Steve Balmer of Micro$oft, over at TechEBlog, exposing himself as a dinosaur in charge of a waning empire, discusses the iPhone.

First of all, as we all know, Microsoft has not come up with a new idea EVER. Microsoft Word is a ripoff of MacWrite, Windows is a ripoff, the Zune is a ripoff. Those guys invent nothing.

Second, he mentions, as have others, the price of the iPhone. They seem to be forgetting that it has a built-in video iPod. So rather than spend $250 on a video iPod and $200 on a phone, you spend it all on the iPhone. The math works out. Plus the rather obvious fact that people will pay more for superior technology. All that and, as we know, v2 of the iPhone will probably be half the price, include GPS and have twice the space.

Just once I’d like to see someone like Balmer say something like “The iPhone is really cool and I congratulate Apple on a great new product.”

It just cracks me up that the nay-sayers can’t admit how cool the iPhone is because they enjoy so much feeling superior to us Apple zealots. They can’t recognize the obvious innovation in the iPhone because they so want to believe that Apple just isn’t that great. No, folks, Apple is insanely great, especially compared to old-school losers like Balmer.

I just saw the iPhone in detail. Holy shit, that is cool. Apple just innovated again. Most companies have never demonstrated they know what that means. Apple does it all the time. Bye bye old fashioned phones. Phones are computers now, it’s just a matter of which network you’re getting on.

It’s hard not to side with Peter Jackson on this.

But today the dispute reached breaking point, with Mr Shaye telling the Sci-Fi Wire: “He’s got a quarter of a billion dollars paid to him so far, justifiably, according to contract, completely right.

“And this guy… turns around without wanting to have a discussion with us and sues us and refused to discuss it unless we just give in to his plan.

“I don’t want to work with that guy any more. Why would I? So the answer is he will never make any movie with New Line Cinema again while I’m still working at the company.”

A: Mr. Shaye sounds like a complete Type-A asshole. He should have started his quote with WAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaa. B: The film has brought in $US4 billion. So Jackson, who made a butt-pile of money, got $250,000,000 which is roughly 6.25% of gross. So Mr. Shaye is being pissy because his company only made 3.75 BILLION dollars on Mr. Jackson’s work. What a fucking asshole.

UPDATE: I just found Jackson’s statement about the above:

“Our issue with New Line Cinema has only ever been about their refusal to account for financial anomalies that surfaced from a partial audit of The Fellowship of the Ring.” The statement continues with Jackson saying, “Contrary to recent comments made by Bob Shaye, we attempted to discuss the issues raised by the Fellowship audit with New Line for over a year but the studio was and continues to be completely uncooperative. This has compelled us to file a lawsuit to pursue our contractual rights under the law. Nobody likes taking legal action, but the studio left us with no alternative.” The statement concludes by saying, “It is regrettable that Bob has chosen to make it personal. I have always had the highest respect and affection for Bob and other senior management at New Line and continue to do so.”