14 DAY TRIAL // Outgoing Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer admitted during the company's meeting with financial analysts on Thursday that Redmond has “almost no market share” in the mobile sector, but outlined that this represents a great opportunity for the firm.
Ballmer also brought Windows Vista, often described as Microsoft's biggest flop in history, in discussion, saying that this particular OS version is partly to blame for some of his mistakes.
The CEO explained that during the 2000s Microsoft was investing too much in Windows, so it neglected other products that could gain market share, including Windows Mobile.
“If there's one thing I guess you would say I regret, I regret that there was a period in the early 2000s when we were so focused on what we had to do around Windows, that we weren't able to redeploy talent to the new device form factor called the phone,” Ballmer told the audience.
“That would probably the thing I would tell you I regret the most, because the time we missed was about the time we were working away on what became Vista, and I wish we'd probably had our resources slightly differently deployed, let me say, during the early 2000s. It would have been better for Windows and probably better for our success in other form factors.”
This isn't the first time when Ballmer claims that Vista is his biggest regret, even though the sales performance of Windows 8 have often been compared to this OS version.
Sales of the new Windows 8 have so far failed to excite, with some reports suggesting that its poor performance is one of the reasons why Ballmer will soon leave Microsoft.
Either way, Ballmer has apparently become a bit nostalgic now that he's retiring, but it's pretty clear that whoever comes next has quite a lot of issues to fix.