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Steve Ballmer (CEO of Microsoft) is boldly claiming that Apple's new iPhone will be a failure (Microsoft's Ballmer having a 'great time'). Wow. If anyone out there actually believes that, here's your wake-up call: Ballmer is nuts. Microsoft's search, MSN, barely squeakes out 10% of overall search traffic (way behind Google and Yahoo), yet somehow Ballmer claims "Microsoft has the most visitors". Hmm... could this be related to www.msn.com set as default start page for most copies of Internet Explorer? And there are millions of Windows users out there who don't how to change the start page? I'm willing to bet the answer is yes. But "default start page" is not "search user". I think what Ballmer meant to say was, "lots of people automatically land on MSN, but for every 10 of those people, 9 of them don't use it and instead go out of their way to use either Google or Yahoo." Microsoft's Zune music player is waaaaaaay behind the iPod (and other music players) in sales, which is understandable because the Zune is an ugly brown hunk of crap with dumb features. The Zune is trying really, really hard to sell 1 million units (not in any specific period of time, just hit the 1 million mark at some point). Meanwhile, Apple sells something like 20 million iPods every quarter. Microsoft's Xbox 360 group lost $315 million in one fiscal quarter. I guess selling the consoles below your production cost isn't such a great idea after all. Ouch. And Microsoft's newest operating system - Windows Vista - is selling so poorly that Dell recently began offering new laptops to customers with Windows XP installed... not Vista. But Windows XP is five years old. Did I leave anything out? I guess I could pick on Microsoft's new Office suite with the "ribbon" that seems to have confused more users than it's helped (there are lots of hacks out there to make your new Office suite look & feel like the old office suite - that is, without the ribbon). Oh right, I almost forgot the constant sharp decrease in Internet Explorer usage. Millions of people are using Firefox, and more are ditching Microsoft's crap browser for something better every single day. Meanwhile, Ballmer swears the iPhone will fail. Given the above examples (certainly there are more), it seems pretty clear that Microsoft isn't a great example of success. In fact, most of what they're doing these days seems pretty terrible. Therefore, we've established that Ballmer's opinions about the iPhone are useless, because he's in charge of a company that's rapidly losing ground on all fronts. Also, Cingular has gauged iPhone interest from ~2 million potential buyers. Hardly sounds like it's going to flop. I know more people who are planning to buy an iPhone than those who own (or plan to own) Vista, Zune, or an Xbox 360 - combined. So what the hell is going on with Ballmer? In part, it's his job to get in front of big media and say stupid things that somehow try to make his company look good. For phones, he must stand up and say Windows Mobile is awesome, etc., despite the fact that it's garbage (I know guys who use Windows Mobile-based phones and they suck - missed calls, lost messages, crappy interface, way too hard to use). But beyond that, I suspect the writing is on the wall at Microsoft. It's not the same place it used to be, and surely Ballmer knows this as well as anyone else. Of course, rather than take it like a man, he's acting like a scared little dog. He's like a scared, threatened little dog, backed into a tight corner, and all he can really do is freak out and bite people. Oh, I also like this lame attack on Google's online applications (like spreadsheets): "[Google has] come out with some of the lowest functionality, lowest capability applications of all time. [Laughter]." -- Steve Ballmer This guy is on another freaking planet! It is precisely because Google's spreadsheet application is simple and clean that people love it! Sadly, I own a copy of Excel but I rarely use it, instead choosing simpler, cleaner alternatives like Google Spreadsheets. Most projects at Google demonstrate a firm understanding of the 80/20 rule - that is, 80% of your users are going to use 20% of your features, so find out the 20% that people need and deliver. Everything else is kinda wasting your time. In fact, lots of additional features can hurt you, because with every extra, unwanted feature you add beyond your 20%, you run a serious risk of complicating your software interface so much that users are confused, so then you spend a ton of time+energy trying to build an entirely new interface paradigm like the "ribbon", which it turns out most users don't understand either. Meanwhile 80% of your users are left banging their heads against your awful application trying to use the 20% of the features that they can't find because they're all buried in a sea of useless functionality. Ugh. Dear Steve Ballmer, |
