“So what does Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer do when he faces a room of press and financial analysts toting a bunch of Macs? He counts Apple logos,” Larry Dignan reports for ZDNet. “During his talk about search, netbooks, Windows 7 and the business climate, Ballmer took a detour into Apple-ville and how Microsoft tracks share versus Apple.”
Excerpts from Steve Ballmer’s speech:
We have low share, by the way, in the investor audience. I can see the Apple logos versus the PC logos. So we have more work to do, more work to do. Our share is lower in this audience than the average audience. Don’t hide it. I’ve already counted them. I have been doing that since we started talking.
Anyway, we got a bank them right here in the middle. I know where they all are. One over here on the side. But anyway… that’s okay, feel free as long as you are using Office to go right on ahead.
The primary attack that comes from Apple is, hey, at the end of the day, we have the coolest hardware. When you see the hardware, the PC design that is am come out this Christmas with Windows 7, I think that conventional wisdom can begin to really change. There is some really amazing, amazing work. So it is possible to get great hardware innovation, even when hardware and software comes from separate companies.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take:
By SteveJack
This, of course, is exactly what Ballmer wants his investors and his customers to think. Concentrate only on the hardware, not on the OS, which, BTW, is what Microsoft makes; not PC hardware. This is one of Microsoft’s weakest attempts to freeze the market in recent memory. Does he really think we’ll believe that Dell et al. are building factories to mill ultra-thin, precision unibody laptops out of solid aluminum like Apple? Puleeze. Not with their margins (or lack thereof). And, besides, no matter what they produce, they’ll still have crappy Windows and tons of other assorted crapware pre-installed. And, stickers; don’t forget the stickers.
So, why, some may ask, doesn’t Ballmer just say, “Hey, Apple makes cool, quality hardware, so run Windows on it!”
The reason he doesn’t say such a thing, especially in a room full of press and financial analysts, is because he knows that it’s death. If people did that, buy “cool” Macs to run Windows, then they’d also get to dabble in Mac OS X. In Microsoft’s land of mediocrity and worse, this is A Very Bad Thing™. The Very Worst Thing Of All™, in fact.
Obviously, as many of you know firsthand, Windows-only sufferers who are confronted with Mac OS X routinely and quite joyously end up dumping Windows. In fact, the Windows-to-Mac switchers end up being some of Apple’s very best salespeople. Ballmer knows all this, of course, but he can’t say it, so instead he pretends that this whole Apple Mac thing is only about “cool” hardware, as if Monkey Boy were actually capable of discerning cool. Ballmer’s spiel only works on those who’ve never really tried a Mac; the rest of us just laugh.
This is how Microsoft makes their money, it’s really the only way they’ve ever made their money, on the backs of the ignorant. Ignorance is the key to Microsoft’s success. Just look at their commercials in which Microsoft peddles cheap, junky, thick, heavy, and uncool (one of the actors even says she’s not cool enough for a Mac) laptops that they don’t even make. Microsoft ignores the OS – the actual part of the “PC” that they make – altogether. Microsoft avoids the Windows vs. Mac operating system comparison for one simple reason: They cannot compete. So, sticker price is all they have left. Ballmer, like the rest of us, knows that if you give people both Windows and Mac OSes to use, they overwhelmingly choose Mac. That’s why in a room full of people in-the-know, he’s facing a room full of Macs with glowing Apple logos.
This situation, of course, is why Microsoft will ultimately lose and Apple will win. In a head-to-head matchup of Windows vs. Mac, it’s no contest. Microsoft’s only remaining technique it to try to keep as many sheep as possible in the dark. Microsoft’s last refuge is to pretend that the people who buy Macs are somehow glamoured by a glowing Apple logo and not making a sensible choice, “paying $500 for a logo,” etc. Basing your business on a lie guarantees failure. Unfortunately for Microsoft, there are too many Apple retail stores, too many satisfied customers who talk way too much about their satisfaction, and far too many roomfuls of Mac-toting financial analysts and members of the press.
Oh, BTW, not content to merely fleece the ignorant sheep, Ballmer also promised to rape them, too:
Gavin Clarke reports for The Register, “Ballmer said Microsoft had got it wrong by selling low-priced Windows – Windows XP – on netbooks. These run Windows XP and account for 11 per cent of Microsoft’s PC business, but Microsoft’s tactic of using low price to win market share against Linux has hurt its revenue.”
“With Windows 7, Ballmer vowed prices would go up, and Microsoft had a ‘great chance’ to up-sell customers,” Clarke reports. “It sounded like the upsell will come from Windows XP on netbooks to Windows 7 on netbooks and from Windows 7 on netbooks to Windows Home Premium on ultra-thin machines. ‘In Windows 7, we are going re-adjust those prices north,’ Ballmer told analysts looking for the bottom line and dismayed by the impact of netbook sales on Microsoft’s business.”
Full article here.
SteveJack is a long-time Macintosh user, web designer, multimedia producer and a regular contributor to the MacDailyNews Opinion section.
Didn’t Ballmer gave the same statement when Vista was about to be released. from what i remember he said look for the hardware that will come along with Vista. nothing really changed after Vista was released.
MSFT’s DNA is to copy others.
You know sooner or later Ballmer will start contract manufacturing PCs too to counter Mac sales and growing number of non-Windows netbooks, just like they had to make Zune. They had to make XBox. And when the MacTouch comes out they will scramble to marry Windows 7 with the Big Ass Table.
There will always be people who really don’t want to change anything. They somehow convince themselves, or others convince them, to switch to the Mac, but the unspoken expectation is that everything will work exactly the way it did in Windows. This, of course, is impossible; so these people eventually go back to Windows. For most switchers, however, there’s no looking back. I, too, was a switcher once. I bought my first pc in 1978, six years before the first Mac appeared on the scene. Hardly a day went by that I didn’t want to throw that stupid pc out the window. The day I laid eyes on my first Mac, I knew my days of endless frustration were over. And they were.
iPhoner: your experience is so like mine. Switched 6 years ago. Now my family has gone all Macs and I’ve got one at work: four high end laptops, one G5 tower, one macpro, two iPhones, two mac minis and two iMacs. Now my mother-in-law has an iMac, my brother-in-law bought an iMac and even my nephew, an accountant got a macbook pro after buying his first iPhone a year ago (going to the dark side, as he put it at first). It just keeps growing. We don’t need to drink anything. Just experience it first hand. The rest is history.
What it simply comes down to is would you by an OS from a visionary who has cut his teeth in 3 different companies and learned tons from his failures or from a salesman that won’t acknowledge that he has already failed and is still trying to market his way out of a sink hole? Painting a sickly elephant in black and white stripes does not make it a healthy zebra. I think even PT Barnum would not have tried that one.
S’funny – I wonder what he meant by “When you see the hardware, the PC design that is am come out this Christmas with Windows 7, I think that conventional wisdom can begin to really change.”
What conventional wisdom? That Macs are better than PCs?
Shirley (from a Ballmer point of view anyway) it should be that conventional wisdom dictates that PCs are better than Macs!
Freudian slip?!? I think he knows Microsoft’s screwed
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ROTFLMAO! Ballmer’s a douche!
First, anybody can come up with something cool. Cool and functional, that’s the hard part. Apple does this very well.
As dave points out, above, when PC companies come up with something cool and functional, they end up having to charge more for it. And they end up competing against themselves. I can buy this Dell 1/2-inch thick aluminum unibody laptop for $2000, or I can buy this Dell 1-inch plastic laptop for $750. Most people will choose the $750. Believe it or not, style doesn’t sell all that well.
One of the things about Apple is that, as Mac users, we get great looking devices for free because Apple doesn’t compete against itself. You don’t have a “luxury” line of Macs and an “economy” line of Macs. Because of this, Apple can enjoy better economies-of-scale producing “luxury” Macs.
As an example, consider an iMac. It’s a great looking all-in-one desktop personal computer. Let’s say the pretty enclosure for the iMac costs $100. Suppose Apple yanked the motherboard out of the iMac and stuck it in a cheap-ass $10 PC case (and unhooked the monitor). They could sell cheapMacs for less than $500 and it would probably outsell the pretty all-in-one iMacs. Because they wouldn’t be selling as many iMacs, the cost of those pretty enclosures would probably go up, accentuating the rift between the “luxury” iMacs and the “inexpensive” cheapMacs.
So by having just the one line, Apple makes good looking machines that are economical.
@iphoner
It’s not about Mac snobbery. It’s about a sense of right and wrong. Mac users have a feeling of frustration that time and again, Apple has added creative feature after feature through talent and hard work to make our user experience better, and Microsoft eventually either takes credit or gloats about it when they copy it two years later. That frustration was deeper years back when Apple was on the brink of collapse. Now with Apple in fine form, it just seems terribly unfair, similar to plagiarism where the loser kid keeps on boasting for work he copied off the creative kid. The list of Apple firsts later copied by MS is really endless.
With Balmers attitude I will be amazed if Microsoft is around in 20 years.
Lets face it, Apple is destroying them in the hardware and software game, Google have launched their own OS and web apps that are a million times better than office, Nintendo is owning the Xbox in unit sales across the globe (xbox will never make any money for Microsoft anyway as it cost over $100 million to develop and Market).
Micosoft has made it’s first major losses in 20 years and is cutting back. Things are VERY bad for them and it’s only going to get harder for them to compete.
The most effective marketing bucks spent on Apple’s behalf might just be Balmer’s salary and benefits.
Long live Balmer!
With all the news to come out of Redmond over the past weeks, one has to wonder how this moron still has a job. The comments he made are delusional at best, and given the fact he stood there counting Apple logos and talking sh*t about how W7 is the coolest thing on Earth tells all of us this guy is frightened for his company. He should be.
It is a forgone conclusion the Windows 7 is too little, too late. If more than half of the business community is still sticking with XP, he’s already lost the enterprise market on the OS side. It won’t be long after that when he starts losing SQL Server, Dynamics, and other apps to competing providers like Oracle and IBM – both of which are supposedly writing enterprise apps for our favorite company.
Microsoft has proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, to be the masters at copying the technologies of others (i.e. Apple). It’s like the old saying – you can fool some people all of the time and you can fool all people some of the time. The bottom line is Apple continued to innovate to a point where MS could not keep up, so their stolen ideas from Apple could never be xeroxed. Every version of Windows was a rip-off of the Apple OS, and when Apple came back to prominence in the 90s MS laughed it off. Subsequently you had Windows ME, Vista, and the upcoming 7 (which looks like a copy of Vista, actually) – all of which were or will be flops. Beyond that, the Zune is dead, the Big Ass Table is laughable, and now this phony retail initiative. How uncool.
Ballmer was and is nothing but a big, fat sales and marketing guy that just can’t keep up with Apple, and if he doesn’t know that, he’s a complete moron. He should be looking at his employment agreement for how much they’ll pay him when he’s tossed out the door, and if I were him, I’d start dumping those shares quickly.
All of this is just music to my ears.
fm
@ bezoar … “Long live Balmer!”
Agreed. It’s just like us Bronco fans in Colorado.
Long Live Al Davis!!
As long as you’ve got inept leaders at the helm it makes the competitions job that much easier.
(Don’t worry Raider fans – we now have a rookie head coach who is trying to get rid of the few talented players that we have)
“The primary attack that comes from Apple is, hey, at the end of the day, we have the coolest hardware. When you see the hardware, the PC design that is am come out this Christmas with Windows 7, I think that conventional wisdom can begin to really change. “
First, Microsoft doesn’t make hardware. Second, while I love the Mac hardware, it is the quality of the Mac —software— that sells the machines.
This idiot runs a software company and doesn’t get this?
A little off topic;
Just to speak about how Mac is better… I was in the Apple Store and started playing with a Mac that had a usb piano keyboard hooked up, with Garage Band.
I am a musician, but I’ve never used garage band.
I recorded a perfect cover of “Right Now” by Akon in 20 minutes, including vocals. The Apple salespeople walked me through tempo changing, adding instruments, and recording. I one-take sang into the built in mic and then flipped on GarageBand’s pitch correction.
I’ve never recorded such a professional sounding piece of music soooo fast in my life.
Also makes you wonder how much talent our pop stars really have…..
I have news for you MAC turds. Ballmer knows all about amazing innovation. I’ll remind you real world computer challenged nincompoops of a certain 4-letter MP3 player that’s taking the world by storm, and it ain’t the dumpy I-Pod. Zune oozes amazing hardware design and innovation, and It’s only a taste of the awesome things Microsoft and their hardware partners will offer at Christmastime. Scared? You dorks should be.
Your potential. Our passion.™
Ballmer’s comments are eerily reminiscent of those uttered by virtually every CEO of General Motors over the last 20 years. Every year, as GMs market share continued to erode, their mantra always, “Wait ‘til next year, when the new models come out. Sure the current crop isn’t meeting sales expectations, but the NEXT batch, those are really going to be the game-changers.” They shamelessly shoveled that drivel year after year, as they continued churning out largely forgettable products and their market share plummeted. Ballmer would fit right in with that pack.
I used to think that if the government made cars, they’d be GM. And if GM made software, they’d be Microsoft. Never thought I’d actually see it happen though.
@iPhoner: a beautiful story, thanks for sharing.
Ballmer still has a a job because the rest of Redmond is just as deranged and out of touch as he is.
Apple isn’t about the hardware, it’s about the EXPERIENCE. The user experience is a combination of hardware and software. Ballmer just counts units sold, he doesn’t get it.
I think I’ve lost my touch 🙁
Word to the wise: being a Mac turd=being a Micro$oft turd; but Macs are cooler.
Ballmer’s scared because the last 2 quarters, MS has ONLY made $3B; while the much smaller Apple, or so he thought, has made $2B each of the last 2 quarters. With such a tiny sliver of the computer market, Apple has really closed the gap in profits, and Ballmer can no longer ignore them.
“…the PC design that is am come out this Christmas with Windows 7, I think that conventional wisdom can begin to really change.”
“Yes (Steve,) there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy.”*
But unfortunately for you, he works for Apple.
And HE, has been a very good boy.
*http://www.newseum.org/yesvirginia/
Welcome back Zune Tang! Your expertly crafted sarcasm and wit is a sight to behold and worth a million laughs! Keep it coming!
“…real world computer challenged nincompoops”- bwaha!
I want Microsoft to be smaller and less draconian, less anti-competitve.
I don’t want it to die.
Steve Ballmer is on the way to totally bury MSFT for good.
I feel sad.