Groklaw on Balmer's threat to kill Google

Pamela Jones has been ruminating on Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer's alleged threats to kill Google and bury the company's CEO, Eric Schmidt.

I await with eager anticipation the cries of moral outrage from Rob Enderle and Laura Didio and Darl McBride and everyone else who has accused the FOSS community of verbal extremism.

That may be quite a wait, so let me be the first to call on the proprietary software community to condemn in no uncertain terms such violent speech coming from their community. Death threats are never acceptable, don't you agree?

Such threats coming from the CEO of the largest software company in the world are far more serious than they would be coming from some teenage Slashdotter, because Ballmer surely has the means to follow through, does he not, should he actually mean it?

If you were Mr. Schmidt, how safe would you be feeling today? It was a metaphor, you say. Likely it was, but are you positive? And let's say you answer yes, it was a metaphor. Is it all right for a convicted monopolist to threaten to "kill" a competing company?