14 DAY TRIAL // Several Microsoft executives admitted the company missed the boat in mobile on several occasions, and now it’s the turn of former CEO Steve Ballmer to say the same thing.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Ballmer explains that Microsoft was late to the party and this had a substantial contribution to its operating system failing to grow bigger.
Ballmer also commented on his famous statement claiming that the iPhone would never sell given its price, explaining that he’d never thought Apple would come up with such a brilliant idea of offering mobile carrier subsidies to discount the device.
“I wish I'd thought about the model of subsidizing phones through the operators,” he said. “You know, people like to point to this quote where I said iPhones will never sell, because the price at $600 or $700 was too high. And there was business model innovation by Apple to get it essentially built into the monthly cell phone bill,” Ballmer explains.
Microsoft was late to the phone party
But even if Ballmer would have thought about the model of subsidizing phones, this doesn’t mean that the fate of its mobile platform would’ve been different.
Microsoft didn’t have a high-end phone when Apple introduced the iPhone, and the company would have needed way too much time to develop one. During this whole time, the mobile business improved at a very fast pace, with both iOS and Android gaining share.
This isn’t the only time when Ballmer was wrong, as another famous quote described Linux as “a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.” With Microsoft investing big in Linux these days, Ballmer says he’s changed its mind, and now he actually loves the open-source world.
Steve Ballmer was Microsoft’s CEO for 14 years before stepping down in early 2014 to be replaced by Satya Nadella, the third chief executive in the history of the company.