Mr. Ballmer states:

The most successful by far is Firefox. Chrome is a rounding error to date. Safari is a rounding error to date. But Firefox is not. The fact that there’s a lot of competitors probably is to our advantage. Yeah, we’re right now about 74 percent overall with the browser market, roughly speaking. But we’re having to compete like heck with IE 8, with great new features.

The other guys are getting more and more unanticipated competitive attack factors, the thing that Google announced yesterday where they replaced IE but they don’t tell you. I mean that’s how I would say it. For all intents and purposes of what they’re doing IE is not there. It’s their operating system. Instead of now masked as browser, it’s masked as a plug in basically to IE. So, you know, we’re going to have to compete like heck and you know, see where things go. The one thing that’s unclear is what’s the economic play for anybody else competing with us at the browser level. Is this all about kind of controlling the search box or is it about something else?

He is actually a bit off in his numbers -- recent marketshare estimates place Internet Explorer's marketshare in the mid sixties and give Firefox as much as 30 percent market share.  

Mr. Ballmer's latter remarks refer to Google Framework, a recently released plug-in for IE 8 that allows IE 8 to use Google's Javascript engine and parts of Google's rendering framework.  The plug-in released last week, and showed great promise, greatly speeding up Javascript performance and allowing HTML 5 support, according to early reports.  The release was not without its problems, though -- DailyTech downloaded it for testing and was unable to run tests as it consistently crashed.  Other users complained of installation problems on the plug-in's Google Group.  Still, you can't fault Google for ingenuity -- sneaking Chrome's engine Trojan horse-style into Microsoft's industry leading browser.  Mr. Ballmer, though, was less than impressed.

Mr. Ballmer says the EU and other governing bodies are being hypocritical scrutinizing Microsoft's bundling of IE 8 with Windows 7 while allowing Apple and Google to release similar bundled software (Safari, Chrome).  He did concede, though, that Microsoft's dominate marketshare may change the rules for it slightly.

He was quick to belittle Google's upcoming Chrome OS (targeted for netbooks), stating, "You know, Google is talking about building an operating system with the name of its browser. Nobody should be confused. The browser they think of is the operating system and the question is you know sort of like Marc Andreessen in the late ’90s is back at work at Google. If you remember, he said something like, Windows will just be a poorly debugged set of device drivers running Netscape…Now, that’s kind of basically the attitude expressed in Chrome Browser, Chrome OS. Windows is just, you know, sort of a bag of bits that manages the hardware under the Chrome operating system and oops, we can even do our own device drivers for the Chrome operating system. Of course, the Chrome operating system isn’t available, hasn’t shipped."

He concludes with some jabs at Apple's Snow Leopard and continued talk trash about Google's upcoming OS.  He raves:

Here’s Windows and Windows is a very successful product. How do you attack Windows? Well, you attack with the high end, and hardware. That’s an attack. That’s – I won’t call it the Snow Leopard attack. I’ll call it the Mac attack of which Snow Leopard is a piece. You could attack from the side. That’s the Chrome – Firefox attack. You can attack from cheap, from below. You’re not from the side. You’re one on one, but that’s kind of a Linux, Android, presumably Chrome OS, who knows, attack vector. You can attack through phones that grow up. You know, mama don’t let your phones grow up to be PCs or something. I don’t know. But that’s another attack vector. So, you could say how do I feel about all these attack vectors? Strong, I feel very strong here.