14 DAY TRIAL // Just ahead of the week in which Apple introduced its new line-up of notebooks, Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer downplayed the relevance of the Cupertino-based hardware company on the global PC market. And, while Apple slashed the prices of the new MacBook and MacBook Pro computers to make them more affordable and capable of rivaling Windows PCs in terms of price tags, Ballmer indicated that Microsoft would attempt to stop Macs from attracting additional consumers. However, Ballmer underlined that the Redmond giant was little interested in going against Apple by using its business model, and that it would continue to collaborate with existing OEM partners.
“Apple has 3 percent of the world's PC market. I never want it to reach 4. That would be a goal, you could say, from a Microsoft perspective. But I don't want to build PCs. And there's a certain elegance Apple gets by building the hardware and the software and everything else. And I don't want to embrace their business model, but what it would mean is we have to work as effectively with the HPs, the Dells, the Positivos of the world to have an elegant experience that at the same time provides all of the freedom and flexibility and choice that today's PC model provides. So, it's a business model competition, if you will. Apple is an emblem, but I can give you other emblems of the same competition,” Ballmer noted while on a trip to Brazil at the end of the past week.
While, according to Gartner and IDC, Apple did ship 1.6 million Macs on the U.S. market in the third quarter of 2008, the Cupertino-based hardware company is still far from Toshiba, which sold 3.6 million PCs worldwide, also in Q3. Indeed, in the U.S., Apple is the third largest vendor of computers after Dell and HP in Q3 2008 – still, Microsoft has yet little to fear on a global scale.
“You've got to remember, Windows has 97 percent, Mac has got 3. So, yes, what's the definition of a PC? It used to be a PC was any computer. Now what's a PC? It's a Windows computer. So, Apple may have helped slightly on that definition, in which case I'm very happy. And I think that's a campaign that again so far the initial testing and measurement says it's a campaign that really is resonating well with our audience,” Ballmer added.