Steve Ballmer, CEO and co-founder of Microsoft, recently gave an interview to Dyan Machan, SmartMoney senior writer.
Here is the main stuff, with my comments [Thanks to MacDailyNews for the heads up] :
Machan: Steve Jobs's iPhone announcement stole the thunder from Bill Gates's keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show. Do you wish you had the iPhone?
Ballmer: No. Apple has put its brand into a new category. That doesn't mean it's a good product. I wouldn't be surprised if one of our partners came out with a device that looks exactly the same at a lower price in six or seven months [near the time when iPhones will ship]. There's a notion that there's magic with Apple. iPod is a hot brand — not Apple.
M.D. comment : a Microsoft partner coming out with ' a device that looks exactly the same at a lower price ' won't even succeed. Pricing is not the issue here. That's the user experience. The whole product solution : the product' design, features, ease-of-installation, ease-of-use, ease-of-maintenance, ease-of-upgrade, reliability, sales & technical support, cost-of-ownership... The post-1997 Apple got it all. Microsoft and its so-called partners are still trying to figure out why the iPod+iTunes model is so successful. Pricing is not the issue. Look Dell.
Machan: But Apple is in the home, winning in the very place Microsoft has identified as important to its strategy — that is, entertainment.
Ballmer: It's a romantic notion that Apple has the lead. People who build overpriced, underpowered equipment and then market it in an edgy way do not have a formula for broad success. In the home there are PCs; Apple has no presence. There are videogame machines; Apple has no presence. TVs: Apple has no presence; Microsoft has some presence. Music: Apple has a very large presence [via the iPod]; Microsoft has an interesting presence in the high-end market.
M.D. comment : First, Ballmer should have add "yet". "Apple has no presence yet ". Wait for the release of Mac OS 10.5 ' Leopard ' : I bet the AppleTV will become the media-center every one is looking for for home entertainment. Second, on the ' formula for broad success ' : on the contrary, Apple is building products which may seem overpriced (that might be true for the iPod as a simple MP3 player, but no longer for the Macs), which offer ' just-enough ' feature set, and are visible enough to become mainstream faster than Windows Vista ;-)
Machan: You mean the Zune? Please.
Ballmer: We don't kid ourselves. We won't come out our first Christmas and take over. There will be a phase two and three. But at the end of the day, entertainment devices will be a very good business for us.
M.D. comment : as long as they run Microsoft Windows, yes...
Machan: People complain about feature bloat. Most of us use 5 to 10% of features. People won't buy for features.
Ballmer: No. They will buy for features. People use more of these products than they think. Maybe you couldn't write [a great PowerPoint presentation]. But now you can read it. The user interface is sexier. Sex sells.
M.D. comment : okay, sex sells. Look the iPod. But please Mr. Ballmer, don't tell us PowerPoint is a sexy product (otherwise, I wonder what is a sexy woman for you ;-). Plus, the possibility to read a file is the minimum a software company can offer to its users.
I will come back to those points later, with the comparison between Ballmer's statements and what we did at Agilent Technologies to overcome our main rival on the optical network testing arena (I know, it's not as sexy as the iPod, but still, that's marketing as unusual ;-)
For the time being, here is one out of a dozen of reasons why I will never apply to a job at Microsoft - at least as long as Steve Jobs don't put his hands on it ;-)
Direct link to the video on YouTube here.
