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Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer Admits He Was Wrong About the iPhone

Euphemia said:
Back in 2000, I bought my Nokia 8250 on a phone subsidy in Australia. Phone subsidies have been a common practice for a very long time. I'm not sure why Apple is getting the credit for it.
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This ^

Subsidies on phones were happening way before iPhone was released and ironically my 2 top phone choices during this time were the Nokia and Samsung phones!

I thought they were so cool at the time!

samsung.jpg
Nokia.jpg
 
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I avoid buying phones on contract - when you add it all up you realise the operators charge an extortionate amount compared to buying the phone outright.

I live the UK and for £20 (about 25 dollars) a month you get unlimited data on sim only. So for me while sim only is such good value, there really is no attraction to get a phone on contract.
 
Now are we going to hear from Xerox...?

Talk about blunders you have to live with for the rest of your life...
 
Ballmer is having trouble admitting the real reason why he was wrong.

The iPhone wasn't successful because of the subsidized model, which existed prior to the iPhone. The iPhone was a success because it was simply a way better phone.

Ballmer not admitting this is the reason he's not the CEO.
 
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MrX8503 said:
Ballmer is having trouble admitting the real reason why he was wrong.

The iPhone wasn't successful because of the subsidized model, which existed prior to the iPhone. The iPhone was a success because it was simply a way better phone.

Ballmer not admitting this is the reason he's not the CEO.
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Yes and no.
If Apple had stuck to the full price model, the iPhone would have been relegated to the niche market.
Part of what put it over the top was making it available to the masses with an affordable up front cost through subsidies.
 
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At least he has admitted he was wrong. Personally i think the iPhone is the best on the market, the iPhone is probably what Apple is known most for. The Mac and iPad are also great, but i think the iPhone has helped Apple as a company more.
 
He had some reason about saying that nobody would pay 500$ for a phone. The problem was that the iPhone was so much more than a phone.

And even that I'm not sure. A lot of high end Nokia phones (at least in Europe) sold around that price point. And sold pretty well.
 
he was the worst Microsoft CEO of all time by far, he almost Bankrupt the whole company. it is good Microsoft is back to its good days and we customers will have more options to buy.
 
Smartass said:
Doesnt really. He, personaly, wiped off microsoft from mobile market. These days windows phones out in the real world are as rare as a priests who werent accused of being child molestors.
This guy made so much damage to Microsoft, it is trully unbelievable how he failed to see the rising phone market and new technologies with it, yet he still mocked it made fun out of it. Probably the biggest fiasco in High-tech industry in years...
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Although he did destroy Microsoft's consumer reputation so bad that the Xbox brand almost seemed like it wasn't a Microsoft product to many...what he did in the Enterprise was absolutely amazing. Microsoft's Office and Server products (as well as their services) were the focus from 1999 forward, and he did win that one. MS even predicted the BYOD trend early on but just couldn't turn that ship around fast enough to get back into the consumer market. Their cloud initiative was the right step, even if they just talked about it too much at the start.

However, when you see your own employees would rather walk around with Galaxy S and iPhone devices than the free phone you gave them, it's time to hang it up.
 
Arminnn89 said:
he was the worst Microsoft CEO of all time by far, he almost Bankrupt the whole company. it is good Microsoft is back to its good days and we customers will have more options to buy.
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"all time"...there have been 3 CEO's, one has had a very short time in that seat. Ballmer inherited the post anti-trust Microsoft, he had limitations on what he could do in just about every direction. Ballmer took MS to its previous highest heights as well, and to use a word like bankrupt here is absolutely ******* crazy. Microsoft has reported one loss in its history, and it rolled all of those into one quarter from previous purchases over a few years that it wrote off. Do you know how many losses it would take Microsoft to go bankrupt? Look at Blackberry, now multiply that by thousands.
 
Ah, Ballmer. Leaving was the best thing he ever did for MS, but I do miss the entertainment value of watching him lead.
 
MacRumors said:
Ballmer praised Apple's cellular subsidy model and admitted he wished he had come up with it first.
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Ballmer still doesn't get it.

Apple didn't create the phone subsidy model -- that'd already existed for years in the US market.

Blackberry, Palm, Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, etc. were already was already riding that model for all it was worth. The entire point of the model was to reduce the barrier-to-entry for people to buy a cell phone.
 
the8thark said:
Ballmer was not wrong. That's the thing.
Apple realised the truths in what Ballmer said and worked on them to make the iPhone sell. If everyone had to pay $750 or more outright for their iPhone, no one would. The whole phone plan subsidising where you get to pay off the cost of the phone along with your bill over 24 months is what really allowed the iPhone to take off.
It was comments like Ballmer's that prompted Apple to go for the subsidised approach.

Ballmer's lament about not entering the hardware market sooner is not really a vaid one. MS traditionally is not a hardware company, it's a software company. Apple does the hardware and software vertically integrated whole solution in one approach. An approach MS traditionally has not done.

The interviewer is asking Ballmer - Why is MS not doing what Apple does?
His answer is so captain obvious - Because MS is MS and not Apple.
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But, phones are $750 or more now, and it doesn't stop people paying for them outright. Nobody has ever required customers to pay cash for these phones.

Ballmer is trying to revise history here, and save some face.

levitynyc said:
iPhones are still $700. You just don't pay it up front anymore.
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Of course you do -- via a loan. I bought my first iPhone for $600 and put it on a credit card. I paid for the entire phone up front, but via an unsecured loan to me allowing me to pay for it over time.

Yes the subsidies created the illusion of paying much less for the phone, but that model existed long before Apple. Ballmer is just wrong here. Every cell phone I owned before the iPhone was purchased as a "free" phone or otherwise subsidized.

There's absolutely nothing different about the subsidy the phone company offered that couldn't be had by buying it outright on a credit credit card. The net result was monthly payments and increased cost of ownership through interest payments tacked on to the retail cost.
 
Mac 128 said:
But, phones are $750 or more now, and it doesn't stop people paying for them outright. Nobody has ever required customers to pay cash for these phones.
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The majority do not buy outright. Ballmer's point about this was totally on point.
 
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We need a video of Tim Cook talking about the Mac and how nobody cares about the Mac and that the future is the iPad. This video can be like the Balmer iPhone video for future generations to watch.
 
This and the Michael Dell quote are referenced so often. I'm an Apple fanboy but I actually enjoy a lot of MS / Dell products (not the base models but the more premium stuff).

I think these quotes were mistakes even at the time, it was clear these two leaders were out of touch. I also think that these guys get way too much crap for something they said 10+ years ago.

Watching the full interview, Ballmer should not look @ his time in Microsoft as he said something like a 10 person company to a billion dollar company in the 30 years he was there. He wasn't running it for 30 years and during his time, all of his competitors soared in stock & revenue while Microsoft simply got by selling Windows & Office licenses.

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I don't fault Ballmer for who he is, a lover of Microsoft, someone that bleeds microsoft and is passionate and a great leader and overall a very likable guy. I fault him because his directions lead to Microsoft missing the boat on a few key computing areas, even ones that Bill Gates had said were the future and Ballmer chose to ignore or squander them. Watch Bill Gates' CES Keynotes from 2001-2005. He said a lot of things that eventually came true but Microsoft missed the mark repeatedly so much that without group licensing their Windows & Office products, they'd be out of business by now.

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Without knowing the behind the scenes of it all, I imagine a big area of contention between Steve & Bill Gates beyond that maybe they worked well together but simply didn't get along outside of work would be that Bill set in motion a lot of things that simply weren't delivered under Steve and this lead to Bill feeling like Steve really screwed the pooch.

would Windows Phone, AR, VR, Bing, Office 365, One Drive, Xbox, Mobile Gaming, Home theatre PCs & content deals happened under Bill Gates? we'll never know. Steve may have tried to execute on his predecessors ideas but failed because the MS culture was too IBM-Like and it took radical restructuring to make that work. Steve may have inherited an organization that was pre-disposed to miss these boats?
 
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