It's Ballmer Gone Wild at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando this past week, it seems... in addition to the previously described dust-up with analyst Yvonne Genovese, we are getting word now of Steve dissing Google, and maybe just dissing everybody who dares compete in Microsoft's core competencies-or at least core competencies as Steve sees them. Then there is the whole FUD thing with respect to Linux patents, but I'll spare you my views on that one again.

Now, I don't want to be dissing on Steve just because he is dissing on others, because that just leads to a whole mess of circular logic, and it so happens that I agree with him in some respects-as I have said before, I don't think that Google is really competing (or even trying to do so) with Microsoft in the Office arena, and so it's hardly a surprise that their offerings don't look very similar to Microsoft's. And his observations about means of adapting Microsoft core competencies to the new order of web-based services may be astute, at least in the short-term... and they are certainly bright moves for the company to make in lieu of attempting to entirely reinvent itself from scratch to play in that market.

So for all the inflammation that Ballmer can work up among those who haven't had the Kool-Aid, in general I think the picture he paints is of a fairly nicely maturing organization which is starting to think about some real market-oriented strategy instead of simply trusting to brute marketing force and inertia. This is in stark contrast to some of my other recent appreciations of the company, so it may be time for a couple of steps back and a careful re-analysis-what do you think? Has Microsoft learned valuable lessons in more than just PR? Or is this a veil behind which business as usual will occur?