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Steve Ballmer Says Smartphones Came Between Him and Bill Gates (fortune.com)
Steve Ballmer once said Apple's iPhone would flop because it cost too much -- though he now admits that he failed to anticipate carriers subsidizing the cost of the phone. But that was only the beginning. An anonymous reader quotes Fortune:
The former CEO of Microsoft says he and Gates drifted apart over Microsoft's move into the hardware business in the early 2010s, according to Bloomberg. Ballmer says he was the one who pushed for Microsoft to design smartphones and tablets at a time when Apple was already well established. He says Gates and the board seemed reluctant to do so. "There was a fundamental disagreement about how important it was to be in the hardware business," Ballmer told Bloomberg. "I had pushed Surface. The board had been a little -- little reluctant in supporting it. And then things came to a climax around what to do about the phone business."
Microsoft eventually took a $900 million write down for its first tablet, the Surface RT -- plus most of the value of their $9.5 billion acquisition of Nokia Oyj's handset unit as Microsoft pushed into hardware. "Ballmer's only regret: not doing it sooner," Bloomberg reports, adding that Surface is now profitable and this year will generate more than $4 billion in sales.
Microsoft eventually took a $900 million write down for its first tablet, the Surface RT -- plus most of the value of their $9.5 billion acquisition of Nokia Oyj's handset unit as Microsoft pushed into hardware. "Ballmer's only regret: not doing it sooner," Bloomberg reports, adding that Surface is now profitable and this year will generate more than $4 billion in sales.
Huh? How could he have failed to anticipate this? It was already widespread in the industry!
I think Microsoft did mobile all wrong. It should have focused on the software and let hardware makers decide the models to use it. Buying Nokia was a huge mistake although at the time Microsoft probably figured a big cell phone company like Nokia was a big advantage to pushing Windows mobile. I haven't used Windows mobile OS since 7.5 but even then it was a OS that could easily run well on cheaper and slower hardware. When you look at the sales figures today, Android is now killing IOS in sales. Even Apple hurts itself by not allowing IOS on more devices to give people options. I am a iPhone user myself, but see the much more flexible Android OS as a big advantage over Apple's closed end ecosystem. For example if a Samsung Galaxy phone would drop a 3.5 mm audio jack, a person could easily find another good Android phone with one. If you want USB C charging, or wireless, you can find options for those too. Microsoft obviously lost out on mobile which will hurt their OS going forward.
There is no way the Surface is profitable. More lies.
What Microsoft needed to do, and failed, was to get a big chunk of the new market called "mobile". Microsoft surface division with its much touted billions of marketshare is not mobile. It's 100% pure PC: PC hardware with PC software. Not a single sliver of a new market there at all. So the surface division as it stands right now is totally irrelevant to this.
Even if you want part of the mobile market, it's debatable if you need to build your own hardware. Google steamrolled this market and now owns it like Microsoft owns the desktop without building and selling any hardware. Yes there are Nexus devices but they certainly weren't made to make money or get marketshare.
So Ballmer was utterly wrong in his assessment of needing to build and sell hardware, the surface division is like the xbox one: horrible losses for years, billions of dollars spent to make a few millions in "profits". With profits like those, no one would want any.
Will generate $4 billion in sales and about $187,000 profit... HEY PROFIT IS PROFIT OK?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Developers! Developers! Developers!
Smartphones! Smartphones! Smartphones!
Microsoft has never had the competence to develop something you'd want to use as a phone. I've owned a couple Windows Phones and several Windows PDAs and they are simply not capable of developing an operating system sufficiently reliable or usable for that purpose. But they are capable of producing a decent general-purpose computing device. Windows Phone is dead last in the market, and it always will be. Ballmer was right.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Fine example of selective memory...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Perfectly applies for Ballmer in this context I think, Don't ya?
Ballmer Do
Quote: "Steve Ballmer once said Apple's iPhone would flop because it cost too much -- though he now admits that he failed to anticipate carriers subsidizing the cost of the phone."
Is Ballmer really that stupid? At that time, cell phone companies subsidized the cost of most cell phones. The higher cost of an iPhone might mean higher subsidies, greater customer fees, or longer contracts. But it'd make no other difference.
Never forget that being a billionaire at the top of a huge corporation doesn't mean you can't also do stupid things.
Mr.Steve Ballmer. Would you like a chair to throw with that?
"Linux is worse than cancer"
-- Steve Ballmer
"Steve Ballmer once said .. that he failed to anticipate carriers subsidizing the cost of the phone. "
Any actual hard facts that the only reason the iPhone succeeded was that the carriers subsidised it. Or is this yet another example of Microsoft respectively rewriting historical facts to present itself in a better light.
Just sayin'.
The problem with Microsoft's phone effort wasn't that Microsoft didn't invest in it soon enough or early enough; in fact, Microsoft was the dominant smartphone player prior to iPhone. The reason Microsoft lost in the smartphone market was because their product sucked.
I bet.
Just my opinions, but I think SB would be more needier and clingy in bed than BG. SB feels like he's someone who might love to cuddle and stick their tongue in the ear of their lover.
BG feels like he would just turn back into a bird and fly into his bird cage by himself and close the door with his beak, ready for a good night's sleep.
let's post about what favorite flavor of soup Bill Gates enjoys and how Ballmer feels any day of the week about anything.
yeah, it's like, let's interview Ballmer for an hour or two, then instead of posting about one comment he made, let's split it up into dozens or more so we can have more FP stories!
place is boring here anymore anyhow.
If my business was selling snakeoil, I'd be calling medicine cancer, too.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"Linux is worse than cancer"
-- Steve Ballmer
If my business was selling snakeoil, I'd be calling medicine cancer, too.
Ideas like surface and other moves into hardware don't come instantly. A big company like Microsoft has to start hiring people years before they actually launch products and then they have to sustain the program for years before the rest of the company swings in behind. It's worth looking at an online review of Microsoft hardware history to see how long exactly MS must have been planning for this day.
Think if Dell and HP had done the sensible thing and swung in behind Linux the minute they saw Microsoft producing a mouse and keyboards. Even Now Dell is getting big sales on developer only specialist Linux Machines. There is no way that Microsoft would have survived to take Dell's business from them now without the PC manufacturers letting them. Ballmer's job was to see his company survive and he's done that at the expense companies like Gateway, Digital and Compaq. A very big part of that success was in tricking them into being afraid of Linux. You can fault this on morality but it's difficult to fault on practicality.
If you think that the PC manufacturers were a stupid exception, just look around and even today you will find plenty of companies willing to partner with Microsoft even when it seems obvious it will be their death in the long term.
Honestly Gates knew how to run a business and he knew that cell phone hardware was a stupid idea. And the world did prove gates right. The first mess starting with the BlackJack phones running WinCE and then the reboot attempt with the windows OS phones, every single attempt was a complete failure.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I thought .
this is where the fail begins
Who cares what Fat Skeletor has to say?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
still irreverent and still picked the wrong way to do it.
He didn't mention how Google was also noticing Apple's iPhone and won the market without becoming a hardware company. Google even followed Microsoft's formula of providing the software for other vendors to use to make their hardware products.
Just when I thought we'd heard the last of Monkey Boy, this article shows up. What will he do in 3-5 more years to get back in the press, talk about how he invented the gaming motion capture device?
Dance Monkey Boy Dance /a>
Apparently Ballmer didn't know squat about the phone business, and didn't bother to ask. Classic behavior for American financial types running technology businesses. Carriers had been subsidizing mobile phone costs since at least the mid-1990s after the PCS spectrum auctions.
From the Bloomberg article,
"I wish I'd thought about the model of subsidizing phones through the operators," [Ballmer] said.
We hat kind of idiot loses a billion dollars in one year? - hillary clinton
Steve Ballmer was called Monkey Boy on the cover of Businessweek Magazine. Now that Ballmer has been kicked out, in favor of the far less primitive-seeming but not knowledgeable Satya Nadella, Ballmer is trying to remember his importance.
Trying to repurpose their Windows OS for the form factor. They should have started over with a bold new approach to mobile interactivity, but instead the suits won the day. Conservative and derivative, they tried to extend off the windows brand. The UI idioms in desktop don't work well directly under glass. This is the reason surface still lags behind Apple products. My advice is for MS to start over; build a high quality unix-style OS; Open it up for peer review; and package DirectX for the best 3D experience. That would give the an advantage again.
by not being sold.
Don't worry - Apple seems to have been hard at work fixing that problem.
Windows on phones is completely dead as for consumers, but still have a little life left in it, in the form of corporate devices like the HP x3.
It's a shame really. Windows Phone 7 took too long to develop, but had promise. But then MS decided to shaft their customers and developers by throwing it to the curb and start over with Windows Phone 8.
When WP8 came out, it was far too late to make a difference. Plus the ugly "tile" UI didn't exactly attract consumers (imho).
And that's the real shame, because it was genuinely a good mobile OS. On low end hardware: Single core Qualcomm CPUs and 256 MB RAM it ran circles around Android devices.
A Windows Phone 8 device with a slow dual core processor and 512MB RAM was much faster, smoother and lag free than an Android device with 1GB of RAM.
The low end Lumia 520/620 were the only smartphones below 200$ that I've ever enjoyed using and could recommend to someone else. A 149$ 520 were smoother and with less lag than a 400$ Android phone when it came out.
Yup... Two factors were important in killing off MS's mobile efforts.
1: The Windows brand. The senior leadership in Redmond never understood that the Windows brand DOES NOT have an awesome reputation among consumers, and was a liability instead of an advantage.
2: A united, mixed mode UI is invariably a compromise, and will never be as effective or user friendly as a dedicated mobile/computer UI. What makes sense on a 4 or 8 inch screen doesn't work on a 15 inch screen and vice versa.
They seem dead, i.e. Aquarius E5 and E4.5 sold out and no news ones yet.
Perhaps it doesn't really has a chance, but what's left anyway? Everyone else is dead now?
Do they get software updates?
Ubuntu has no phone apps either, but maybe there would be some freedom. Run command line desktop stuff at least. Does that come out of the box, or can you easily add bash etc.? (bash is said to come out of the box on Ubuntu Tablet). Run graphical programs from a desktop that runs an X11 server (ghetto "convergence" that doesn't require special cables, compatible monitor etc.)
I would like one that's pretty low end or really low end but with 2GB RAM, instead of the 1GB the EQ Aquariuses had. Just to keep it safer.
Now the feature I'd hope for, could I run an Android VM then - a pretty full one, just for running the single app I need? clean, unencumbered, firewalled, gets the data and network access it needs.
Android is pretty backwards in requiring you to crack or replace the OS by jumping through hoops. I would rather get a trustworthy, functional and secure phone in the first place, and just add software if I'm going to fuck with it.
I don't know about Jolla.
Note : I can't justify more than $120 for a phone. An alternative $500 or $700 phone is rather useless. If it were down to that, I could buy an iPhone SE so as to not get Android, get years of update and run the single needed application. But I can't front $500 for that.