Let it go, Steve: Ballmer bans iPads from his LA Clippers b-ball team Steve Ballmer says he doesn't have huge changes planned for the Los Angeles Clippers, his newly acquired pro basketball team, but he does want them to quit using Apple products. "Most of the Clippers are on Windows, some of the players and coaches are not," the former Microsoft CEO told Reuters, without naming names. Although …
"I am sure the players won't have to pay for the Surfaces and WPs to replace the Apple products. Microsoft has warehouses full of the albatrosses to give away to VIPs."
For now, but these will become massively coveted when Minecraft only works on Windows RT and XBOX.
>For now, but these will become massively coveted when Minecraft only works on Windows RT and XBOX.
Not a bad plan except its a few years too late. All those Minecraft installs out in the wild today hardly need some new feature that would be worth burdening the user with a dead man walking platform. Minecraft.apk anyone?
You may laugh, but in a previous life, I worked in a Coca Cola factory, and at shift change one day there was a can of Pepsi in the "Team room" fridge.
There was an internal inquiry as to how it got there, but they never found out who did it... ;o)
IMHO the only good pop is a heavily diluted tonic water. (Diluted with copious amounts of Vera Lynn, obviously!)
"at shift change one day there was a can of Pepsi in the "Team room" fridge."
If I was working there I would not be able to resist the opportunity to wind management up with cans of Pepsi placed in draws, fridges, toilet cubicals, store rooms and just about anywhere else I could get away with it after an investigation like that.
Ballmers kids really did get dealt a bit of an ambiguous hand. On the one hand, Dads filthy stinking rich, on the other hand his 'rules' on what you can own not only make you look like a right plonker in front of your mates, but the rest of the world gets to have a good laugh at your expense too when his fetishistic control freakery is widely reported. Other kids do crack as an act of teen rebellion, you buy an iphone, because he's too obsessed to notice if you went for crack. And now he's pulling the same shit with adults.
If you really wanted to get back at him, being interviewed on CNN as the first in the queue at the 5th avenue Apple store a week before Jesus phone release day would probably be the nuclear option. Sad at every level.
This even makes less sense since Microsoft has the next largest Mac development team to Apple. How are you going to know what's better as a company unless you use and compare both products?
These adults have made their choice, they left mommy and daddy a long time ago. What a dbag.
You know.. Steve Jobs didn't let his kids have iPads either. (widely reported, but here's one: http://www.irishtimes.com/business/sectors/technology/screen-time-steve-jobs-was-a-low-tech-parent-1.1929304 )
Ballmer owns the baseball team, and a large chunk of Microsoft. As Apple don't pay the team to publicise Apple products, and Apple is a competitor of Microsoft, there's no benefit to the team or its owner to keep the current arrangement in place.
Since it says "some of the players and coaches are not" on Windows it implies that some are so not all use iPads. If that is the case then the communication and strategizing isn't a unique trait of the iPad. Of course if it is what they are comfortable using the change makes about as much sense as dictating what socks they wear. Outlook for iPad anyone?
I suspect that the issue here is El Reg playing the red top card. I doubt he has banned players from owning apple devices, which is implied, just that he is switching all team issue devices over the windows, which makes sense. It's not like apple do something unique, and how many sys admins say no when users start wanting (with no other justification that style) iPhones and Macs in a work place instead of the company issue crackberry and windows PC so they can keep things simple?
Rather than get rid of the Apple products perhaps it would be better to find out why they are using them and then feed that back to Microsoft. If people choose one product over another the answer isn't to ban the competitors, it's to make your product better so people choose that.
As soon as he saw iPads and iphones it should highlight to him what a bad job Microsoft have made of it so far.
Shows what a complete idiot he is.
It should be about using the best tools for the job, that is to say he should be analyzing the best kit for his team and if it is windows , then fine if it is not then that is also fine.
This sort of stupid corporate mentality is what I have had to continually deal with.
Back in the 80's it was "only directors are allowed colour screens" ( colour being 'green')
Then "only directors are allowed windows 95"
Then "only directors are allowed portables"
Sorry the director of computing says we will not use a professional database for our $300,000,000 turnover company, because he does not like oracle products, flat files are more than adequate for our 40,000 product lines…
Sorry the director of computing says we will not use a professional database for our $300,000,000 turnover company, because he does not like oracle products, flat files are more than adequate for our 40,000 product lines…
Funny that, this was actually the attitude that forced sysadmins to introduce Linux into operations to run SAMBA as Windows just was too flaky and unstable. In your case it appears to be the various flavours of SQL that may help. How history repeats itself on the back of stupidity.
http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-nfl-surface-ipads-2014-9
Microsoft will cleanse sport of iPads with its billions.
This post has been deleted by its author
> Many posters in this thread seem to think that all MS OS's crash frequently.
I have never seen a single Linux kernel panic (equivalent of a bluescreen) on a stock kernel (a kernel from the repositories), in over 15 years. I have seen them on kernels I compiled back in the day (early 2000's), because I forgot a few drivers ;-)
In over 14 years, I have seen one kernel panic on a Mac OS X system, caused by Norton.
I have seen more BSOD's each and every week, often day, when I used Windows 7 on a brand new laptop, with only official HP drivers installed, over a period of 6 months. See my other comments for causes, I will not repeat myself.
On which planet do you live ?
Linux supports many more devices out of the box than Windows 7 or Mac OS X.
funny, just this morning I had an iPad "panic" (all I was doing was watching a video ) - I have yet to see a win8 or 8.1 bsod on any of my computer lab (30) machines with 30 kids writing some really strange code
"I have never seen a single Linux kernel panic (equivalent of a bluescreen) on a stock kernel (a kernel from the repositories), in over 15 years"
You should try turning them on. Helps. I have yet to see a linux kernel panic for over 15 minutes, but many, many, many before. Including in Production. At Christmas. At Midnight.
If you actually read about the bash vulnerability it has not been unpatched for 25 years ... it's not been discovered for 25 years and has been patched in a matter of days. Or were you just being stupid on purpose
Well well well, someone from Microsoft PR. I though we'd scared you away for good, or maybe you're just new there.
Many posters in this thread seem to think that all MS OS's crash frequently - they do not.
No, of course, that reputation is wholly undeserved. The OS just inconveniently bluescreens at embarassing places such as hall marketing, on stage video (always a bad idea, video and Windows) or even directly in front of a gazillion head audience when you're presenting it. On the plus side, that is very good as tech comedy goes.
They also do not get bricked by OS updates
Google is your friend - and that's just a recent one. Actually, Google may not be, come to think of it, because over the lifespan of deployment it gets kinda embarrassing. Maybe that's why MS is starting to push Bing as a search engine? There is a reason why companies have to stage Microsoft updates - the potential for borking something is so high that nobody trusts you. Apple screws up less frequently (no, they're not problem free either) so you have to milk that rare occasion for all it's worth. Oh, BTW, this was a firmware error - I've actually had no primary OS cockup yet but I've only been enjoying OSX for the last 5 or 6 years so I may have missed it. The reason I switched: yet another MS balls up.
plus we have patch Tuesday so our vulnerabilities get sorted out honestly and quickly (much less time than 25 years).
Oh, as in "our OS is perfect so we will tell you when we identify something we screwed up for a long time? I don't think so. First of all, the time it took between me reading about the vulnerability and fixing it on Linux and OSX is in the region of 65 minutes, of which 5 minutes for for verification of source checksums before compiling it myself. The remaining 60 minutes is because we have a mandatory waiting time to see if nothing else pops up on security forums. I cannot see MS come anywhere near that - it would take days.
Secondly, you're revising history here. Patch Tuesday was set up as a result of complaints by major users that they simply could not keep up with the flood of patches coming in that needed to be staged and tested, combined with your marketing department's desire to make it less visible just how much you have to keep fixing. Kindly don't try to sell that as a feature.
Also, if you had a long history and connection with a software company, would you not want other companies in your control to use said products?
Correct, that's why we're pretty much rooting out any instance of Microsoft products left. We have revenue and clients to protect. No more Microsoft office with the MSOOXML format that is too horrible to even contemplate and with its productivity wrecking ribbons, no more MS Windows which need far too much babysitting and frankly a scandalous amount of external security for a modern OS, no more battling with integration and praying that the next grand idea won't tank months later.
I have no idea how much time, aggro and hard cash we save using a blend of Apple front ends and Linux back ends, but it is a LOT. I can live with the (very) occasional problem here - as we learned from Microsoft the hard way, you TEST anything new. We haven't had a real production problem yet.
Oh and by the way - @ JBfromOZ - both my win 8 tablets boot in under 30 secs from cold. On what planet do you think it takes 3 hours or is that a special Unix way of counting time.
You've never been near Unix, or you'd know what you're missing. Please keep clicking easy GUIs and let the rest of us get on with making IT work for your companies. I have some crayons for you too if you want.
@ Glenn6 "He may own the team, but that doesn't give him the right to tell people which brands they personally use" - the article said that he wanted MS products used by the team and its organisation - cannot see here it say anything about personal use.
I guess you're using a Microsoft dictionary or Bing: which part of "ban" is hard for you to understand?
I'm not a Microsoft hater (no, seriously, we know many victims), but I do dislike this defence against all facts idea that makes even Jehova's Witnesses shake their heads. Microsoft's problem is that switching to Apple gear is has become very much economically defendable for small to medium businesses if you start being honest in your TCO calculations and incorporate costs of downtime (reboots, patching, crashes), software and support. I know private banks that are switching, and they're pretty much ALL about money and security, they don't do religion.
@ Glenn6 "He may own the team, but that doesn't give him the right to tell people which brands they personally use" - the article said that he wanted MS products used by the team and its organisation - cannot see here it say anything about personal use.
Actually it probably does - the members of the team agree to sponsor A products exclusively - that is one reason they get paid megamega bucks
Actually it probably does - the members of the team agree to sponsor A products exclusively - that is one reason they get paid megamega bucks
Good point. Let's see how long it takes before they're spotted at home by tech journalists with Apple products. I give it two weeks, max :)
What about the bugs MS never gets around to fixing?
I speak of the one where you must refresh the desktop to see renamed/moved folders. Or the one where you cannot save certain file types to the desktop.
Literally thousands of post webwide on these two, and MS always says "boot to safe mode and check for malware." It happens on new installs not internet connected...
Or the deliberate trashing of features that require 3rd party apps to reinstate - ShellFolderFix is a big one.
This doesn't even touch the borkings that automatic updates cause, there was ablue screen one a few weeks ago.
I have one XP box and one Win 7 box left. When they die I will be finished with MS.
Parting shot: UEFI/Secure Boot. How clever of you to get the OEMs to do your dirty work there...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
