Steve Ballmer...this guy is going to be run out of Redmond on a set of rails at some point, but that's another story for another time. Today, we get to admire his...audacity, as today is the day that he became the new champion of openness.

Yes, that's right: The CEO of the company most responsible for co-opting and corrupting open standards, for trying its hardest to eliminate open standards in many instances, is now championing the idea of "openness."

The comments came during a panel Mr. Ballmer shared with Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T Mobility, and Olli-Pekka Kallasvu, CEO of Nokia, a panel moderated by Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg.

The panel was ostensibly about the need for innovation in the mobile market, according to a report from CNet News, but it turned instead to what the executives on the panel described as a need for openness.

Mr. de la Vega, for instance, said that Apple would benefit from more interoperability between applications on the iPhone, while both Messrs. de la Vega and Olli-Pekka said there needed to be fewer operating systems competing in the market so that developers could focus more of their efforts.

For his part, Mr. Ballmer said that device openness was important, as it lead to more customer choice. "I agree that no single company can create all the hardware and software," he said. "Openness is central because it's the foundation of choice."

In other words, customers benefit from the kinds of hardware choices that result from companies like Microsoft licensing their operating systems to any and all comers, as opposed to benefitting from the kinds of performance, stability, and ease-of-use that result in proprietary solutions like Apple's, where one company controls the hardware and the software.

The dude doesn't get it. He won't ever get it. He can not see that while Microsoft's model leads to cheap crap dominating the market, and I mean a proliferation of lots and lots and lots of cheap crap to choose from, it also leads to a lack of innovation -- the subject the panel was convening on -- and lots of cheap crap.

But it boggles my mind that the head of the company that tried to convince the world that Open Source development was un-American and bad for business is now trying to champion the cause of openness.

From where I sit on my Throne of Judgement™, Microsoft is the single-most responsible entity for the near-destruction of open standards in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and the company has repeatedly tried to dominate the market by introducing its own standards that were incompatible with other technologies.

From the standpoint of having a tiny stake in Apple, I suppose I should be glad. Mr. Ballmer doesn't get it, as I mentioned, and that should leave Apple out front, in the driver's seat. Apple's products have become so popular, in part, because they "just work," and because the user experience is so much better when one company controls the whole widget.

I'd like to see Apple get more competition from companies with similar models. That's the kind of thing that will keep Apple on its toes, but it looks like Microsoft's boss will keep deluding himself that his company's business model can produce products that are better than Apple's.

One more note about this panel: CNet reported that one frustrated member of the audience asked why there was all this concern and talk about Apple when its market share was so small. After all, here are these three non-Apple executives, and all they could do was talk about Apple.

Mr. de la Vega, whose company carries the iPhone in the U.S., replied: "Because the other 99.5 percent of the industry is trying to copy the iPhone."

Oh my! I wish I had been there for that.

Follow me on Twitter @TMOBryan.
Bryan Chaffin began using Apple computers in 1983 in a high school BASIC programming class. He started using Macs in 1990 when the Kinko’s guy taught him how to use Aldus PageMaker, finally buying a Power Computing Power 100 in 1995. Today, Bryan is the Editor of The Mac Observer, and has contributed to the print versions of MacAddict and MacFormat (UK).
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