So what exactly was so aggressive about Steve Ballmer's words yesterday at Stanford University? The Microsoft boss, in a Q&A with MBA students reported as full of verbal fireballs and counter-productive trash talk, said: "Google built one very good business. They only have one thing they do. Everything else is sort of cute." Zing! Except that statement, about the search engine's dependence on text ads, is so obviously true as to be unobjectionable; and take a look what else Ballmer said, about Microsoft itself.

We're a two-trick pony, and that's rare in the history of business. Desktop software was a trick. Server was a trick. We do a lot of things that are cute, too. I'll tell you about our robotics effort, for example, but that's not paying for me to come down to Stanford.