Microsoft CEO: Sales of beloved XP could continue
LOUVAIN-LA-NEUVE, Belgium – Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer offered a glimmer of hope Thursday to fans of the company’s Windows XP operating system, saying the company may reconsider its decision to stop selling it soon.
But Ballmer was adamant that most people who buy PCs today buy them with XP’s successor, Vista.
“That’s the statistical truth,” he told reporters at a news conference at Louvain-La-Neuve University. “If customer feedback varies, we can always wake up smarter.”
Fans of XP – the six-year-old operating system set to be pulled off store shelves by June 30 – have plastered the Internet with blog posts, cartoons and petitions. They trumpet its superiority to Vista, whose consumer launch in January was greeted with lukewarm reviews.
Ballmer said the customers buying PCs with XP are corporate information technology departments that are having trouble shifting old machines to newer technology.
On another issue, Ballmer said he was confident that Microsoft’s offer for Yahoo Inc. was “a very good price.” Microsoft has set a Saturday deadline for Yahoo to accept its offer or face a proxy battle.
Microsoft has threatened to oust Yahoo’s board if the 10 directors don’t accept the offer by Saturday. That risky course of action, known as a proxy contest, probably wouldn’t be settled until Yahoo’s shareholder meeting, which doesn’t have to be held until July.
The cash-and-stock bid is now worth about $42.7 billion.
Joking with the media and even breaking into French, Ballmer acknowledged that he’s finding it hard to keep up with social networking on the Facebook Web site.
“I do have a profile on Facebook,” he said. “It’s hard to keep up. I get many friend requests from people I don’t know.”
“There’s about 10 Steve Ballmers, and I’m only one of them. I’m the one who actually has a picture that looks like me on it!” he said.
“I’m hitting a golf ball, that’s the real Steve Ballmer.”
He was in Belgium to open a Microsoft innovation center in the southern city of Mons that hopes to boost new startups in the country, creating some 200 jobs over the next three years.