Salvatore Iovene

Thanks to Digg I just found out a cer­tain video on YouTube. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, is asked what he thinks about the iPhone. I won­der how much the MS guys are aware of their image, or con­scious of what they do and say. I’m sorry, I don’t want to be harsh, nor I want to dis­re­spect Mr. Ballmer, whom I don’t know per­son­ally, but his com­ments in that inter­view were out­ra­geously ridicu­lous. Mean­ing that they made me laugh my head off.

First of all, Mr. Ballmer was shout­ing pretty loud, and that’s ter­ri­bly impo­lite. His all line of answer was about mock­ing the com­peti­tor (Apple, in this case) with an eery smile between sar­cas­tic and fright­ened. It’s really an old tech­nique of blab­bers like him: under­min­ing the com­peti­tors’ value, and pre­tend­ing it doesn’t pose a threat at all. He says “That is the most expen­sive phone in the World and doesn’t appeal to busi­ness cus­tomers because it doesn’t have a key­board, which makes it not a very good email machine”. First of all, this is totally and absolutely ques­tion­able. Sec­ondly, the iPhone might be plugged to a blue­tooth key­board. In any case, that doesn’t mat­ter at all. Mr. Ballmer was dar­ing to express his lousy per­sonal opin­ion on the sole obvi­ous pur­pose to under­mine the com­peti­tor. He’s just try­ing to blow smoke in the eyes of the users. I don’t want to start any anti-Microsoft issue here, but it’s def­i­nitely obvi­ous that Ballmer is scared and falling into pathetic attempts to dam­age the competitor.

He then con­tin­ues with “We have our strat­egy, we have great Win­dows Mobile devices in the mar­ket today, you can get a Motorola Q phone now for 99 dol­lars”. He stresses the “99 dol­lars” a lot. Well, if hav­ing low-cost lousy device (which you don’t actu­ally build! It’s a Motorola, isn’t it?) is the only way to keep your share, then be my guest, but I see no sense in mock­ing Apple for the price of the iPhone, and then giv­ing no real argu­ments. It looks like they want to sell their Win­dows Mobile pow­ered (under pow­ered?) devices by the pound. That’s lousy. He con­tin­ues talk­ing about the Motorola Q, say­ing that it’s a very capa­ble machine, it can do music, it can do Inter­net, it can do email, it can do Instant Mes­sag­ing. “So I kinda look at that, and I say I like our strat­egy, I like it a lot”. The orig­i­nal ques­tion he was asked was about the iPhone (which he just mocked for the price) and the Zune (which he didn’t men­tion at all). So the inter­viewer felt about hav­ing to repeat the thing, because it was obvi­ous that Ballmer was kinda afraid of the sub­ject. The inter­viewer asks, talk­ing about the phones mar­ket and the music mar­ket, “How do you com­pete with that?” — and there you can see Ballmer go with a sort of dull expres­sion for a moment — then replies “Let’s start with the phone” (appar­ently he really doesn’t want to go to the Zune) and says that at the moment Microsoft is sell­ing “mil­lions and mil­lions and mil­lions” (how many is that? 3 mil­lions?) of phones, and Apple is sell­ing zero. I’m amused: that was his argu­ment. “How do you com­pete to the iPhone?” — “That’s not a threat”. That was his answer, minus the bull­shit. Then he says again that the Apple iPhone will be the most expen­sive phone “by far” ever in the mar­ket — then smiles — and says “Let’s see”.

Then he finally men­tions the Zune, and says they’ve got 20% of the mar­ket. What mar­ket? The mar­ket of the devices over 249$. That’s not the mar­ket. It’s only a part of it. I don’t know what you peo­ple will think about this, but it gives me the impres­sion that the phones mar­ket is going to shake badly.

By the way, it’s so funny how he goes on and on about the price, when they dare sell­ing a com­pletely bloated Oper­a­tive Sys­tem for 400$ or some­thing, but that’s just my opin­ion.

Besides, Mr. Ballmer prob­a­bly is not aware that when every­thing will set­tle up in one year or so, this video is going to get back at him, and be extremely hilar­i­ous. Good job, Microsoft. On the other hand, what else can you say about this man?