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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.'"
He knows the iPhone is going to be big and that it will put pressure on Microsoft's hand-held OS to match it feature for feature; but since MS doesn't not design the hardware, they'll be in tough to compete.
The hand-held market is the dominant computing platform and Jobs is going after it with a vigor not seen since the first Macintosh came out. Apple has yet to ship a single unit, but already iPhone (and mini OS X) is a top-ranked contender for that market.
Ballmer is either scared or stupid, plain and simple.
boxlight
Ballmer just defines ball game differently than you do. Lots of love, low sales is success for some. He would (obviously) prefer little love, high sales.
I suspect that what Mac has is the notion that by buying the 2% solution, you are smarter than us dolts in the 98%. If you can convince your customers that they are a member of an elite, you can sell them anything.
Well, maybe not an iproduct, but close.
I speak as a former member of the cult who got seduced by the fact that the Windows market is thirty times the size of the Mac market.
I had a macbook but it was too damn slow, so I bought a 64 bit, 17inch monster laptop. It had everything, it could play games, have two documents open side by side, it was a beast. I had owned that macbook for almost three years before I gave up on it and bought the PC laptop.
I handed that PC laptop to the trash bin after only 12 months. I couldn't hot swap the battery. I couldn't tell how full the battery was until the stupid thing had booted. It's case was plastic and broke. It got stuffed with stupid software that I couldn't uninstall. I put Suse Linux on it, but it's a cutting edge funky laptop so nothing worked. I went back to windows with a fresh install but the CD ROM drive was loose and unless I held it in its bay the speakers would spew static. Finally it just gave up and the mousepad wouldn't work any more.
During this time I had given my old macbook to my stay-at-home wife and mother of my three year old. The three year old threw it while the plug was in an horribly bent the chassis. But it still worked. My wife is nursing the baby and it turns out that human breasts can spray that milk quite a distance. My macbook had breast milk spattered all over it and in every crevice. It still worked! The three year old stuffed something into the DVD drive to prevent us getting the disk out. After we finally got the disk extracted, everything continued to work. The laptop is over five years old and has literally been around the work with me. It still works fine.
Needless to say, I just bought my second MacBook. With 2GB of ram and 2.1Ghz standard the performance has been excellent.
Bottom Line: PC Hardware sucks because no one is in control of it. (Even Dell and Sony can't get it right) Apple has the best hardware for their computers, the best hardware for their music players and I suspect will have the best hardware for their phones. OS X even bugs me a bit, but the fact is that their product is better than the PC products. Vista will be years before it stops sucking. XP on the MacBook might be viable, but realistically, everything I care about runs on both platforms.
It's not about being in the elite. It's not about catchy adds (tho they are funny and true). It's not about corporate personality or hype or history or market 'statistics' (lies, damn lies, statistics, etc). It's about finding and using the best tool available for doing my job.
Current winner: Macbook Pro.
You have a valid point. There's another interesting way to look at this issue, however. People's choices affect other people at times and in ways they don't always anticipate or even care about if informed. The classic example is the protective helmet. If you ride your bicycle or motorcycle without a helmet, you are contributing to a social problem (head injuries) which cost me (the taxpayer) money. Eventually somebody (insurance companies and Medicare) get tired of paying for stupidity and persuade Congress (or State Legislatures) change a law to reduce the cost to the society as a whole from individual stupidity.
If you choose to run Windows that's fine on the level of the individual decision. In theory, I don't care what you run on your PC so long as you and I have access to web sites, can exchange email and photographs, etc. We can be friends and share data freely without even knowing what type of system the other person uses.
However, I care about the fact that email is very nearly useless now. I care about identity theft. I care about industry and government data which is protected in order to reduce the proliferation of nuclear weapons technology.
How many billions of dollars must be stolen or wasted and how many years must pass before we admit that there are systemic problems with security on Windows which seem to be deeply rooted not solely in hubris as often thought, but also in more subtle philosophy, technology, and methodology choices? These go back decades, and have enabled an enormous industry in identity theft and spamvertising to take root and thrive despite, ahem, entirely new versions of Windows which are, ahem, more secure than ever. Some of these problems can be fixed, and some of them have been substantially mitigated if not outright fixed, for decades, on UNIX. The sad realization that Microsoft apologists refuse to admit is that development methodology and management philosophy affect the security of products produced by the organizations practicing them.
If software vendors were held liable for the expensive calamities that result from their security defects, would the technology industry collapse? Or would it adjust, and then march steadily on, with a greater emphasis placed on security? I suspect it would not collapse, but I don't have the lobbying dollars t back up my position, and neither does anybody else who shares it (thus far). The recent law suits brought against TJX by banks over stolen credit card data may portend a coming shift in alliances. If the banks turn against the software industry next, we will see a shakeup in political alliances and an eventual fight in Congress over this issue. Until then, the issue will remain the abstract musing of the occasional columnist or security analyst.
Discussions of botnets in forums like Slashdot often include the idea that individual home users should be held accountable for the security of their home PC. Well, should they really? They didn't sign up for that. Are they held accountable for the global security implications of their refrigerator? No, they are not because there aren't any except for a few highly abstract issues related to the resources it took to build it and the energy it takes to run it. With a home PC the global security implications are complex, but not highly abstract, rather they are quite direct. Your home PC can be used to steal your identity which could be sold to raise funds for terrorism, for example, which is pretty direct. It can be used to attack other hosts or assist with Distributed Denial of Service attacks on hosts or entire networks, which is unambiguously direct: PC -> Shitstorm.
Quite frankly, the statistics are stark and unforgiving. Windows: roughly 100,000 "known viruses" vs. roughly zero for the Macintosh (margin of error +/- 5 (five)). Twenty percent of home Windows PCs infected vs. roughly zero percent of home Macintosh or Linux systems infected (margin of error +/- 1/100 of 1%). If a relationship bet
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