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Comment by ssp | Hacker News Reader

Ballmer was not wrong about the iPhone. He said they would get 2-3% of the total phone market, not the smartphone market. He even makes that clear in the part that Gruber quoted: "... 1.3 billion phones ...". That's phones, not smartphones.

According to http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/apple-iphone-smartphone-market... in the first quarter of 2010 Apple had 16.1% of smartphones and smartphones were 18.8% of mobile phones. That comes out to almost exactly 3%.

Ballmer also wasn't wrong about Windows Mobile. The "60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent" was not a prediction, it was just what he would prefer.

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Perhaps Ballmer did get the right answer, after all. But was he asking the right question?

Gruber is right about Microsoft failing at phones and that there is not much they can do about it. However, I don't think Ballmer is in denial about that.

It was and is obvious that at some point all phones will be what we call smartphones now. I think Ballmer's point is that even when that happens, the iPhone will not be able to sustain its 16%. It will still have insignificant market share.

Android will not, though. It might get "60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent", and that's the share that Ballmer would have preferred run Windows.

So yes, I think Ballmer asked the right question and got the right answer. He just doesn't have any way to respond to Android.

"I think Ballmer asked the right question and got the right answer. He just doesn't have any way to respond to Android."

Of course he does: he can give away the new smartphone OS. It's not as if Microsoft has never given away software to win market share.

exactly. and he can give away windows os on mobile because they are getting paid for android os on mobile.

He would also have to make it open source with no strings attached then pray the community will adopt it.

He would also have to include a Webkit browser by default.

But when they are both free, they have to compete on quality. And on smartphones, windows loses it's main advantage -- a software library dating back to the dawn of the pc.

Microsoft cannot just take that market, but they can, and in time, probably will fight for it.

What will happen when smartphones become powerful enough to run windows? [Thinking long-term, tectonic shifts here]

There's constraints of display/keyboard size, and the form-factor encourgaes different usages (eg. less business software).

But I think people might start to dock their smartphones to large displays and keyboards at home (that's what I do with my netbook) - like a portable harddrive. Projectors might also become popular, giving a large portable display.

Or, future desktops might actually be smartphone components, wrapped in a desktop package (in the way microcomputers invaded the workstation, minicomputer and mainframe markets).

Windows phones are smartphones. That is the market share that ballmer was talking about.

But yet he mentioned the number of total phones sold (1.3b) while talking market share so he didn't mean smartphones. Apple has a tiny sliver of the total phone market and that's what he meant. Microsoft has an even smaller sliver, but he said he wants/prefers a large chunk of that total market:

> But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent of them, than I would to have 2 percent or 3 percent, which is what Apple might get.

He was exactly right about Apple's position but there's no obvious way Microsoft will be able gain mass adoption. Google will.

  Apple has a tiny sliver of the total phone market and
  that's what he meant

That was mentioned in the article: Apple has 10x less market share than Nokia and still more revenue.

More profit, Nokia has significantly more revenue. Apple only sells very high-margin phones while Nokia sells at all levels.

I'm pretty sure that Steve Jobs is quite happy making more profit from less revenue.

Ballmer basically laughed the iPhone off as insignificant. Yeah, he's obviously clairvoyant.

Maybe it was a prediction, it's just when he said "our software" he also said patents really quietly.

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