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?

Get new articles via email

Related posts:

• Please stop talking about iPhone clones
• Dear Steve Jobs, give me an SSH iPhone