Posted on 08/26/2009 10:20:19 AM PDT by Star Traveler
The iPhone & Steve Ballmer: It’s Time For Him To Eat Some Serious Crow
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
There are very few people in the tech world who annoy me quite like Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. It’s not just that he’s loud, dismissive and arrogant. It’s that he manages to be all these things while usually being spectacularly wrong, especially when it comes to Apple. Take for example his thoughts on the iPhone from a USAToday article in 2007:
“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance,” said Ballmer. “It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.”
As you might imagine, I experienced a moment of pure schadenfreude last week when Canalysis senior analyst Pete Cunningham announced that not only did the iPhone have 13.7% of the global smartphone market, but that it had surpassed Windows Mobile devices which had slipped to only 9%. Even worse for Microsoft is the fact that in the last 2 years, Apple has sold more iPhones than all the Windows Mobile devices from all its vendors combined.
I can only imagine that somewhere in Redmond, behind a very heavy door…Steve Ballmer is throwing a good old-fashioned hissy fit, cursing Apple, sweating profusely and gnawing on the furniture.
The fact is that Microsoft has never truly understood Apple and that confusion has grown in part out of their unparalleled success with Windows. With Windows, Microsoft found a superior product in the Macintosh OS, produced a cheaper knock-off and then created a large ecosystem of partners for wide distribution and support. The result was global domination. Unfortunately, cheaper and more plentiful doesn’t automatically win in every situation. As computers sink into every facet of daily life and the costs of consumer technology continue to drop, more and more value is being placed on finding products which are easier, more capable or simple more enjoyable to use.
Microsoft was unable to stop the runaway success of the iPod and it’s looking more and more unlikely that they’ll be able to contain the growth of the iPhone either. Why? Because they cannot fathom a formula for success that isn’t a function of feature set divided by price. It’s how they think and it’s also how they ultimately view the products they compete against. No wonder Ballmer spends so much time shouting at the rain. From his perspective, anyone who willingly pays more for the same features is a brainwashed idiot. What he doesn’t understand is that the experience of a product is more than the sum of its component parts. It’s how the device works, how it feels and even more elusively, how it makes you feel. Can you think of a Microsoft product that is truly a joy to use? I don’t mean one that works well, because many of their products work well enough. I mean one that is a joy to use. Neither can I. That’s because Microsoft isn’t in the joy business. They’re in the “nearly as good for less” business and that isn’t an appeal to the heart. It’s an appeal to the wallet.
So Mr. Ballmer, here’s some friendly advice. The next time you feel yourself ready to mouth off about how Apple is doomed to fail because it doesn’t understand the realities of the marketplace, take a moment and think about Windows Vista and the fact that roughly 50% of Apple Store customers are new to the Mac. Think about sales figures for the Zune as compared to the iPod. Think about the millions of people ditching their Windows Mobile devices for an iPhone. Think about the $35 Billion that a zero-debt Apple has sitting in the bank and all the money it continues to make made through this harsh economic downturn. Then if you’re still confident that you’re the smart one and Apple is the delusional one, then by all means have your say.
Just understand that with your miserable track record in predicting Apple’s future, there’s an excellent chance that you’ll end up eating your own words. Better make sure they’re palatable.
I remember when the iPhone was predicted there were guesses and mock-ups everywhere of what the fans and pundits thought it would be like. Usually it was kind of an iPod/phone mix.
The iPhone was so groundbreaking that everybody got it completely wrong. Nobody, not even those who follow Apple very closely, was anywhere near the ballpark.
If you like buying everything from one source, that is fine. Other platforms have thousands of sources and many hundreds of thousands of applications to choose from.
I find it very ironic that most Applefiles complain about Microsoft's monopolistic tactics but now marvel at Apple's single-channel AppStore.
Not my assertion. It was asserted by an Applefile in this thread.
I find it ironic that Applefiles complain about Microsoft's monopolistic practices, but worship the single-source, all-controlling AppStore.
Apple doesn't subsidize them, AT&T and the other service providers do—and pays Apple for every iPhone sold that is contracted to their service.
No, they don't. There may be dozens of providers, and thousands of apps, but not what you are claiming. In addition, while you are getting the iPhone apps from one store, you are getting them from thousands of publishers.
In a way, it is. You asked:
"Put up or shut up....what groundbreaking functionality did the iPhone bring that was not present already?"Your "not present already" implies newness. However, the operative term here is "functionality" which is where the iPhone shines. Functionality is, according to the New Oxford American Dictionary, "the quality of being suited to serve a purpose well; practicality". It is the basic "functionality" of how the various capabilities of the iPhone's system work together to make a seamless User Interface—where all of the iPhones capabilities are easily accessed and used without drilling down and searching through multiple layers of on screen menus—that IS groundbreaking.
For example, the Motorola phone I had previously to buying my iPhone had the capability of being a speaker phone and also the capability of combining an incoming call with an existing call together to make a conference call. They advertised it as being easy to use. Hah!
I am not a technophobe, nor am I technically challenged, but trying to turn on the speaker phone capability of that phone was not intuitive... or even easy to find the option to do so. In fact, in two years of owning that phone, I saw the option to turn on the speaker phone, which was a soft button option, exactly twice during a phone call—but I wanted (needed) to use it dozens of times. Often while looking for the option to turn on the speaker, the phone would disconnect the call. Even duplicating the exact same steps on the next call after I had been able to turn on the speaker phone did not invoke the speakerphone option button again!
Sitting with the over 100 page manual in my hand, turned to the section on turning the speakerphone on, I could never consistently even FIND the option. Tech support could not give me the steps to turn it on... they suggested I buy another phone next time my contract was up.
In multiple attempts to use the phone for a conference call on that Motorola, I never was able to successfully connect an incoming call to an existing call—although it was touted as an important feature of the phone. EVERY SINGLE TIME I ATTEMPTED JOINING CALLS, one or both of the callers would be disconnected during the process! Again, tech support was singularly unhelpful.
Although that Motorola HAD those capabilities—they were included in the specifications for the phone—it was simply not functionally possible to invoke them in real world usage. EVen putting a caller on hold was a very iffy proposition, with most attempts resulting in disconnections. The phone had the capability, it just did not have the functionality.
On my iPhone, those capabilities are dead easy, done by anyone from any call—without reading the manual. Answering an incoming call and adding it to a call already in progress is a two tap process. Speaker phone is also just two taps. That is groundbreaking functionality. It works and is easy to make it work.
No previous phone had a virtual keyboard that was context and application sensitive... changing characters and layouts dynamically depending on the application that was using it. That also is a groundbreaking. This virtual keyboard was again intuitive to use, far more so than any previous keyboard or touch screen.
As for "not present already," the iPhone's visual voice mail, where you could easily select the message you NEED to hear from a list was not present in any usable phone function on previous phones. It required a re-working of the infrastructure of the service carrier's equipment and software to accomplish. I find it is very usable and needed when important, response time sensitive messages come through after other not-so-important messages. I don't have to listen to all messages received before getting to the one that counts. I can tap on it and hear it NOW. That qualifies to me as breakthrough also.
iPhone App For Diabetes Gets $100,000 Grant
The developer, a college student, will use the grant to add Internet data-sharing to his app, which helps diabetics manage their health.
By Mitch Wagner
InformationWeek
August 26, 2009 09:25 AM
A Princeon University undergraduate has been tapped to receive a $100,000 grant for writing an iPhone app that helps diabetics manage their food consumption, blood sugar, and insulin intake.
The grant will allow Matthew Connor, a Princeton junior majoring in operations research and financial engineering, to expand an app he wrote with his brother to help diabetics manage their disease. Connor proposed building the iAbetics Web 2.0 Diabetes Management System, a Web site that will interact with the iPhone app, called Islet.
Diabetics need to keep careful track of blood glucose levels, insulin injections, and food intake to manage their disease and lower the risks of complications. But it's not easy, Connor said in an article on Princeton.edu. "You can hand write what you eat and your blood sugar numbers," he said. "But that gets pretty difficult if you're on the go, and it's hard to analyze without manually entering your handwritten notes into a computer."
The app provides an easy-to-use system for diabetics to record what and how much they eat, insulin injections, blood sugar readings and activity levels. The program graphs the data to show how the activity affects blood sugar, to help diabetics manage the disease in the future.
Right now, the data is stored on the iPhone and can be exported as a data file, but with the funding from the grant, Connor plans to allow the data to be shared over the Internet, to allow doctors to access the records and help patients manage their diabetes, as well as providing quality data for medical research.
Connor came up with the idea for the app after watching diabetic family and friends struggle to keep track of food, insulin intake, and blood sugar.
Connor won second place in the Prize for Primary Healthcare competition from the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology, a nonprofit consortium of Boston teaching hospitals and engineering schools to build interdisciplinary collaboration and rapidly improve patient care. The prize was made available through the Gelfand Family Charitable Trust, which will support the annual award for five years.
Some people just like to grouse over nothing, in regards to the Apple iPhone App Store, it seems... :-)
How about this. The New York Apple Store, has earnings of $35,000.00 per Square foot. Can't wait to see how the new M$ stores fair.
That "one size fits all" philosophy leads one astray as often as not. It led Xerox to sell its office solutions technology to Apple, leading us to where we are now on this thread. It led AT&T to get out of the personal computer business after developing Unix and the first networked personal computers. It led Exxon to abandon personal computer manufacturing. The same with Tandy Corporation and Texas Instruments. Eventually the exodus included IBM.
Are those companies who got out to concentrate on their core business the smart ones? Considering that personal computers were considered emerging technology at the time I am sure it made sense in that particular economic climate. But in the long run.... ?
How well would a large company like Xerox have faired with the early version of Mac to go along with their copy machine superiority in an expansion of office automation?
How well would AT&T done with their quality computers and the ability to network in the office?
What about IBM with its money and contacts and a newly developed operating system of their own?
It was in this environment that Microsoft's disk operating system prospered while others were getting back to their core business. It obviously helped Apple and Microsoft but did the others make the right decision?
AT&T subsidizes it. They make their money back on the contract. Apple gets paid $500; AT&T gets the extra customers and a guaranteed $30 per month for internet access per phone. They make their $300 back in the first year. iPhone users also tend to purchase more stuff like the unlimited texting package.
The iPhone has redefined the smart phone market, just as it did with the portable music market.
Muwahahaha. Android is Linux inside. Throw some more chairs Ballmer.
The Linux-inside Android is ahead of Microsoft Windows Mobile now. See #16.
But hey! Market share speaks for itself.
Yeah. And they've done it not by gaming the system but instead by making superior products and letting the market come to them.
If Microsoft isn't a hardware company, why can't I walk into a computer store in the US and buy a computer without an OS and decide for myself what OS I want to put on it? I can do that in Manila ...
bump
That's a fascinating comment.
in 1979, well prior to MS's link-up with IBM in which they parlayed Tim Paterson's QDOS to IBM as MS-DOS (without telling Paterson what they were up to), Microsoft was plugging a version of Unix called Xenix.
Xenix wasn't a flavor of Unix so much as a licensed port. It was Unix.
Bill Gates himself called MS-DOS 2.0 "the bridge to Xenix," clearly signaling a belief that the future of personal computing rested on this flavor of Unix [cf. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/01/31/ms_sells_stake_in_sco/]. Somehow that vision jumped the rails.
PC-DOS 2.0 was indeed a bridge to Unix. The new DOS calls added were all flavored towards Unix equivalents. I wrote alternative C libraries for two different C compilers in that period (Computer Innovations and Lattice) and already had extensive Unix experience by that point. It's true. The new code was buggy and poorly done in some cases (the globbing code that was more Unix-style than CP/M style was hopelessly bugged in 2.0).
Perhaps IBM drove that... hard to say, and a bit ironic in view of that company's reliance on Linux today. But it could be that the era Ballmer refers to was the turbulent circa-OS|2 era, in which Windows took its current vector.
IBM was driving OS/2 towards a bridge between their mainframes and PCs. I forget all of the details (I was never employed to work on IBM mainframes), but the big deal with OS/2 was supposed to be compatibility between the PC world and IBM mainframe world.
During this time frame, Unix was driving the final coffin nails behind proprietary, lock in systems. See Tracy Kidder's book Soul of a new Machine for the final dying gasp in that era. That was the final OS written by the manufacturer for a specific new machine. DEC VMS was still king in the minicomputer world, but its realm was disintegrating.
By the mid 1980s Unix was making inroads into previously DEC VMS-only territory. I watched that happen in my first job out of college being hired into a VMS shop. By the end of my time there, we were Unix and VMS was a relic of the past.
Microsoft hired the top VMS guys out of DEC to do Microsoft Windows NT in this same time frame. This should have been a clear indication to DEC stockholders to bail on the company, but it took more than a decade for the company to die.
I don't agree with all the things that VMS did, but it (DCL) allowed sufficient customization and had so many cool features that it was possible to reduce the pain level of using that system to a point where you could get a bit of enjoyment out of using the system. EDIT/TPU (which was a DEC reimplementation of Emacs, complete with provided source code for most of the editing features) was part of that. DEC SHELL, which was a native CLI that emulated the Unix Bourne shell was so buggy that I was banned from using it after I caused multiple cluster crashes in one day. Sigh.
I'm a Linux developer, have been before the kernel was a gleam in Linus' eye. I've been a Unix fan since 1981. Unix's strengths have always been a simple system call interface and lack of really complicated things like VMS RMS (Record Management System) which never made much sense and hardcoded extensions having special meaning. If a file has the execute bit turned on, it can be run. If it doesn't it can't. Contrast that to a hypothetical email attachment named sarahpalinnude.jpg.exe in the current Microsoft world.
I'm not particularly a Microsoft hater and I never got involved in Open Source because I hated Microsoft DOS or Microsoft Windows, I never cared for those systems in the first place (exception below). I got involved because I wanted to have a system that was all in source code that could never be abandoned and taken away from me by the company I bought it from.
I got a significant amount of enthusiasm by working on my roommate-of-the-time's PC on PC-DOS 2.0. I thought it was a great idea, no matter how buggy.
That was in response to Post #8, asserted by an Applefile.
No previous phone had a virtual keyboard that was context and application sensitive... changing characters and layouts dynamically depending on the application that was using it.
Not true. The earliest Palm PDAs(no phone) already had virtual keyboards with auto-complete. The Treo phone kept those features and improved on them....as did the Blackberry systems and WM systems.
Just because YOU think it was not done before does not mean it was not done before. You are making my point....the iPhone did not bring anything new to the table, but received attention like it did bring something new.
Nice.
Try this:
The iPhone "Global Warming Personal Calculator" app
The iStore has all sorts of applications to measure your carbon footprint, but none about debunking the myth.
The iStore does not have one applications about conservatives, but plenty about conservation.
This is what you get when everything is filtered though a single source.
Since Microsoft does not force you to buy everything from them, I am sure it will be less.
Well, if you buy from brick-and-mortar, you will get an OS installed. However, if you buy online, you can easily get a PC without any OS (or the one of your choice) installed.
MS does not "force" anyone to buy their products, unlike Apple that controls all software as well as its healthy liberal content.
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