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Microsoft CEO Claims iPhone Will Be Bust
Theaetetus writes "In an interview with USA Today, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer claimed there is no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. The article also deals with Microsoft's friction with the Justice Department, friction with Google, and the profitability of MSN. 'No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get. In the case of music, Apple got out early. They were the first to really recognize that you couldn't just think about the device and all the pieces separately. Bravo. Credit that to Steve (Jobs) and Apple. They did a nice job. But it's not like we're at the end of the line of innovation that's going to come in the way people listen to music, watch videos, etc. I'll bet our ads will be less edgy. But my 85-year-old uncle probably will never own an iPod, and I hope we'll get him to own a Zune.'"
No it is not. BSD kernel, bash shell, but not the bash kernel.
It's a simple matter of complex programming.
Actually, if you really want to get technical, no it is not. :)
Darwin is the BSD-based OS, XNU is the kernel, not the BSD kernel.
Here's to the crazy ones
Ahh, that's what is meant by a "subsidy". Ever notice that phones are cheaper when you get a contract? That's because the carrier will cover part of the cost of the phone to get you on a contract (usually 50-100/year, here in Canada at least).
Every road warrior I've talked with recently is planning on getting an iPhone.
Do they care that it's $500? No. And why should they? They're going to expense it anyway.
Time will tell exactly how big the market for the iPhone is, but if I had to guess,
I'd say the Apple will do very well.
*sigh* back to work...
But if you calculate the amount of profit per employee Apple might be doing much better than MS.
Speculation of this kind is passe' in the Internet Age. Google "microsoft number of employees" and find some helpful Wikipedia articles:
Microsoft: $12.6B/71712 employees = $177,035.91/employee
Apple: $1.73B/17787 employees = $97,262.05/employee
Note the reporting periods are slightly different (MS is 2006, Apple is 2006Q1 TTM), but the numbers are essentially comparable.
So while is might be that Apple has higher productivity, and in fact I fully expected that would be the case, a naive reading of these numbers (ex MS perma-temps etc) suggests otherwise.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
According to a Bloomberg News article I found, the global cellphone market is forecast to grow 12% over the previous year and reach 1.14 billion units in 2007.
The same article describes how Motorola grabbed 4% more of the market,with Sony Ericcsson the star performer grabbing 8%.
Sony Ericcsson models (at least the one with music that I wanted to buy) when I looked cost about $500 bucks. These things aren't subsidized either. You pay a chunk up front and then a chunk all along.
So Ballmer says Apple will grab 2%? Wow. 2% of 1.14 billion is 22.8 million units. At $500 each, that's over 11 billion dollars. Apple's sales for the fiscal year ending Sept. 2006 was$19 billion. So Ballmer says they are going to have *only* this incredible success, whereas if Apple pulls anything at all interesting out of this hat it has a chance at going like Sony Ericcson, which actually has worse design and features than the iPhone?
That, plus the trend for phones toward full browsers, larger screens and music. Maybe not in the U.S. where people don't spend money and are happy with motorola bricks, but there is a distinct possibility the iPhone could grab market overseas too.
My forecast is Microsoft needs to start ordering in chairs by the busload.
I would correct you in this, seeing as the wikipedia entry is old and new earnings for both Microsoft and Apple have just come out this quarter. Let's play devil's advocate, assuming Apple adds 5000 employees and Microsoft adds zero, MS would have ~71,000, Apple ~23,000
. html?sr=hotnews.rssr el_q3_07.mspx
The numbers go as follows. For the same fiscal quarter, Apple had revenue of $5.26 billion.
MS has more revenue at 14.40 Billion.
These numbers are from the companies' own SEC filings and press releases, NOT wikipedia (probably not a good place to get financial information).
You can find them at:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/04/25results
http://www.microsoft.com/msft/earnings/FY07/earn_
Now let's redo that calculation with our worst case scenario (for Apple) numbers.
Apple 5.26 x 10^9 / 2.3 x 10^4 = $230K per employee (with 5000 added employees)
Microsoft 14.40 x 10^9 / 7.1 x 10^4 = $203K per employee
Those are your real numbers. Don't rely on wikipedia for everything- it's not a Bible.