October 20, 2009 by Matt Thomas
Another day, another display of pettiness from a member of the digital elite. Hot on the heels of Google bigwigs refusing to refer to Twitter by name, referring to it instead as ‘micro-blogging’ (as if we don’t know who they mean), Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has gone out of his way to avoid mentioning Google in a recent interview. When TechCrunch interviewed the Microsoft head this week, he refused to call their main search competitor by name, referring to the company repeatedly as, ‘the incumbent’.
It does seem a little small of him though some might say that Google started it. Many people saw the inclusion of the phrase ‘do no evil’ in the Google charter as a subtle dig at Microsoft, implying of course that the previous ‘most powerful company in computing’ had done some evil.
It’s hard to see what, if anything, Ballmer’s playing at by doing this. It might be that he’s trying to avoid giving Google free publicity or implying that he believes they are the market leaders at all… Or, on the other hand, he might just have been feeling a bit tetchy at being very much not the incumbent currently.
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