While Steve Ballmer never associated Android with anything nasty nor did he suggest that killing puppies could look dignified next to building Android, he did say that creating a mobile OS was “financially unsound” for Google and that Google was already far behind the competition.
“They can hire smart guys, hire a lot of people, blah dee blah dee blah, but you know they start out way behind, in a certain sense.”
He also questioned their financial strategy, claiming that Android has no revenue model and that carriers will take android and then charge Google big bucks to carry their search on the standard Android deck or UI.
“Google doesn’t exactly bubble to the top of the list of the top competitors we’ve got going in mobile. They might someday. But right now..” he said at Telstra’s investment day.
Steve, Steve, Steve… Windows Mobile is popular for one simple reason: it seems to work reasonably well with Windows. This is fine for the fleet IT market – there’s no shame in buying up 500 Palm Pros for your entire executive staff – the low-end feature phone market is a mish-mash of OSes, including WinMo and to some extent Symbian. Mostly, however, you find OSes that are unsupported and essentially proprietary.
Android will replace those OSes first. Carriers won’t care – or will care less – when face with the cost savings of installing Android vs. rolling their own OS and the charges for search placement will be a wash. As Android bubbles up, WinMo will get bit first, then Symbian, then, dare I say it, RIM. While I’m not in love with Android, I know a contender when I see one. Hopefully Steve’s posturing will buy WinMo enough time to escape off into the woods to die.
“blah dee blah dee blah”? He said this literally?
apparently so.
Yup used to work there and Balmer talks like that!
Wow. Talk about sour grapes. It’s a good thing Apple wasn’t bragging about the iPhone before they launched it, or Ballmer would have said the same thing about them and looked like a total idiot.
That said, I think he’s probably right on Android. Google has had a very hard time innovating past search and Adwords.
Did Base kill Craig’s List? Did Knol kill Wikipedia? Did lively take on Second Life? (For that matter, are any porn chat rooms even worried about lively?) How’s their Radio Ad Network doing? Is Open Social threatening Facebook? How’s Blogger doing against Wordpress?
Have they launched anything in the last 5 years that really changed the game on anyone? Honestly, with 6000 engineers in R+D, what have they done?
They have no creativity. Google thinks that smart engineers and tons of money and brand will get them success. But the end products they come up with are usually a day late and a dollar short. Maybe their knock-off phone OS will go somewhere. But the fact that they’re Google is a bigger vote against that than for it.
As a matter of fact, Ballmer DID laugh at Apple Iphone in this video. He said Iphone was too expensive, no keypad blah blah…
Their innovations are in infrastructure and scalability. A world-wide network of big ass data centers that process unbelievable amounts of data. Not to mention all the small innovative features they’ve added to gmail, maps, earth, chrome, android and reader.
gmail
google maps
Just one reaction to your “two hit wonder” comment about Google. I work at a company and implemented a Google Base datafeed with all our products. We made $500,000 through Google Base in 1 month. I think you’re a little misguided about the arena Google Base is in and about it’s success.
Ya, you’re definitely smarter than Steve Ballmer :P
It’s a good thing Apple wasn’t hyping the iPhone, or Ballmer would have bagged on that and looked like a total idiot.
However, in this case, I’d bet he’s going to turn out right. Google has launched a ton of failed products, but other than their core search business, all of them have failed.
Look at Base vs. Craig’s list, or Lively vs. Second Life. Or Knol vs. Wikipedia. Even blogger vs. wordpress. Open Social is going nowhere fast. Gmail didn’t kill hotmail or yahoo mail. Their radio ads business isn’t re-inventing radio.
Google’s problem is they have engineers, but no entreprenuers. They have technology, but no drive to invent. They have 6000 people in R+D, but get nothing from them.
Google does knock offs: Google maps is slightly better than mapquest. Gmail was slightly better than hotmail. Is a knock-off phone OS going to be a winner? People think that because it’s Google, it will be. But I think that because it’s Google, it probably won’t be.
you say google is always slightly better…
so if android will be slightly better then windows mobile, plus it’s going to be free, plus windows mobile doesn’t have a critical mass yet (which hotmail and wikipedia and your other examples do have) –> android is a win
Again, another misguided review of Google’s offerings. Why does it have to “kill” something in order to be a success? In some of your examples, Google offers different and/or better. I think there is no question that Gmail is a success, regardless of whether or not Hotmail or Yahoo mail survive.
Perhaps he’s unfamiliar with the seemingly endless amount of cash with which GOOG has to invest. Oh, and this is a pretty sizable and growing market.
Ballmer is in denial. He will also soon come out of the closet.
“they start out way behind in a certain sense”
Which makes it all the more embarassing when they eat your lunch, doesn’t it?
Still, it’s a good sign that Steve Ballmer is still so confident 1 month after the first Android device is released… things could have been much worse for them.
Ballmer cracks me up. I guess he still doesn’t understand why search is so important and why Google is doing so well.
Balmer is an idiot. Motorola just dropped all of their mobile OSes except for Android (and there is a huge push here at MOT) and Windows Mobile – how is Microsoft not competing with Google here?
Guess which OS Motorola will drop next.
Even if Google will not make money from Android OS directly, the OS will allow Google and others to make money from Android Apps and services. Since Android is an open OS, mobile markets will be opened up to developers and innovators, not just to big carriers. Google will have a significant advantage there.
Sorry, are you sure he was talking about Google and not Microsoft? Anyway remember how he confidently predicted that no-one, but no-one would buy the iPhone and the app-store would bomb.?
Windows mobile sucks. It’s sooooo out of date and they need to do a rewrite from the ground up (which they won’t) to make it any good for the next version.
The iPhone is great and though I haven’t used it, I suspect Android kicks butt too. M$ are being very much left behind in mobile.
I’ve had a G1 since launch. While it’s a bit bare-bones for the time being feature wise, I’ve not had to reboot my phone even once, and I’ve far more 3rd party apps installed than I ever did on the WinMo-running device I had previously.
Android is extremely stable, looks great, and is a hell of a lot of fun to use. Can the same be said of WinMo?
“…blah dee blah dee blah, but you know they start out way behind, in a certain sense.”
Wait, Ballmer is trashing Google for Android, but what has Microsoft come up with? If I was Ballmer, I will shut the hell up until Microsoft comes up with something remotely compelling before trashing another company.
Google’s product may not get a lot of traction but they innovate and a lot more progressive than any other company. Microsoft, on the other hand are copycats. They wait for others to innovate, take theirs ideas and research and then build something. Even with that, they fail most of the time.
Wasnt he the guy who had dismissed iPhone because it did not have a KEYBOARD.
Steve has his MSFT blinders on. Google success is attributed to Economies of Scope(Hal Varian) and Android strategy is just that.
Steve Ballmer would look at youtube , gmail and a whole bunch of other things google does as financially not viable
Yes, please continue to buy stock, invest in, have your personal retirement pinned to, a man who uses “blah dee blah dee blah” as a substitute for English words…Smart!
Nov 6, 2008
Google – $328.04 a share
Microsoft – $21.00 a share
Sorry Todd, but you might need a “smartness” check-up at your local GP.
Microsoft have 8.9 BILLION shares in issue, Google have 314.45 MILLION giving them a market cap of $103B vs MS’s $187B.
Not being a big fan of Ballmer, I actually quite liked the “blah dee blah” thing. What it does is taint Google by applying a tongue-in-cheek stupid brush to them. In general I quite like it when business folk talk like people rather than leveraging synergies to capitalise on a marginal stop-gap, or something.
Makes one think Steve’s never read The Innovator’s Dilemma, or heard of Christensen.
And if Steve doesn’t realize that Google has the ideal monetization strategy for anything with a screen and keyboard he’s really out to lunch.
Of course, he realizes all this. It’s all just whistling past the graveyard, which he does all the time.
“They can hire smart guys, hire a lot of people, blah dee blah dee blah, but you know they start out way behind, in a certain sense.”
I wonder if anyone said this about the Microsoft XBox seven years ago.
He had very little to begin, with what with his old TV ads and his ape-like behaviour, but Ballmer lost any last shred of credibility with Zune and his initial reaction to the iPhone.
Microsoft prove time and time again they aren’t innovators in any sense whatsoever and they really need somebody stronger to lead them into the future.
Google lost more than half of its value in the stockmarket.
Shareholders want a return on investment, Ballmer knows there might be a slowdown in ad dollars and he’s telling the shareholders to look at Google’s investments.
Google won’t change the business model for its Android platform and Ballmer knows it, but Google might be forced to make some unpopular decisions among its employees.
That being said the way to compete against MSFT and Apple is to open up.
Android may not have market share yet, but it got my business. Why? I don’t like the iPhone. More importantly, I was a Windows Mobile user starting in 2004. I don’t have an Exchange server, which means when I started using Vista fulltime, the Windows Mobile/Outlook 2007 experience is a fail. Coupled with a one-time purchase of $30 CompanionLink software, I get all the cloud features of having Exchange built on the Google Apps backend. If you don’t use Outlook, Gmail and Google Calendar handily replace all Exchange server functionality for free. Android Marketplace could be a potential business model for Google, or it could be that they simply have an optimized experience for showing ads on phones and they’ll slowly eat away at the small business users like me who find the Windows Mobile user experience to be increasingly lousy.
Can you all get off of Google’s nuts for a minute? How is MSFT so lame and making billions of dollars per quarter? While I agree that not all their products are the greatest, you have to give them some credit for what they have done. If Google is still around in 20+ years, we’ll see how they stack up. Until then, STFU and don’t think you are smarter than the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world.
You don’t have to consider yourself smarter than Steve Ballmer to see that a) Windows Mobile is dire and b) he’s clearly talking absolute shit here. Yes we know Microsoft makes lots of money… doesn’t automatically mean that Ballmer is talking sense.
Steve Ballmar is mentally unsound!
Considering the MS has delayed the release of Windows Mobile 7, I don’t think Ballmer is in any position to criticize Google. Hey Ballmer, are you at least going to release the new version of Pocket IE on time? The new version of Opera Mobile trounce pocket IE, only 55 more days to go.
Sweet Photoshop!
Financially unsound? As in investing in MSFT stock since 1999?
Apple has iPhone
Google has the G1/Android
Microsoft has nothing.
“They can hire smart guys, hire a lot of people, blah dee blah dee blah”
Or you can sit there and talk trash like a stupid has been.
what about windows mobile? a lot of smartphone run it
MS guys will do anything to prove themselves better. This was nothing new. All of us know that Android is one of the Google’s future steps and it’s gonna rock. May be it’ll take a while but, it’ll keep growing for sure. It’s open source community powered strategy is enough to make it better than microsoft’s or any other closed source platform’s developments.
Any comments, folks?
first they laugh at you
then they criticize you <– he’s here right now.
then they fight you
then you win!
I believe the phrase he was searching for was “Yada, Yada, Yada.” Perhaps if had researched his prepared response using Google Video Search instead of Live Search, he could have nailed it.
Silly bully. You dumb.
Balmer is a real fool, he pretended years ago Linux was the cancer of the IT industry so… nothing he says can really surprise me.
I always have in mind the Balmer dance when Microsoft acquired Visio…
http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc4MzqBFxZE