What is Steve Ballmer On?

Well a week after people were calling for his head over at MSFT, Steve Ballmer is back on the street peddling his wares. He has an interview with USA today which is worth a read. Kind of interesting that their tagging system lists the following too: FIND MORE STORIES IN: Microsoft | Google | Windows | Xbox | Steve Ballmer | Microsoft Office | Zune | Chairman Bill Gates | Laughter

Laughter?

The article can be found here:

http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/2007-04-29-ballmer-ceo-forum-usat_N.htm

Anyroad. The general consensus of opinion was that Microsoft's Market Cap has fallen from around 600 billion in 2000 just after he took over to it's current situation of 295ish or thereabouts which is not encouraging.

The whole point is that it seems one of the least able people in the universe has accidentally ended up running the biggest company to influence everyone in IT. I won't dwell on how this happened it's not relevant - but what is relevant is that he continues to prove that as a chairman of such a large company he has no clue.

Here are a couple of the points raised.

Q: When is your next operating system coming out?
A: That I won't share with you. Not because we're not hard at work on that; I want to let the team do their job, figure out what the release looks like. I guarantee you it won't be four or five years.
Q: You mean sooner?
A: Yes, absolutely.

So is this an admittance that Vista doesn't cut the mustard and Microsoft NEEDS something better? Is Vista the ME for the 21st century? I actually think that Vista will "pull an Apple" and build the next OS on top of Linux. They are seeing the advantages that Apple are having making a clean break from the legacy systems and this may give them a better way to provide the security that people in this century demand.

Q: People get passionate when Apple comes out with something new — the iPhone; of course, the iPod. Is that something that you'd want them to feel about Microsoft?
A: It's sort of a funny question. Would I trade 96% of the market for 4% of the market? (Laughter.) I want to have products that appeal to everybody.

So first of all he avoids the question. He's muddling Apple's computer market share with the iPod market share. Notice he didn't say "Would I trade 6% of the market of 30 gig hard drive players with 76% of the worlds MP3 market" OK that was a cheap shot. Oh and btw that's FIVE percent these days. But he continues:

"Now we'll get a chance to go through this again in phones and music players. There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. 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."

OK this is where Steve loses it. If perchance Apple should hit their goals of 10 Million units in 2008 it is probably at THIS point that Steve has proved that he has not got the corporate skills to run a company such as Microsoft and this is probably why they have managed to, for example, lose 6 Billion dollars on a games console.

The point of the game is to actually make money to have a viable company. You cannot leverage your monopoly to just buy markets which is what Microsoft has been doing with both the Xbox and the Zune. Anyone can throw money at a market and, as in Microsoft's case, if you have enough money you will continue trying to buy a market until you own it.