Ballmer Laughs at iPhone

>what Steve Balmer said about the iPhone The first iPhone, running iOS v1, was kinda shit. It's easy to look at what the iPhone is today and laugh at Ballmer, but I don't think what he said was wrong at the time he said it. ▶ this video

> When the iPad was introduced, everyone was shocked by the very low price and the sleek form factor compared to previous Windows tablet devices. What I remember is everyone making fun of it, including the name¹, for being “just a big iPod Touch”. Similarly, the iPhone wasn’t taken all that seriously² on launch. The App Store wasn’t even an idea yet, let alone a reality. That is to say this always happens: people discount a new thing and use as contrast something else which was also discounted at the time but framed as if it had always been perceived by the current lens. I have no idea if the Vision Pro will “succeed” (however we define that), but we can be reasonably sure that the current version is the worse it will ever be. In other words, it will get better and it’s too soon to judge its impact. ¹ link ² ▶ this video

Interesting just how similar his reaction is to what Ballmer's was when asked about the iPhone. "We like our strategy," comments about how it's so expensive (in fact giving almost precisely the same comparison; $99 vs. $500 back then is quite close to the $500 vs. $3500 with VR!), and mentioning that they're selling "millions of phones per year" while Apple is selling zero. ▶ this video

The same could be said for mobile phones. Some things can be done quicker with physical buttons. That's why people thought phones with just a screen would never become popular: ▶ this video But with a screen you can do many more things.

Strong Steve Ballmer vibes about this comment. "It doesn't have a keyboard which makes it not a very good email machine" ▶ this video Sure the iPhone was such an evolutionary product - practically indistinguishable from my old Nokia.

I'm open to being wrong here and I'd agree that my initial comment was stated in a provocative way, but let me clarify a bit. Revenue growth isn't the whole story. If you're extracting rents from legacy locked-in products or enterprise deals that doesn't necessarily mean you're a competitor on the new paradigms (phone, cloud, web). At the time Windows phone was a failure and they missed that entire platform because of Ballmer (there's hints of your argument in this video, "we're making money with windows mobile"): ▶ this video MSFT cloud wasn't doing well and was overly focused on .NET They were too focused on Windows rather than recognizing the strategic value they could provide outside of it: link Today I'd make a similar argument for Intel. Intel doubled down on old style fabs and is not competitive with TSMC. They failed to compete on mobile. They're ignoring the end of x86 and mocking Apple: link Increasing revenue is a good sign, but it matters how. If you're making short-term decisions to extract money from legacy stuff at the expense of new products - that's bad for your long-term future. It can take a while to catch up to you, but it eventually will. Then you'll just limp a long as a dinosaur that makes enough money to survive but nobody really wants to work there and you're done doing interesting projects. That's basically what I mean by irrelevant.

>I think we give too much credit to an application that plays videos on a phone And what Youtube or Instagram does? Doing laundry on a phone? If it was a simple UX tweak situation the USA wouldn't be using it's muscles to force a take over by an US company. Unless of course there are no designers left in SV due to high rents. How much was that to take over TikTok USA operations? 50 billion? I am sure that you can hire designers for that money. And any argument over a strong current situation reminds me of this: ▶ this video

How is that reaction different than those that dismissed the iPhone in 2007 because it was sold for $500? Remember Ballmer laughing at the iPhone? ▶ this video

This strikes me the same as Ballmer's reaction to the iPhone launch laughing at the perspective of such a device to gain any market: ▶ this video

That wasn't Gates, it was Steve Ballmer. In an interview a decade later after this one he acknowledged to an interviewer that it might have been a mistake. ▶ this video One error Gates later admitted making was not buying Allaire Corp because he thought the price was too high. His own staff members argued with him on that one. But after Allaire was sold to Macromedia J.J. Allaire started the company Onfolio with some friends from Allaire. Gates insisted after launch that Ballmer purchase it, primarily to acquire the services of J.J. Allaire. During his time at Microsoft he created Windows LiveWriter and I've been told also worked on the creation of Azure. He left Microsoft and founded RStudio.

I can think of a fair number of execs who did not understand the implications. One of the classics: ▶ this video

Even those whose job it is to get these things right routinely don't. Example A: ▶ this video I always wonder at what point it was that Balmer realized their strategy was a failure.