Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently took a shot at foreseeing, stressing that Apple's iPhone had a short lifespan, while Nokia and Research in Motion would bow to the Windows makers, in terms of mobile software offerings.

In fact, Microsoft's boss went as far as predicting the end of iPhone's life in approximately five years. Whether or not Apple itself plans to keep things the way they are five years from now, Ballmer added that Nokia and Research In Motion (the makers of the Blackberry) would also stumble because they make a habit out of tying their own hardware and software together.

"Apple's a good company, I won't take anything away from them, but they have a certain kind of strategy," Ballmer stated at a dinner at the Churchill Club. "They believe in putting the hardware and software together, they don't believe in letting other people make it."

Well, we wouldn't want to cross Microsoft's head, but it has been proven that only big companies with immense research potential and hundreds of tech-savvy blokes working in a basement can accomplish this. And if Ballmer is talking about letting people make their choice, again, it has been proven that companies like Apple, which provide all the parts for a certain experience, have a smaller rate of failing in offering said experience.

"I'm not saying there isn't a threat [from Apple]," but if Microsoft and its PC partners "do our jobs right, there's really no reason Apple should get any footprint in the enterprise," reads another quote from Microsoft's CEO, posted by The Industry Standard.

Ballmer was hinting at the same strategy that helped the Redmond company become the leader in desktop computing, the report mentions, and apparently he feels Microsoft can do the same with smartphones. His last prediction was that the final battle would be between the Symbian OS, a mobile version of Linux and Windows Mobile.