Steve Ballmer's comments on the iPhone and other Apple stuff.....

Steve Ballmer gave an interview to USA Today.......His comments on the iPhone :)

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.

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.

In the case of music, Apple got out early. They were the first to really recognize that you couldn't just think about the device and all the pieces separately. Bravo. Credit that to Steve (Jobs) and Apple. They did a nice job.

But it's not like we're at the end of the line of innovation that's going to come in the way people listen to music, watch videos, etc. I'll bet our ads will be less edgy. But my 85-year-old uncle probably will never own an iPod, and I hope we'll get him to own a Zune.

I know this is an Apple iPhone Blog, but I'll make an exception for Steve Ballmer, his arrogance knows no bounds.....
On the Zune.....

Q: When can we look forward to a Zune phone?

A: It's not a concept you'll ever get from us. We're in the Windows Mobile business. We wouldn't define our phone experience just by music. A phone is really a general purpose device. You want to make telephone calls, you want to get and receive messages, text, e-mail, whatever your preference is. The phone really is kind of a general purpose device that we need to have clean and easy to use.

On the XBox......

Q: With the Xbox, it looks like you're targeting the hard-core gamers. Are there enough to make this a good business?

A: Version one we targeted to hard-core gamers. With Xbox 360, we're broadening the audience. You may notice the color is white with faceplates, not black. It actually rounds out the audience appeal of the product. Now you can customize for the hard-core gamer; you can customize in other ways.

If you look at the game selection: Viva Piñata is targeted at a more female and a younger demographic than anything else we've done. Our arcade games, traditional board games and card games target casual gamers. The audience tends to skew older than the average gamer and tends to skew again more female than the, quote, typical hard-core gamer.

There will be a Halo 3. There will be a Gears of War 2. We're not going to stop that stuff. On the other hand, we're trying to broaden the appeal as opposed to revector

On Google Aps.......

Q: Google has been rolling out applications that are very similar to Office. Are you concerned about competition from Internet-based applications?

A: They've come out with what I might call — what's the politically correct way of saying it? — they've come out with some of the lowest functionality, lowest capability applications of all time. (Laughter.)

If you want to sit and write a paper for school, you're not going to use Google Docs. You can't even put a footnote in. Now, last time I checked, that's still kind of important to give attribution. (Laughter.) There are some basic, basic things that you just don't find.

In the short run, we don't have a lot of competition; in the long run, sure. We always have some competition. We have competition from OpenOffice. We have competition from StarOffice. We're going to have competition from Google. We have competition from IBM. And competition is a very good thing for Google to give us, and for us to give Google.

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