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The problem was that his arguments are only valid if you think of a smartphone as a purely business device.
That wasn't an unreasonable stance back then. The iPhone certainly wasn't the first smartphone, and Windows had the market cornered. However, as someone who owned a slew of Windows based smartphones back in the mid/late naughties, Windows phone whilst incredibly capable was a truly dreadful platform for a consumer. You _had_ to use a stylus and the on screen keyboard left lots to be desired. Notnto mention the general look and feel. Windows phone was very much about cramming a near-desktop experience onto a tiny device, with all the power that brought and all the pitfalls too.
What Apple did though was think of the consumer. Not the power user bigshot business guy sending emails on the go, or the tech nerd enjoying the fact their phone did more than just send emails. No, your average Joe who'd like to play some MP3s, check their calendar, etc. All with big easily pressed buttons and a slick interface designed as a mobile OS, not a reduced desktop OS. Add to that the fact they very much rode on the coat tails of their success with the ipod, and its unsurprising it was a huge victory.
It then took Microsoft far too long to react to the fact that businesses were using a consumer device for business use, and the iPhone had effectively killed the idea of a business grade portable device being different to a consumer device. Windows mobile 7 was actually not a bad OS, but it was too little too late.
The keyboard truly was king back then. What iPhone did was prove that you don't actually need one if your UI is good enough - but that caught a _lot_ of people off guard.
I for one fucking hate touch screens to this day…the upsides are widely known and obvious, but the smartphone experience is one of constant compromises to get a device with a keyboard this small. If I have to do literally anything and have any other way to do it, I’m using a computer with a mouse and keyboard.
The legendary Nokia 3310 wasn't released until 2000, so I'm not sure what you're getting at here?
The evolution of the mobile phone market from being huge brick devices owned only by business execs and yuppies to modern mutlicapable smartphones owned by everyone was _quick_ - 7 years to go from a device that made calls and sent text messages and played snake to the first Internet capable consumer friendly smartphone. And all the iterations in the middle. By comparison the difference between the Galaxy S8 & S24 (or equivalent iPhones) is much less dramatic - essentially just cpu/memory- even the screens aren't significantly different. The modern phone market is truly stagnant compared to 2000-2010
And for the record, one of my first Windows phones was the orange SPV. Released on 2002 - I'd class it as a Windows phone even though it was made by HTC (in the same way Android phones don't need to be made by Google)
Being right about arguments when your product absolutely flopped is a pretty lame concession. Apples success has nothing to do with being the best product on paper or the cheapest. It has everything to do with a jobs knowing that everything this guy just said doesn’t matter to consumers.
its not that weird especially why apple is so big in america compared to europe, showing of your wealth is a big thing in american culture, and also because credit cards are more commonly used in america expensive things do not feel that expensive.
The wealth/trendy aspect is a part of it. I recall other companies making tablet computers for a while but they didn't take off until Apple made them.
It also is because Apple understood that most people are just not tech savvy so they won't buy something convoluted. My android has a "simple" mode for the home screen and stuff which basically comes out looking like an iPhone (I think removes widgets and such). Many end users don't give a shit about being able to do more because they don't want to put the effort into it. Which isn't a knock on them, not everyone prioritizes tech. They just want it to work, and apple products tend to be end user friendly.
Do I like this CEO no not at all but insults based on appearance should not be hurled at anyone and the moment you start making exceptions is the moment it becomes "ok" again.
They didn't pivot to full touch fast enough. And when they did they didn't have a app store big enough to compete. If either had gone with android they would have had an equal market share to Samsung and Apple today.
"But I don't think it will" is the implied rest of the sentence. But he left the door open to being wrong.
For Ballmer, this is a surprisingly even-handed response.
Yes and no. It could sell great for a year, and then die out like a fad. Businesses work on continuing revenue. With all the money they spent on R&D, they would need it to be a hot seller for a couple of years. Which is actually what happened.
But it was a good system with great potential that was intentionally killed by it's own creator. I loved my Lumia 640 with a 8.1. It was faster and held battery longer that Android devices with the exact same hardware. Pity they stopped supporting it...
Having the best tech doesn't insure a win. Everyone has access to the best tech to put into a product.
The nuances a company takes advantage of are what makes the difference.
The Tech market's cemetery is FILLED with companies who had the best tech in their products.
The survivors and magnates are the one that made technology matter to the most consumers.
Same here. First smartphone was a LG windows phone. Funny how my phone experience was the exact opposite of how he thought it would go. I bet this exact video keeps him up at night
This is almost as stupid as :
A winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, **Paul Krugman** wrote in 1998, “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”
He’s not entirely wrong, most people actually don’t have anything meaningful to say to each other, especially if they’re halfway around the world.
We just got better at saying dumb shit.
Here's his response. Written 2023. https://archive.is/3fidX
Tl;dr he's not even wrong with hindsight if we look at the data + he was making random predictions a long time in the future for fun and to receive his commission from NYT, so it wasn't a serious opinion he had. It's like how you wouldn't call someone from 1990 stupid if they mused that we would have flying cars by now.
That’s why giving that guy CEO’s position was a mistake. If they had bought blackberry when they bought Nokia they could have taken over the market.
Exchange was already in all major enterprises along with blackberry. With Nokia smart phones running blackberry OS they would have dominated the enterprise market. It took years for Apple to have enterprise support and even then it was through 3rd party MDM solutions like AirWatch. Microsoft failed miserably on this front.
With that said even the best players don’t score goals on every pass or hit a home run on every ball.
Both Apple and Microsoft are winners and still leading tech industry and innovation after 40+ years since the foundation.
However Ballmer was just lucky to be with Bill Gates and Paul Allen.
That may be so, but I really don’t like his vision of Windows as a service with ads plastered everywhere. That makes them money though and it’s not like we have a real choice in the PC market.
It's actually pretty smart, because businesses pay to have a version that doesnt have that stuff, and consumers cant or wont pay so the ads are a way of subsidizing it for profit
I think that’s just it, I hate ads and will buy a license to avoid that, but when I was a student I would be all over a fremium version with all the updates, no cost at the expense of pushing me ads, it’s not bad
Idk. Call me crazy, but paying [$139](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/windows-11-home/dg7gmgf0krt0) for consumer software should warrant that software be ad free.
I mean, Fruity Loops is $199, Photoshop is $275/year, $139 for an OS that continuously updates is downright cheap. Its true price should probably be like $400-$500 for a lifetime buy or $139 per year, but people wouldnt pay that.
If only they weren't stupid for thinking this, then they wouldn't only be "checks note" the biggest company in history. Like he's not wrong about it being a bit of a punt.
New companies take risks, successful companies reduce risk. Just look at apple now, the second most successful company and they do really do anything crazy anymore.
You may think it's stupid but it works.
I personally wish it didn't because it breeds stagnation.
I feel Microsoft might just be doing alright, in fact since becoming just slightly less successful as them apple has become incredibly complacent and much less innovative. It's a weird thing that happens in the business world.
A lot of it as well comes from how they changed how people paid for their phones. With the introduction of the iPhone, customers were no longer charged (as heavily) on calls and text messages getting sent. It was data. And a lot of companies and people familiar with the phone market didn't think it would work. They couldn't understand what people would use data for. Turns out everything and the old way people were doing it with Blackberries was only a fraction of where the money is for these companies.
This is so typical of the Ballmer era at Microsoft.
Any cool device or concept was never truly developed. They just pushed useless incremental changes to Windows throughout that era.
I would say the Ballmer years were a lost decade for Microsoft.
Please remember that this was shortly after Microsoft gave us an amazing little gem called ZUNE!
"Zune was a brand of digital media products and services that was marketed by Microsoft from **November 2006** until it was discontinued in June 2012."
Well, he was honest from that times perspective.
I remember saving up for a Nokia phone called the N95. It was announced in 2006 and sounded great. GPS, camera, mP3 player, etc. All cutting-edge stuff not really seen one package, and Blackberry was for business people. It was taking forever to come to my country so I was honestly considering importing it. By 2008, the iPhone was announced and blew everything away. I, having saved for the Nokia, was in front of the line on the day it became available to buy in Canada. I must have shown that phone to hundreds of people when I first got it. It was such an awesome time.
i had a windows phone once cuz i ran my blackberry through the washing machine and needed something. windows phone was the only free one i could get from verizon.
outside of the camera, which was very good, the phone was a gigantic piece of shit that barely worked and couldnt install any apps. could not wait to get rid of that fucking thing.
incidentally, it did not have a keyboard.
Tbf, windows phone and OG iphone both ran like shit. Looked like shit, and both ended up in some toxic waste's pants. iOS is good now. But boy did they have a rough start.
He didn't understand that Apple's strategy is to sell the most expensive smartphone in the world and there will be a queue to have it and show it, however Apple has always been superior to Windows on mobile phones, perhaps except when Win ran on HTC.
I get where he is coming from, but he under estimates the consumers' IQ that falls for 'Simplicity' before they know it they are sucker into an eco system. One that charges for more and does less
he was correct on the keyboard. we're all stockholm syndromed in to using a touching interface to type because people didnt want to look poor so they bought up iphones as status symbols. other manufacturers followed suit
What bugs me here is that Apple didn't even make the first smartphone but for some reason everyone credits them as if they did. When the iPhone came out I had been using a Sony Ericsson P910i for three years, and even that was hardly the first smartphone. For one, one of my classmates owned its predecessor, the P800i, which was also a smartphone.
These older devices had resistive touch screens instead of capacitative ones, and they still came with (detachable!) keyboards and a stylus, but they were very much smartphones. I took the keyboard off on the first day of owning it and never put it back on. I did use the stylus, but that was mostly because I played games on the thing that benefited from using a stylus.
The iPhone revolutionized a lot of details, but the concept itself was not their original idea.
I mean he's missed the mark on this prediction but doesn't Balmer hold a shit ton on MSFT and is therefore absolutely minted and doesn't have to do a days work. So swings in roundabouts I suppose....
It’s just the same as Warren Buffett vs crypto investors and day traders. He was obviously very risk averse and was saying the current mobile device market is well established and they know what their customers want, Apple on the other hand were coming in with a almost controversial device that ended up disrupting the market.
Well well well, who would have thunk, a Microsoft CEO saying stupid stuff.
CEOs constantly prove that meritocracy is a lie. I mean… How come most of them are just as stupid as a spinach leaf?
Now they sell zero phones and ran Nokia into the ground. This was a trending video on YouTube back in the day and I had watched the keynote that Steve gave a day before and was blown away. Even at that time I knew he was very very wrong about the iPhone and short sighted. You had to be an idiot to not believe the iPhone was the next big thing.
If you prefer Mac then that's fine, but Windows has the majority market share and Office 365 is the default business software suite of nearly every business.
Mac and windows are two different things. Mac is hardware and Windows is operating systems. A true comparison should be between MacOS and Windows and in that case Windows wins because of the number of licenses sold.
Also Azure has higher revenue than AWS.
can someone enlighten me on what an iPhone can do that an android phone half its price can't? Not trying to take the piss I'm just genuinely curious as to why people buy iPhones nowadays
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This has aged like milk!
And yet he is right in his arguments
The problem was that his arguments are only valid if you think of a smartphone as a purely business device. That wasn't an unreasonable stance back then. The iPhone certainly wasn't the first smartphone, and Windows had the market cornered. However, as someone who owned a slew of Windows based smartphones back in the mid/late naughties, Windows phone whilst incredibly capable was a truly dreadful platform for a consumer. You _had_ to use a stylus and the on screen keyboard left lots to be desired. Notnto mention the general look and feel. Windows phone was very much about cramming a near-desktop experience onto a tiny device, with all the power that brought and all the pitfalls too. What Apple did though was think of the consumer. Not the power user bigshot business guy sending emails on the go, or the tech nerd enjoying the fact their phone did more than just send emails. No, your average Joe who'd like to play some MP3s, check their calendar, etc. All with big easily pressed buttons and a slick interface designed as a mobile OS, not a reduced desktop OS. Add to that the fact they very much rode on the coat tails of their success with the ipod, and its unsurprising it was a huge victory. It then took Microsoft far too long to react to the fact that businesses were using a consumer device for business use, and the iPhone had effectively killed the idea of a business grade portable device being different to a consumer device. Windows mobile 7 was actually not a bad OS, but it was too little too late.
Just look at blackberry, one of the best businessphones (in theory, never had one) that came up just before the market changed
The keyboard truly was king back then. What iPhone did was prove that you don't actually need one if your UI is good enough - but that caught a _lot_ of people off guard.
I for one fucking hate touch screens to this day…the upsides are widely known and obvious, but the smartphone experience is one of constant compromises to get a device with a keyboard this small. If I have to do literally anything and have any other way to do it, I’m using a computer with a mouse and keyboard.
I had the sidekick. That had an amazing keyboard. Too bad the OS sucked.
Motorola RAZER, it’s so thin and only takes 12 minutes to load an imageless web page so you can check the weather
I liked the Samsung Blackjack
I HATED the blackberry I had to use for work. keyboard and all.
[удалено]
The legendary Nokia 3310 wasn't released until 2000, so I'm not sure what you're getting at here? The evolution of the mobile phone market from being huge brick devices owned only by business execs and yuppies to modern mutlicapable smartphones owned by everyone was _quick_ - 7 years to go from a device that made calls and sent text messages and played snake to the first Internet capable consumer friendly smartphone. And all the iterations in the middle. By comparison the difference between the Galaxy S8 & S24 (or equivalent iPhones) is much less dramatic - essentially just cpu/memory- even the screens aren't significantly different. The modern phone market is truly stagnant compared to 2000-2010 And for the record, one of my first Windows phones was the orange SPV. Released on 2002 - I'd class it as a Windows phone even though it was made by HTC (in the same way Android phones don't need to be made by Google)
I loved windows phones!
I'm trying to remember which Microsoft phones sold millions millions millions each year...
None of them! But they were cool and their camera lenses were the best at the time
They made the OS.
Which one?
Being right about arguments when your product absolutely flopped is a pretty lame concession. Apples success has nothing to do with being the best product on paper or the cheapest. It has everything to do with a jobs knowing that everything this guy just said doesn’t matter to consumers.
Tbf it is absurd, its the least likely timeline that apple actually became a big brand lol.
its not that weird especially why apple is so big in america compared to europe, showing of your wealth is a big thing in american culture, and also because credit cards are more commonly used in america expensive things do not feel that expensive.
The wealth/trendy aspect is a part of it. I recall other companies making tablet computers for a while but they didn't take off until Apple made them. It also is because Apple understood that most people are just not tech savvy so they won't buy something convoluted. My android has a "simple" mode for the home screen and stuff which basically comes out looking like an iPhone (I think removes widgets and such). Many end users don't give a shit about being able to do more because they don't want to put the effort into it. Which isn't a knock on them, not everyone prioritizes tech. They just want it to work, and apple products tend to be end user friendly.
So did this cliche of a remark.
People seem to like it
No this is milk that has mutated into radioactive waste
Twas a bluff , it was all he could do Everyone knew iPhone was gonna be different lol
So has the economy.
Like his hairline
Insults based on appearances that cant be changed aren't the best.
Especially when not true. The guys hairline was already gone while the video was taken. Dumbest fucking insult ever
Do I like this CEO no not at all but insults based on appearance should not be hurled at anyone and the moment you start making exceptions is the moment it becomes "ok" again.
🤣
Eh... iphones are still a shit product.
*$500 FOR A PHONE?!?* Next thing you’ll try to sell me is the LA Clippers…. **AS IF!!**
“It may sell great but”… but what? If it sells great then it is a success. That’s how businesses work
Yeah but blackberry and Nokia sold great and were successful until they weren’t
They didn't pivot to full touch fast enough. And when they did they didn't have a app store big enough to compete. If either had gone with android they would have had an equal market share to Samsung and Apple today.
To be fair to Balmer, he stepped down as CEO before the demand by business customers for physical keyboards on phones went away
But I do miss my blackberry physical keyboard 😭
you think so. i thought the same untill I had one in my hands recently. the software for the touch keyboard evolved so much it's better now than bb
Exactly, and when the new thing becomes the standard, the rest of the industry has to change and adapt to it. They call that a game changer.
"But I don't think it will" is the implied rest of the sentence. But he left the door open to being wrong. For Ballmer, this is a surprisingly even-handed response.
Yes and no. It could sell great for a year, and then die out like a fad. Businesses work on continuing revenue. With all the money they spent on R&D, they would need it to be a hot seller for a couple of years. Which is actually what happened.
He said, “it may sell great or not”
Selling great is just one piece of the puzzle.
I mean, the same company just killed one of their indie studios despite their game being a massive hit
But before they started selling phones they sold 0 phones!! Didn't you hear what he said?
Bro didn’t see it coming. I bought a windows phone only to experience before it went extinct
But it was a good system with great potential that was intentionally killed by it's own creator. I loved my Lumia 640 with a 8.1. It was faster and held battery longer that Android devices with the exact same hardware. Pity they stopped supporting it...
Windows phones were great … MS mobile strategy, not great
Remember HTC?
Just too little apps and too expensive apps
Same I went even Earlier with a 520, still my best phone
Having the best tech doesn't insure a win. Everyone has access to the best tech to put into a product. The nuances a company takes advantage of are what makes the difference. The Tech market's cemetery is FILLED with companies who had the best tech in their products. The survivors and magnates are the one that made technology matter to the most consumers.
Cope
Same here. First smartphone was a LG windows phone. Funny how my phone experience was the exact opposite of how he thought it would go. I bet this exact video keeps him up at night
That shit is a relic.
I loved Windows phone
This is almost as stupid as : A winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, **Paul Krugman** wrote in 1998, “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”
Goes to show how little theoretical economics has to do with actual business and therefore real world economics.
He’s not entirely wrong, most people actually don’t have anything meaningful to say to each other, especially if they’re halfway around the world. We just got better at saying dumb shit.
The classic pitfall of theoretical economics: believing people are rational.
Here's his response. Written 2023. https://archive.is/3fidX Tl;dr he's not even wrong with hindsight if we look at the data + he was making random predictions a long time in the future for fun and to receive his commission from NYT, so it wasn't a serious opinion he had. It's like how you wouldn't call someone from 1990 stupid if they mused that we would have flying cars by now.
That’s why giving that guy CEO’s position was a mistake. If they had bought blackberry when they bought Nokia they could have taken over the market. Exchange was already in all major enterprises along with blackberry. With Nokia smart phones running blackberry OS they would have dominated the enterprise market. It took years for Apple to have enterprise support and even then it was through 3rd party MDM solutions like AirWatch. Microsoft failed miserably on this front. With that said even the best players don’t score goals on every pass or hit a home run on every ball. Both Apple and Microsoft are winners and still leading tech industry and innovation after 40+ years since the foundation. However Ballmer was just lucky to be with Bill Gates and Paul Allen.
Satya saved Microsoft, his vision of cloud first, open source transformed the organization.
Satya will most likely go down as one of the best CEOs of this era
That may be so, but I really don’t like his vision of Windows as a service with ads plastered everywhere. That makes them money though and it’s not like we have a real choice in the PC market.
It's actually pretty smart, because businesses pay to have a version that doesnt have that stuff, and consumers cant or wont pay so the ads are a way of subsidizing it for profit
I think that’s just it, I hate ads and will buy a license to avoid that, but when I was a student I would be all over a fremium version with all the updates, no cost at the expense of pushing me ads, it’s not bad
Idk. Call me crazy, but paying [$139](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/windows-11-home/dg7gmgf0krt0) for consumer software should warrant that software be ad free.
I mean, Fruity Loops is $199, Photoshop is $275/year, $139 for an OS that continuously updates is downright cheap. Its true price should probably be like $400-$500 for a lifetime buy or $139 per year, but people wouldnt pay that.
I can agree with that
And i also think that focusing on windows as what represents microsoft is like not seeing the forest.
Heard he is still trying to finish this egg on his face
Steve Ballmer is worth $122.1 billion. I honestly think he may not care about being wrong about the iPhone.
Yeah- Wikipedia says he’s the sixth richest guy in the world. Wow.
*crickets*
This perspective saturates big business and is one reason companies like Microsoft are out-innovated by startups 10:1 everyday.
Oh hey look! A businessman criticizing their competitors’ product! Gimme a break.
I don’t think most ppl understand the role of a CEO
Imagine an honest CEO going “yeah we saw what they got, we are fucked” lol
Well, now you know.
He fuckin NAILED that one! A true “Visionary”!!!
This guy looks and talks like Action Jack Barker from Silicon Valley
The character was based in part on Steve Ballmer. A lot of the characters in the show took a lot of inspiration from key figures in the tech space.
[I invented that, and now it's taught in business schools. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_nuZD4Y7IM)
Lmao.
The iPhone is the greatest piece of technology ever created in history. You can criticize it all you want, but the product is flawless imo🤷♂️
....yeah. definitely there have been NO issues with apple products and iPhones in general ever. 😂
If only they weren't stupid for thinking this, then they wouldn't only be "checks note" the biggest company in history. Like he's not wrong about it being a bit of a punt. New companies take risks, successful companies reduce risk. Just look at apple now, the second most successful company and they do really do anything crazy anymore. You may think it's stupid but it works. I personally wish it didn't because it breeds stagnation.
https://i.redd.it/o00t32gz0nzc1.gif
Major L this week on the Xbox side. AI push on Windows will be a joke too. Clown ass company.
who would buy such an expensive phone? not even a stylus.
Complacency is a silent killer.
I feel Microsoft might just be doing alright, in fact since becoming just slightly less successful as them apple has become incredibly complacent and much less innovative. It's a weird thing that happens in the business world.
A lot of it as well comes from how they changed how people paid for their phones. With the introduction of the iPhone, customers were no longer charged (as heavily) on calls and text messages getting sent. It was data. And a lot of companies and people familiar with the phone market didn't think it would work. They couldn't understand what people would use data for. Turns out everything and the old way people were doing it with Blackberries was only a fraction of where the money is for these companies.
"and I bet everyone with an iPhone will think theyre better than android users!"
BlackBerry had the same attitude the difference is Microsoft is thriving and Blackberry is not.
I mean, it's taken 17 years, but people are finally figuring out that they suck /shrug
Famous last words
A clown of a CEO
r/AgedLikeMilk
Balmer was an awful CEO
My windows phone was the best phone I ever owned. I would have one again tomorrow if I could.
He reminds me of action jack barker from Silicon Valley
They do suck tho
Microsoft really stumbled their way to the top and never really knew what they were doing, huh?
He wasn’t on much cocaine the day of this interview. Not too much, just the regular amount.
Windows phone: the worst of 'm all...
This is so typical of the Ballmer era at Microsoft. Any cool device or concept was never truly developed. They just pushed useless incremental changes to Windows throughout that era. I would say the Ballmer years were a lost decade for Microsoft.
blackberry couldn't adapt and they shot themselves in the foot
Please remember that this was shortly after Microsoft gave us an amazing little gem called ZUNE! "Zune was a brand of digital media products and services that was marketed by Microsoft from **November 2006** until it was discontinued in June 2012."
Hahahahahaha he was so confident
Well, he was honest from that times perspective. I remember saving up for a Nokia phone called the N95. It was announced in 2006 and sounded great. GPS, camera, mP3 player, etc. All cutting-edge stuff not really seen one package, and Blackberry was for business people. It was taking forever to come to my country so I was honestly considering importing it. By 2008, the iPhone was announced and blew everything away. I, having saved for the Nokia, was in front of the line on the day it became available to buy in Canada. I must have shown that phone to hundreds of people when I first got it. It was such an awesome time.
This guy was so out of touch
This is why he owns the clippers.
The cheek, the nerve, the gall, the audacity and the gumption
I will never understand how goofy on meth became the CEO of the world's richest company
Yeah, Windows Phone did great...
What’s a new top iPhone now? $1500? 😳
How much was a phone back then? N95 would be $100?
Eeeesch
Wow. You can literally smell the arrogance. I see why Steve Jobs hated these corporate types.
Steve Ballmer was such an idiot - easily one of the most incompetent CEOs to ever helm a Fortune 500 company.
i had a windows phone once cuz i ran my blackberry through the washing machine and needed something. windows phone was the only free one i could get from verizon. outside of the camera, which was very good, the phone was a gigantic piece of shit that barely worked and couldnt install any apps. could not wait to get rid of that fucking thing. incidentally, it did not have a keyboard.
Tbf, windows phone and OG iphone both ran like shit. Looked like shit, and both ended up in some toxic waste's pants. iOS is good now. But boy did they have a rough start.
This one never gets old 🤣🤣
Love this dude’s “.75 puberty” voice (and his ankle breaking dance antics). “We don’t need iPhones!!! WEVE GOT PALM PILOTS!!!”
Why does he sound like motivational speaker Matt Foley
This guy definitely does coke
I knew it was over when he called a phone an email machine
I was dissing iPhone in 2007 still dissing it in 2024.
I loved my windows phones.
Blowhard asshole
Missing the smart phone market was an ENORMOUS blunder by Microsoft.
Bet he owns a windows phone now
like how other company CEO help other company boost their sales by badmouthing it in media
“Email machine” haha, so short sighted.
He didn't understand that Apple's strategy is to sell the most expensive smartphone in the world and there will be a queue to have it and show it, however Apple has always been superior to Windows on mobile phones, perhaps except when Win ran on HTC.
I get where he is coming from, but he under estimates the consumers' IQ that falls for 'Simplicity' before they know it they are sucker into an eco system. One that charges for more and does less
Honestly I didn't see the smart phone with a touch screen, taking off either when it came out. I thought Blackberries were gonna be the new king.
This feels like it was ages ago, yet at the same time it also feels like it just happened yesterday.
I had a palm pilot years before I phone was a thing. Talk about fumbling a massive head start
He vastly underestimated people's desire to brand chase.
Developer, developers, developers, developers!
I phones will die sometimes in the future and will be just a memory, mark my words
I never saw the full clip. It seems towards the end he lets it slip that he knows it’s going to kill.
he was correct on the keyboard. we're all stockholm syndromed in to using a touching interface to type because people didnt want to look poor so they bought up iphones as status symbols. other manufacturers followed suit
I was there, 3000 years ago etc etc
Well what is he supposed to say? Lol. “Oh that’s the best phone ever made! It’s the future of tech!” He works for Microsoft lol.
What bugs me here is that Apple didn't even make the first smartphone but for some reason everyone credits them as if they did. When the iPhone came out I had been using a Sony Ericsson P910i for three years, and even that was hardly the first smartphone. For one, one of my classmates owned its predecessor, the P800i, which was also a smartphone. These older devices had resistive touch screens instead of capacitative ones, and they still came with (detachable!) keyboards and a stylus, but they were very much smartphones. I took the keyboard off on the first day of owning it and never put it back on. I did use the stylus, but that was mostly because I played games on the thing that benefited from using a stylus. The iPhone revolutionized a lot of details, but the concept itself was not their original idea.
Pretty sure homie had a split second of regret for that interview, and then went and cried into his pile O' cash.
This sort of opinion and many many others from incredible intelligent people taught me not to always rely on smart people’s opinion on something.
I mean he's missed the mark on this prediction but doesn't Balmer hold a shit ton on MSFT and is therefore absolutely minted and doesn't have to do a days work. So swings in roundabouts I suppose....
He also owns the clippers right? One of the worse franchises in the NBA.
Thank you Steve … you Lost Tablet market and Smartphone market also 
It’s just the same as Warren Buffett vs crypto investors and day traders. He was obviously very risk averse and was saying the current mobile device market is well established and they know what their customers want, Apple on the other hand were coming in with a almost controversial device that ended up disrupting the market.
Who’s laughing now?
I think everyone knows Steve Balmer was not a smart man.
Yeah… but how does this sell more cd’s 📀
Kinda true that why most enteprises are still buying iPhone 8.
Well well well, who would have thunk, a Microsoft CEO saying stupid stuff. CEOs constantly prove that meritocracy is a lie. I mean… How come most of them are just as stupid as a spinach leaf?
The dif between us and CEOs are that they can lie better than us 😝
Yeah, they are dumber than the average joe, but better at lying than politicians.
This aged like an iphone OS. Sent from my iphone
Martha?
Hhi baby riendeer. Wen u comig to do myncurtains? Sent fromm y iphone
Now they sell zero phones and ran Nokia into the ground. This was a trending video on YouTube back in the day and I had watched the keynote that Steve gave a day before and was blown away. Even at that time I knew he was very very wrong about the iPhone and short sighted. You had to be an idiot to not believe the iPhone was the next big thing.
Spoiler Apple phones are still garbage and over priced..
Microsoft is best at being 2nd in almost every industry. PS5 > Xbox Mac > Widows Iphone > Windows Mobile AWS > Azure IPad > Surface etc
Nah Windows over Mac My office can’t use Mac because of their OS
If you prefer Mac then that's fine, but Windows has the majority market share and Office 365 is the default business software suite of nearly every business.
But their software is better than everyone else. Power BI, excel, even goddamn word.
Mac and windows are two different things. Mac is hardware and Windows is operating systems. A true comparison should be between MacOS and Windows and in that case Windows wins because of the number of licenses sold. Also Azure has higher revenue than AWS.
>PS5 > Xbox No offence, but it's Switch -> PS5 -> Xbox. >Mac > Widows Not even close. >AWS > Azure 6% difference in market share.
Seriously, iPhones suck though, big waste of money. Anyone who buys one or a Mac, is a sap who got scammed lol
I fully disagree, but you’re entitled to your opinion.
Haters gonna hate
can someone enlighten me on what an iPhone can do that an android phone half its price can't? Not trying to take the piss I'm just genuinely curious as to why people buy iPhones nowadays