Ballmer on Windows Mobile woes: 'This will not happen again'
You can calling it closing the barn door after the horse is out, you can call it too little too late. But our glass is half-full, and we're taking Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's recent admission that Windows Mobile 7 was botched and late as a positive step.
Ballmer (seen above in all his fuzziness) spoke at a Venture Capital Summit for about 200 in California and let loose a couple of nuggets, which of course immediately made it onto Twitter. [via wmpoweruser, image via @manukumar]
Said @pjozefak: "Ballmer says they screwed up with Windows Mobile. Wishes they had already launched WM7. They completely revamped the team."
And said @beninato: "Ballmer re: poor execution in Windows Mobile" 'We've pumped in some new talent and said "This will not happen again" ' "
We can only imagine the weeks and months of stewing that led up to that, but to us it's a good thing. Because the first step to fixing a problem is recognizing it in the first place.
In the same vein, Ballmer sat down for a chat with TechCrunch's Mike Arrington for a brief state of the union. Any Windows Mobile talk was brief and not overly specific, but Ballmer did drop the following:
So I think you can have an Apple in the phone business, or a RIM, and they can do very well, but when 1.3 billion phones a year are all smart, the software that’s gonna be most popular in those phones is gonna be software that’s sold by somebody who doesn’t make their own phone. And, we don’t want to cross the chasm in the short run and lose the war in the long run and that’s why we think the software play is the right play for us for high volume, even though some of the guys in the market today with vertically oriented solutions may do just fine.
Watch Arrington's interview after the break.
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pelona#wp says:
I think Ballmer is missing the point. What Apple, Palm, and RIM have been able to do by insisting on control over their phones from carriers that have traditionally seen the devices as merely bait to hook customers on contracts, is to create a relationship with the customer beyond the point and moment of sale.
Not only has the market for third party apps exploded, ironically a market Microsoft helped to create, customers now expect that their phone's OS will be regularly updated with official bug fixes and news features as long as the hardware supports them.
It's that last point that Microsoft has failed to grasp. Microsoft doesn't need to produce it's own phone to make it happen (Google has proved you don't need your own hardware), but needs to put pressure on its manufacturing partners and carriers to make it so. How great would it be if every WM phone manufactured in the last two years was guaranteed an update to 7!
This all may be moot. Faced with declining market share and competition from free OS's like Android, Ballmer may be forced to eat his words (like that's never happened before!) as the circulating rumors of Microsoft-branded phones are comfirmed.
There is an interesting event at Stanford GSB on Oct 20 about Mobile Payments, thought it might interest some of you here. Check it out http://www.vlab.org/article.html?aid=283
pelona is onto something vital in his posting.
rim and apple are controling the phone experience better. they are controling the brand experience better. as pointed out google shows a path forward. but will google's path work scaled to 150 android devices?
the phone os wars will really heat up when 4g services are deployed. at those data speeds the experience of using the 'smart' part of the phone will be very compelling.
resistance will be futile.
