Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer (pictured) has said providing a Windows alternative to the iPad is the company’s chief priority.
Speaking at the company’s financial analysts meeting, Ballmer admitted he was concerned about the success of Apple’s tablet. “Apple has done an interesting job of putting together a synthesis and putting a product out, and in which they’ve… they sold certainly more than I’d like them to sell, let me just be clear about that,” he said.
“We think about that. We think about that in competitive sense. And for us, then, the job is to say, Okay, we have a lot of IP, we have a lot of good software in this area, we’ve done a lot of work on ink and touch and everything else – we have got to make things happen.”
Ballmer compared the tablet market to that of the netbook, where Microsoft ceded early ground to Linux-based machines before dominating the market. “Just like we had to make things happen on netbooks, we’ve got to make things happen with Windows 7 on slates,” the Microsoft CEO said.
“We are in the process of doing that as we speak. We’re working with our hardware partners, we’re tuning Windows 7 to new slate hardware designs that they’re bringing them to market. And, yeah, you’re going to get a lot of cacophony. There will be people who do things with other operating systems. But we’ve got the application base, we’ve got the user familiarity. We’ve got everything on our side if we do things really right.”
This is not Microsoft’s first flirtation with tablet devices. Despite a generally positive reception for the prototype of its Courier dual-screen tablet the project was cancelled earlier this year.
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