Last month’s D8 conference in California brought together some heavy-hitters in the technology industry, most notably Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer. Not together at the same time, you understand, but they were both interviewed on the stage over the duration of the conference and the interviews helped to highlight the contrasts between the two.
Jobs got first bite at the apple, so to speak, and – in light of Apple’s success in recent years with the iPod, iPhone and the recent iPad (which sold two million units in 59 days), driven in the main by the consumer market – it was interesting to hear him draw some clear distinctions between the consumer and enterprise markets.
“What I love about the consumer market that I always hated about the enterprise market,” he said, “[In the consumer market] every person votes for themselves. If enough of them say yes, we get to come to work in the morning.” By contrast, in the enterprise, people that use the products don’t vote for themselves and the people that make the decisions “are sometimes confused”.
He also highlighted what he perceived to be one of Apple’s greatest strengths, describing it as “an incredibly collaborative company. You know how many committees we have at Apple? Zero. We’re organised like a start-up. We’re the biggest start-up on the planet. We meet for three hours every morning and talk about all the business, about what’s going on everywhere. We’re great at figuring out how to divide tasks up among great teams, and we talk to each other. So what I do all day is meet with teams of people”.
Needless to say, Jobs waxed lyrical about the iPad and, when asked where he thought the tablet was going, he threw the cat among the pigeons. According to an Endgadget blog, he replied: “I’m trying to think of a good analogy. When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centres, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Fewer people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy.”
Maybe some people, but not Steve Ballmer. A day later, he was in the hot seat. As the man who laughed at the iPhone back in 2007, arguing that it was too expensive and lacked a keyboard, you’d think he would approach the iPad with a little more caution. Not so. He claimed the industry was in an “iPad bubble” but Windows tablets, due to arrive soon, would be “sleeker, smaller and faster.”
Apple already has a smaller iPad, of course; it’s called the iPod Touch. Ballmer was quick to counter Jobs’ attempt to separate tablets from the wider PC family. Asked whether he thought the iPad was a PC, he replied: “Of course it is.” Taking on the cars analogy used by Jobs the previous day, Ballmer said: “Our cars will get bigger and sleeker and faster and better . . . but they’re still cars.” At another point in the interview, he said: “I think people are going to be using PCs in greater numbers in the years to come, but I think PCs will start to look different. They’ll get smaller, lighter, sometimes they won’t have a keyboard. Sometimes the UI will look different, the underlying infrastructure will move to SoCs (systems on chips).
The question is: what’s a PC? Nothing that people do on PCs today will get less relevant; there’s no question that what people do on a PC they’ll do on other devices.” In other words, pretty much everything is a PC and a PC is pretty much everything.
Ballmer’s desire to widen the PC family to include tablets and other devices is hardly surprising because it fits in with the Windows-for-all approach which Microsoft has pursued over the years. Sadly, that strategy has been to the detriment of the company in the hottest tech areas, smart phones for example.
It’s quite possible the same could happen in the tablet area because Ballmer appeared to advance the same arguments in favour of Windows tablets that he did for Windows-based smart phones when the iPhone arrived (and look how that panned out). Essentially the iPad, like the iPhone, is a general-purpose device while Windows tablets will be tailored for different uses. “You’ll have a range of devices, there will be different looks. Some people will want the comfort of Windows as you know; some people might want it to be more customised.” Perhaps most telling was when he quoted an old saying – “to a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail”.
Most outside observers might be forgiven for thinking that, if Ballmer is the guy with the hammer, Windows is his nail and he keeps trying to bash it in even when he should be using a screw. And the worst part of it is, he doesn’t know what a screw is so that, when someone shows him one, all he sees is a wonky nail.
Ltd
