hypothetical situation where you as new CIO walk into a company with a really dysfunctional IT environment. They paid peanuts, they got monkeys, and over the years the monkeys proliferated. Now you're competent and when you look into things you discover that the organization is a sitting duck; it's got security holes all over the place and nothing but monkeys to plug them with.
Why not call in Google? You pu
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What enterprise momentum in the cloud sector? What CIO is seriously going to shunt critical infrastructure into some cloud environment? Seriously? Who? Backups...maybe? Personal photos and email? Of course. But, trade secrets? Human Resources info? Salaries and performance evaluations? To the cloud? Really?
Depends how you define cloud. I love virtualization, and my company (not small at all) does too. It's not about email or online office though, it's about a full blown desktop and storage that you log in as if you were connecting to a Remote Desktop Connection. Your travel laptop with all your files fails? Good thing all those files are actually in the "business cloud", along with all your programs and settings. Just get a new laptop fed-ex'ed or temporarily log in with another machine to the VPN and keep on
Microsoft lecturing anyone on privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
Really?
Google wants all my data. They make no effort at hiding that intent. But I do trust they aren't handing my data over. Microsoft has a specific patent on how to sell my private data, and has handed my private data over the government.
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Really? You trust Google to not hand your data over?
Want to bet? It may take a court order but they will hand it over all the same.
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So you're saying Microsoft isn't going to hand over your data on a court order? Or.. any other company in the US? Really?
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Nope I expect any company to hand over data with a court order. It is foolish to think otherwise.
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It may take a court order but they will hand it over all the same.
As opposed to other telecom companies that hand over data on their customers because the DoJ asked them to?
I don't have a problem with Google for handing over logs when presented with a court order. I may have a problem with the government asking in the first place, and I may take issue with judges effectively signing warrants without looking at them critically because a federal agent cited some nebulous and ill-proven terrorist threat
Re:Microsoft lecturing anyone on privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
There are two precedents.
1 - The government in Brazil wanted information on a group in Brazil circulating kiddie porn via Orkut. Google fought serveral court orders before handing over data. To my knowledge, this is the only time they've ever handed over data.
2 - George W. Bush asked the major search engines to hand over search data with corresponding IP addresses. Google flatly said no while AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft handed over data. If that wasn't enough, Google started anonymizing IP addresses earlier, and started building an off-shore mobile data center than can go into international waters to keep your private data away from the government.
Again, between the two, does Microsoft have a leg to stand on when it comes to critcizing Google here?
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Err, Bing does a better job with privacy. It sanitizes IPs in 6 months versus Google's 9 months. http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10437137-265.html [cnet.com]
Microsoft plans to cut the amount of time it stores the IP addresses associated with search queries from 18 months to six months, in compliance with new European regulations and with a mind to putting pressure on its biggest rival.
Searchers on Bing already have their IP addresses immediately anonymized following a search query, but to comply with a new European Commission directive on Internet privacy the company will delete the IP addresses entirely after six months. Microsoft said it will roll out the new policy over the next 12 to 18 months, however.
Google anonymizes IP addresses after nine months, and deletes IP addresses after 18 months, which the company says is necessary to protect its search results and ads against click fraud and spam.
Re:Microsoft lecturing anyone on privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
Want to bet? It may take a court order but they will hand it over all the same.
The big ballyhoo last year about Privacy and Google's CEO missed the point. It wasn't that that Eric Schmidt was telling us we shouldn't feel the need for privacy. He was warning us that Google gets served with PATRIOT Act requests.
The trusted voice (Score:5, Insightful)
When I want to know what the future trends of online services are, I know I can always count on Microsoft being the one to turn to when I want to know EXACTLY what will be next years abysmal laughingstock of failure will be.
I love how Bing maps only allows streetview to work in IE... how web2.0 of them
Microsoft is trolling, but is also right (Score:2, Insightful)
Google hasn't gotten too far with offering corporate services, and I suspect they aren't that interested. It's one thing to provide a free email service that is based on ad revenue and data mining. But selling that and providing an SLA offering 99.999% up-time is a different market. You have to provide real support and respond to issues - Google has forums for reporting bugs but I can't call them and say "Hey, my gmail isn't working" and get an answer. I can't call them and report that an RSS feed isn't
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For your informaion.... (Score:3)
It's one thing to provide a free email service that is based on ad revenue and data mining.
Hey, guess what ? Google DOES HAVE a "Gmail for enterprise [google.com]" solution., which DOES INCLUDE direct phone and e-mail support [google.com]".
But well, thank you for playing. Please next time, check what you're saying before posting.
There are a couple things... (Score:5, Insightful)
I do know that Microsoft has Azure, but that is all I know about it outside of knowing it exists. I honestly know more about Amazon's could space than Microsoft's. I am no expert and probably not the best and most reliable source of information. I am just a straight up web developer. If a normal web developer like myself has not heard of the Microsoft solutions outside of the name itself but has heard alot about the competition, then I would see that as them being behind the rest of the market since us normal web developers have not heard much about it.
Synopsis: Q: Are you a total failure at your job? (Score:5, Funny)
A: No, I'm super mega awesome and totally deserve more money!
See also the answer to "Hey, hooker, are you a really bad lay?"
No Surprises Here (Score:5, Insightful)
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Translation (Score:2)
Not everybody is dropping office for Google Docs.
Has anyone tried Office 365? Is it any good?
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Where I work, we have both. Shrug.
Re:Translation (Score:4, Interesting)
Has anyone tried Office 365? Is it any good?
I've played around with it [infoworld.com], and my impression is that it is indeed "pretty good," but not necessarily any better than Google Docs or an adequate replacement for the way people do things now.
One thing that bothered me that I don't think I was adequately able to articulate in the article is that it just doesn't feel as good to be doing all my work "in the cloud," i.e. over an Internet connection, as doing it the old-fashioned way. Sure, you can save a document directly to your SharePoint site from within Microsoft Word. But there's no kind of feedback that acknowledges "hey, I'm attempting to save this over the Internet, and anything could happen between here and the server, so sit tight and we'll try to make this work." Instead it just acts like it's the same thing as saving to your local drive, or even to a local server, which it's not. So every now and then I'd experience some unexplained delay and I'd find myself going to the SharePoint site and refreshing things in my browser to make sure everything worked right. And because I was using the same software I'd use to do things "the old-fashioned way," I kept asking myself, "Why do I have to do this on the stupid 'cloud'? Why can't I just save this to my drive and then copy my final draft to the server?" (Of course you can, but then using a "cloud solution" starts to have diminishing returns.)
I think the biggest advantage of Office 365, like BPOS before it, is not having to maintain your own Exchange server. SharePoint can be pretty useful too, but it seems to me that the learning curve required to get it into a form that your company can actually use productively is pretty high. And as far as using the Web-based versions of the Office apps, I I don't rate them very highly [infoworld.com] at all; they certainly aren't much better than Google Docs, unless you really, really need a way to view complex Office documents on the Web (as opposed to using Office).
Who is failing again? (Score:5, Insightful)
Google does not care about its Office products. It does not want any revenue from its cloud based office offerings. Google understood that as long as Microsoft is having a cash cow in the form of Microsoft Office, it will be able to out last any competitor. It can take losses in the billions, quarter after quarter and simply wait for the competitors to run out of money. Putting a crimp on the income stream of Ms-Office is the primary goal of Google. That it has achieved. No matter what, people are not going to pay the old norm prices for MS-Office.
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Actually, the "playing ball" is handled via Microsoft's obscure proprietary protocol, ActiveSync. Apple and Google have licensed it so that their devices can connect to Exchange. They're playing ball with the MS way of doing things, not the other way around.
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Hmm... Google stock is at $555.71 and Microsoft is at $25.26. Just how exactly does Microsoft measure failure?
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Well paid executive admonishes competition (Score:2)
This is news? Really?
Enterprise, come in, over! (Score:4, Funny)
Enterprise, we need to increase momentum, we are entering the cloud sector now!
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Apparently nobody at Microsoft has seen Wrath of Kahn, otherwise they'd know what a bad idea it is taking Enterprise to the cloud.
Wow .... (Score:5, Insightful)
And, maybe Microsoft doesn't understand what consumers need.
Hearing Microsoft actually say this is reminiscent of the whole "I'm a PC/I'm a Mac" commercials where the PC wants to do "fun stuff" like spreadsheets and pie charts.
This blind focus on what corporations need basically missed out on the existence of the consumer market. In a lot of ways, I think Apple has shown that going after the consumer market can be quite lucrative, since apparently nobody else is really focusing on that very well.
And, I've come to decide that anybody who cites a Gartner report is, by definition, talking out of their backside. Gartner says what companies pay them to say.
If he's right, so what? (Score:2)
The consumer market is plenty big enough for Google to thrive and prosper.
What's really interesting is to note how consumer technology has been inviting itself into the enterprise space since the first personal computers. Are there any examples of technology moving in the opposite direction?
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Hmmmm ... photocopiers, fax machines, laser printers, networks and firewalls, gigabytes and terabytes. Heck, I think even my Roomba would count.
They're all stuff that's now pretty commonplace, but I'm sure there's loads of examples.
I would say most computer things started out as something onl
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I think he's thinking of stuff more like MS-DOS and msoffice.
Hopefully the recent success of Apple and Google will break people of the idea that they need to use some proprietary MS thing even when it's really unecessary.
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Google FAIL (Score:2)
Electrolytes? (Score:2)
ITS WHAT BUSINESS NEEDS!
Same old Microsoft, not getting it. (Score:2)
Microsoft has yet to learn that most of the planet doesn't deal with enterprises.
That's Microsoft's bailiwick and their undoing as well.
Microsoft will do as well with the desktops they helped enterprises change but they've been pinned there as effectively as Erie/Bucyrus was with their large earth movers, and unable to even see the threat from Case backhoes. Case is bigger than ever and Erie/Bucyrus is a company that operates in an extremely rarefied "project atmosphere."
Not every project needs huge expendi
Just to be clear... (Score:2)
Or, perhaps companies don't like having "solutions" forced on them.
Perhaps a bit off-topic, but if any of my employees ever says, "To the cloud!" I will fire them on the spot. Fucking stupid commercials. Yes, the OS is so powerful, one has to offload processing else
Corporation trash-talking competitor (Score:2)
Film at eleven.
No substance (Score:2)
Just read the article...
Basically the Microsoft guy is saying "don't use Google's cloud services, use Microsoft's cloud services" and attempting to justify that by saying "they don't know security but we do". However he fails to provide any evidence for his statements - his single example mentions Google's Street View, which a) is about privacy rather than security; and b) isn't related to their cloud services at all.
I believe Microsoft is doing a significantly better job with security overall than they did
"What businesses need?" Talk, walk... (Score:2)
If Microsoft understands what businesses need they don't need to talk about it, they just need to do it.
_Talk_ by companies about how they understand what businesses need and their competition doesn't is a handy smokescreen to explain away problems with their product or their product line. "Yes, it looks to _you_ like a steaming pile, but you, you understand nothing. _You_ are not part of our target market. You understand nothing about what businesses want. We do, and I can assure you real businesses don't
MS is winning online war? Please... (Score:2)
I can't even sync my hotmail contact list, calendar or email with my phone... Google lets me do this ;).
Coming from an expert on 'Fail' (Score:2)
Huh? (Score:2)
Microsoft Online Services (Score:2)
Then again... (Score:2)
The majority of large corporations are still using XP and IE6.
If this is failure, I want in. (Score:2)
Current share prices via MSN:
Microsoft [msn.com] - $25.26
Google [msn.com] - $555.71
Used to be a Google Fanboy (Score:5, Informative)
Some of my experiences using Google to run my business:
1. We use Google Docs for all documents. Recently, after an employee left the company we deleted his account. Every document that he shared with the company is still visible in the Docs list, but there is no way to open them. It returns an error. Posts on Google Docs help site have gotten 0 useful responses other than "documents shared with others should still be accessible". They are not. There is no tech support.
2. We use Google Voice. I had business cards printed and the web site changed to use our Google Voice number. After a few customers complained about my disconnected number, I started looking into it. Apparently certain numbers cannot call Google Voice. The entire 941 area code gets "This number is disconnected" when they try to call. Posts on Google Voice help site have gotten 0 helpful responses. There is no tech support.
3. We use Google Adwords to run ads. Recently an employee who was new to the system created a test campaign with up to $10,000 a day limit pointing to www.test.com. Little did he know that campaigns are created in a "Running" state. And, even if you don't authorize Google to extend you credit, they will. Luckily I noticed the problem after only 3000 damage. Google tech support was non-existent. Luckily their collections department was a little more accessible and gave us a 10% discount on our mistake, and closed the account. They also delisted an unrelated website from Google results.
4. We hosted an old web site in Google Page Creator. For months, when we logged into Google Page Creator a message appeared that said something like "Your pages will soon be automatically migrated to Google Sites". When Page Creator was shut down Google nicely migrated the site to garbage and deleted all record of it ever existing.
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Damn that sucks, but why would you EVER trust a third-party with the only copy of your data? Use
Those who can, do... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm going off topic here, but I think it has to do with corporate culture. IBM is perhaps the founder of what we call 'Information Technology' and was already more than 50 years old when the present day Silicon Valley companies started up in the 70s. All the Silicon Valley companies have a strong cult of personality attached to their founder-CEOs (and even later ones). You cannot think of Microsoft without associating with Bill Gates, or Oracle -Larry Ellison, Sun - Scott Nealy, Apple - Steve Jobs, or until recently, HP - Carly Fiorina. In IBM's case, the brand is bigger than any individual CEO, in fact one doesn't immediately think of Thomas Watson Sr. either when talking of IBM. Can anyone quickly recall who headed the company when it made the mistake of letting Microsoft have the license to DOS instead of buying it out? (without looking up Wiki).
It is very rare for an IBM executive to make controversial statements in the tech media about other companies- unlike the people mentioned above, who have all been sources of great quotes at various times. Google is similar, in that it largely doesn't crow about its success (though CEO Eric Schmidt will forever be quoted for his views on online privacy).