Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is the butt of jokes in the US today, after US President Obama failed to invite Ballmer to a tech leader’s dinner in Silicon Valley attended by some of the biggest names in the industry.
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The struggling software company is already the subject of an hilarious Oatmeal cartoon on the subject (see below), after the President invited the likes of Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg and a host of other tech leaders, but not Steve Ballmer whose company has missed the SmartPhone and Tablet boom because of clumsy software. They also lag behind in the search engine market and their Internet Explorer is currently being chewed up by Chrome and Firefox.
The New York Times asked who determined the seating arrangement. What did they all eat? How did Steve Jobs look? Did Mark Zuckerberg really wear a jacket and not his signature hooded sweatshirt? And of course, what did this group of tech executives talk about?
See Cartoon on next page.
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The New York Times said that they reached out to several of the attendees with the hopes of finding out more, but most did not respond or declined to comment. Oracle, Netflix, Apple, Facebook and Yahoo, whose chief executives were all in attendance, had nothing to share.
The blog Search Engine Land dissected an image that was released by the White House, pointing out who sat where. Mr. Jobs and Mr. Zuckerberg were the lucky two who sat next to President Obama.
The San Francisco Chronicle followed the money trail while reporting on the dinner and listed the political contributions of each guest. The Chronicle also cited people who believed that the agenda was not to discuss innovation in Silicon Valley, but instead “suggested that the president was paving the way for his 2012 re-election campaign.”
See Cartoon here.
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| Cartoon from http://theoatmeal.com/blog/obama_meeting |
