He should have timed it better

When Steve Ballmer (Monkey Boy video) recently called iPod owners Pirates he proved that he's not really up on this whole Internet thing. He should have said it on September 19th!

OK, so he didn't really call all of us pirates. What he actually said was "The most common format of music on an iPod is 'stolen'."

Seriously though, to single out iPod owners is ludicrous. I'm gonna pull numbers out of thin air in order to illustrate a point. Let's say that there are 1 million personal computers taken as a perfect sample of the true state of personal computing. Imagine the percentages of Win95, Win98, Mac OS, Linux, etc, are perfectly represented. Even the peripherals are in the correct ration (I wonder if any MO drives or 5.25 inch floppies would appear in the sample.) Of the people that own those 1 million machines, how many of those people have iPods versus how many have MP3s stored on them? Let's assume that all MP3s are illegal. Let's also assume that no one ever pirates any other software/data. I'd guess that there are some people out there who have iPods that contain close to 100% 'stolen' music. By the same token, there would be some that only contain AAC files (in fact I know of people who re-ripped their sizable personal CD collections in AAC after Apple released the format). I would hazard to guess that there may even be someone who has nothing but music purchased from iTMS on his or her iPod.

But, apparently Mr. Ballmer would assume that the person was a thief. (Another Ballmer video gem )

What about those people who burn their own CDs?!


Sheesh.