8 ms·

Ballmer Laughs at iPhone (2007)

mytailorisrich 4y ago
For those who are not familiar, the other guy is Mike Zafirovski, Nortel's last CEO before they went bust. To me this really makes this video a fine historical document.
riskneutral 4y ago
What a terrible leader
- b800h 4y ago
  As mentioned in comments on the video, he's responsible for XBox and Azure, so not all bad.
  - random314 4y ago
    An Azure that was going to be Windows only. What Ballmer actually succeeded in doing was entrenching windows inside every enterprise Fortune 500 by basically bundling everything from Office, Sharepoint, SQL server etc. This business is still going strong and switching to a subscription model. Before Ballmer, Microsoft was a consumer OS company.
    - b112 4y ago
      Before Ballmer, Microsoft was a consumer OS company. Microsoft was always a business facing company. Companies used NT from the start of time, and every business on the planet has been using Windows since the 90s. Microsoft has spent its entire lifetime slowly strangling and destroying other businesses, and pulling them over to their product lines. Word vs Wordperfect is one example. Wordperfect used to be completely dominant. Ballmer may have etched up Windows dominance a few points in a few markets, and I agree he continued this trend. He continued to expand into new markets. But it seems very weird to hear someone say he is responsible for getting businesses to use Windows, or caused M$ to focus on businesses.
- Normille 4y ago
  >What a terrible leader How can you say that! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMrhoOHNOrI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMrhoOHNOrI Sorry. I couldn't resist dredging up this old classic. It used to be compulsory viewing any time Steve Ballmer was mentioned. Although, on a more practical level; with winter approaching and huge energy price rises on the horizon, the burning feeling of vicarious embarrassment you get while watching this might be a warm blessing on those cold December evenings ahead.
suction 4y ago
DocTomoe 4y ago
In all fairness, Ballmer seemed to be right back then - the iPhone 1 had tons of problems with very little utility, and outside of fanboy circles was considered more of a joke. Not only was it ridiculously expensive, an unproven concept at the time and married to specific cell phone companies, battery life also was abysmal (they said it was up to a day, but from memory, people had to load their phones every four to six hours if they were doing anything with it. Compare that to the average phone back in 2007, which boasted battery times measured in days (weeks in case of Nokia)). It only really got actually general-public traction after they dropped the lock-in to specific mobile providers and proved that screen typing was feasible.
- flantasticle 4y ago
  Agree. It wasn’t really until around the iPhone 4 that the iPhone seemed to find its stride, which was released at least three years after this interview. Before that it’d be hard to argue it had greater utility than other high-end smartphones of the day. But what Jobs and Apple had was a longterm vision… And exceptional marketing.
  - dagmx 4y ago
    I’d argue it was the iPhone 3G. Cheaper, had an App Store and had the data speeds to combine with that burgeoning app ecosystem. It’s arguably the phone that made GPS navigation popular for everyone, and consuming media on your phone on the go. It kickstarted an entire economy with the App Store. Coming from Symbian UIQ (on a Sony P1), that was night and day. The first iPhone wasn’t that interesting other than the multitouch capabilities for people with high end smartphones. The iPhone 3G made everyone sit up and take notice. You could get apps to do all the stuff you’d buy one off gadgets for , and it was way easier than downloading and installing jar files, hoping they’d support your phone. To me the iPhone 3G was the point where it went from “okay this thing is a weird luxury statement” to “why would you buy any other competing product?” it took quite a while before Android really found it’s footing too. To me the Galaxy S was the first real competitor to the iPhone , partly because Samsung saw what made the iPhone great and honed in on it. It’s the phone that made me switch to Android before switching back eventually to the iPhone X after a string of Android phones getting no updates in Canada, and a huge run of hardware issues with no easy way to deal with them. Come to think of it, my first Galaxy S had to be sent back because an entire SKU had bad memory.
vlunkr 4y ago
In his defense, the main objections he has are the price, the lack of a physical keyboard, and the fact that Apple had never sold a phone before. In hindsight those seem funny, but in 2007 you would have heard those same talking points everywhere. If only we all had decided collectively that 500$ really was too much for a phone. No it’s like no one even checks the price tag because their carrier is slowly milking it out of them instead.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  It's hardly slow. Just checked local plans for what I get for $20/mo prepaid and it's about $150usd/mo for one of those awful folding things.
- rvense 4y ago
  As far as I remember, in those days here you often paid nothing or very little out of pocket for a new phone. It was more like an extra 10-20EUR on your monthly subscription. At least for the phones normal people had.
  - yftsui 4y ago
    It was the same in the US, you could get a new phone for $199 every two years, without any additional statement charge. However it all changed after T-Mobile’s “uncarrier” bluff, now it’s all about lock you in 36 months with monthly payments and some credit against the payments.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  It was also a "smart phone" with no data connectivity. Not much use giving it all these features and leaving it with a 2G radio stack.
  - ZGDUwpqEWpUZ 4y ago
    2G has mobile data (via GPRS/EDGE) and the original iPhone absolutely supported it. You could browse the web on cheap phones much earlier, but the rendering engines were limited (some mobile subset of HTML?). A big selling point of the iPhone was that it included a full browser.
retskrad 4y ago
The iPhone is unironically one of the greatest products in human history. The world pre and post the arrival of the iPhone is very different.
- laumars 4y ago
  I’m not going to deny that the iPhone was a successful product but what people often forget is that the world was already shifting that way. Feature phones could already do what the iPhone did (and in some cases even more). Multi-touch devices were available before the iPhone. PDAs had also been about for years and did everything the iPhone could do and more. And Android wasn’t far behind the iPhone and also improved upon the original iPhone. In fact the original iPhone wasn’t even that good compared to the competition. It was lacking a lot of features people considered “must haves”. Native applications (everything was web apps originally), copy/paste, the ability to background applications, etc. And Ballmers point about the lack of a hardware keyboard was absolutely right for that era. Apple have successfully rewritten history here, like victors often do. And so people often credit the iPhone as being uniquely revolutionary. It certainly was industry changing but it wasn’t singularly responsible for that change. I say this as an iPhone user with an Apple Watch and other Apple hardware. So I do buy into the Apple ecosystem. But I’m also an old fart who has lived long enough to have first hand experience, both as a user and as a software engineer, pre and post the iPhone.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
    No one had the sheer power of Apple though. In Australia, when the first iPhone hit, Apple was able to dictate certain things with carriers if they wanted to carry the iPhone. Plans suddenly got better and cheaper. You could just walk into an Apple store and get an unlocked phone (although the 3GS was first available only through carriers). iPhone launches had people camping out for days so Apple managed to exert their influence for years. Before this, data was really expensive, phones were all locked. None of the other device makers exerted their power like this. Or even had that sort of power. The iPad also had a similar effect with data only plans for iPads.
    - 4y ago
seba_dos1 4y ago
Well, who would have thought back then that Apple would actually succeed in making the whole industry be taking multiple steps back for many years ahead?
threatofrain 4y ago
Steve Jobs said on stage at the iPhone launch that the killer app was the phone app. IMO that was wrong — the killer app was Google Maps, back when GPS navigation devices used to cost $200+. This made the economic value of the iPhone a lot more solid and subsequently destroyed the entire device category.
- ulfw 4y ago
  Maybe in subsequent phones but the initial iPhone didn't even have GPS, only WiFi triangulation which worked only so-so and only in cities (with well... WiFi).
  - FPGAhacker 4y ago
    It was cellular triangulation.
- yftsui 4y ago
  Google Maps didn’t have turn by turn navigation until late 2009, you probably mistaken the original iPhone with iPhone 3GS.
  - slavik81 4y ago
    I didn't buy an iPhone until the 3GS, but I never used turn-by-turn navigation. I just needed a map with directions that I could refer to if I got lost. After I got it, I also discovered how useful it was for planning trips by bus. Did the original iPhone not have Maps at all? I think it would have been a killer app even without turn-by-turn.
    - yftsui 4y ago
      Well, people don’t carry a Garmin when they ride buses I guess? iPhone’s navigation didn’t become reliable enough to replace a Garmin / Tomtom till 2011-2012.
- seba_dos1 4y ago
  Several smartphones already had a GPS receiver back in 2007. The original iPhone did not.
Daub 4y ago
Steve Jobs greatest iPhone achievement was in getting Stan Sigman, CEO of Cingular Wireless, to upgrade his network to be equal to the iPhones demands. Prior that that, the tail (carriers) wagged the dog (phone manufacturers).
- Gravityloss 4y ago
  At least in USA. It's the similar thing with a lot of online business:music, videos , movies or ride sharing. First it's illegal and then someone big enough does it and it's a great business. Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, Uber etc... Technologically certainly fairly interesting but the real roadblock was regulations and contracts and conflicts of interest.
michelb 4y ago
Pretty sure he just said whatever he needed to say to promote Microsoft. I can't take anything what any tech leader said/says as truth or their honest opinion. They all have something to sell.
thunderbong 4y ago
IMHO, it was not so much as iPhone won, it's more like all other phone companies lost. Nobody innovated, nobody focused on the developer or bothered with creating a platform for developers although developers were asking for it. Sony, Nokia, Ericsson had big fan bases. There were any number of customizations that people all over the world created for them. But those phone companies didn't care. Each year, all these phone companies would come out with new form factors to keep their fan bases hooked. That's it. No standardization, no nothing. They all lost. And deservedly so. And we were left with Google cannibalizing open-source to create Android. Even then, and now, companies only accepted Android because they saw the rise of iPhone. It was a threat. They had to scramble to get something together. Everyone else just gave up. Even now, all I hear is, "It's not an easy task to create a new phone because you have to create everything from the ground up". It's this attitude which has been the death of mobile communication. Instead of having something that everyone could use and build upon, we're left with brittle pieces of proprietary software, completely at the mercy of two behemoths who call all the shots. The PC revolution happened but nobody learned anything from it.
- iamphilrae 4y ago
  I very much agree. Ironically the only relevant 3rd option who truly felt like they were trying to innovate was Microsoft+Nokia (the real Nokia) with Windows Phone. But failures to market and encourage adoption, and perhaps staining it with the “windows” brand, just led it down the path of being forgotten about by developers and so it withered and died.

For those who are not familiar, the other guy is Mike Zafirovski, Nortel's last CEO before they went bust. To me this really makes this video a fine historical document.

riskneutral 4y ago

What a terrible leader

b800h 4y ago
As mentioned in comments on the video, he's responsible for XBox and Azure, so not all bad.
- random314 4y ago
  An Azure that was going to be Windows only. What Ballmer actually succeeded in doing was entrenching windows inside every enterprise Fortune 500 by basically bundling everything from Office, Sharepoint, SQL server etc. This business is still going strong and switching to a subscription model. Before Ballmer, Microsoft was a consumer OS company.
  - b112 4y ago
    Before Ballmer, Microsoft was a consumer OS company. Microsoft was always a business facing company. Companies used NT from the start of time, and every business on the planet has been using Windows since the 90s. Microsoft has spent its entire lifetime slowly strangling and destroying other businesses, and pulling them over to their product lines. Word vs Wordperfect is one example. Wordperfect used to be completely dominant. Ballmer may have etched up Windows dominance a few points in a few markets, and I agree he continued this trend. He continued to expand into new markets. But it seems very weird to hear someone say he is responsible for getting businesses to use Windows, or caused M$ to focus on businesses.
Normille 4y ago
>What a terrible leader How can you say that! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMrhoOHNOrI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMrhoOHNOrI Sorry. I couldn't resist dredging up this old classic. It used to be compulsory viewing any time Steve Ballmer was mentioned. Although, on a more practical level; with winter approaching and huge energy price rises on the horizon, the burning feeling of vicarious embarrassment you get while watching this might be a warm blessing on those cold December evenings ahead.

suction 4y ago

DocTomoe 4y ago

In all fairness, Ballmer seemed to be right back then - the iPhone 1 had tons of problems with very little utility, and outside of fanboy circles was considered more of a joke. Not only was it ridiculously expensive, an unproven concept at the time and married to specific cell phone companies, battery life also was abysmal (they said it was up to a day, but from memory, people had to load their phones every four to six hours if they were doing anything with it. Compare that to the average phone back in 2007, which boasted battery times measured in days (weeks in case of Nokia)). It only really got actually general-public traction after they dropped the lock-in to specific mobile providers and proved that screen typing was feasible.

flantasticle 4y ago
Agree. It wasn’t really until around the iPhone 4 that the iPhone seemed to find its stride, which was released at least three years after this interview. Before that it’d be hard to argue it had greater utility than other high-end smartphones of the day. But what Jobs and Apple had was a longterm vision… And exceptional marketing.
- dagmx 4y ago
  I’d argue it was the iPhone 3G. Cheaper, had an App Store and had the data speeds to combine with that burgeoning app ecosystem. It’s arguably the phone that made GPS navigation popular for everyone, and consuming media on your phone on the go. It kickstarted an entire economy with the App Store. Coming from Symbian UIQ (on a Sony P1), that was night and day. The first iPhone wasn’t that interesting other than the multitouch capabilities for people with high end smartphones. The iPhone 3G made everyone sit up and take notice. You could get apps to do all the stuff you’d buy one off gadgets for , and it was way easier than downloading and installing jar files, hoping they’d support your phone. To me the iPhone 3G was the point where it went from “okay this thing is a weird luxury statement” to “why would you buy any other competing product?” it took quite a while before Android really found it’s footing too. To me the Galaxy S was the first real competitor to the iPhone , partly because Samsung saw what made the iPhone great and honed in on it. It’s the phone that made me switch to Android before switching back eventually to the iPhone X after a string of Android phones getting no updates in Canada, and a huge run of hardware issues with no easy way to deal with them. Come to think of it, my first Galaxy S had to be sent back because an entire SKU had bad memory.

vlunkr 4y ago

In his defense, the main objections he has are the price, the lack of a physical keyboard, and the fact that Apple had never sold a phone before. In hindsight those seem funny, but in 2007 you would have heard those same talking points everywhere. If only we all had decided collectively that 500$ really was too much for a phone. No it’s like no one even checks the price tag because their carrier is slowly milking it out of them instead.

Schroedingersat 4y ago
It's hardly slow. Just checked local plans for what I get for $20/mo prepaid and it's about $150usd/mo for one of those awful folding things.
rvense 4y ago
As far as I remember, in those days here you often paid nothing or very little out of pocket for a new phone. It was more like an extra 10-20EUR on your monthly subscription. At least for the phones normal people had.
- yftsui 4y ago
  It was the same in the US, you could get a new phone for $199 every two years, without any additional statement charge. However it all changed after T-Mobile’s “uncarrier” bluff, now it’s all about lock you in 36 months with monthly payments and some credit against the payments.
Gordonjcp 4y ago
It was also a "smart phone" with no data connectivity. Not much use giving it all these features and leaving it with a 2G radio stack.
- ZGDUwpqEWpUZ 4y ago
  2G has mobile data (via GPRS/EDGE) and the original iPhone absolutely supported it. You could browse the web on cheap phones much earlier, but the rendering engines were limited (some mobile subset of HTML?). A big selling point of the iPhone was that it included a full browser.

retskrad 4y ago

The iPhone is unironically one of the greatest products in human history. The world pre and post the arrival of the iPhone is very different.

laumars 4y ago
I’m not going to deny that the iPhone was a successful product but what people often forget is that the world was already shifting that way. Feature phones could already do what the iPhone did (and in some cases even more). Multi-touch devices were available before the iPhone. PDAs had also been about for years and did everything the iPhone could do and more. And Android wasn’t far behind the iPhone and also improved upon the original iPhone. In fact the original iPhone wasn’t even that good compared to the competition. It was lacking a lot of features people considered “must haves”. Native applications (everything was web apps originally), copy/paste, the ability to background applications, etc. And Ballmers point about the lack of a hardware keyboard was absolutely right for that era. Apple have successfully rewritten history here, like victors often do. And so people often credit the iPhone as being uniquely revolutionary. It certainly was industry changing but it wasn’t singularly responsible for that change. I say this as an iPhone user with an Apple Watch and other Apple hardware. So I do buy into the Apple ecosystem. But I’m also an old fart who has lived long enough to have first hand experience, both as a user and as a software engineer, pre and post the iPhone.
- 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
  No one had the sheer power of Apple though. In Australia, when the first iPhone hit, Apple was able to dictate certain things with carriers if they wanted to carry the iPhone. Plans suddenly got better and cheaper. You could just walk into an Apple store and get an unlocked phone (although the 3GS was first available only through carriers). iPhone launches had people camping out for days so Apple managed to exert their influence for years. Before this, data was really expensive, phones were all locked. None of the other device makers exerted their power like this. Or even had that sort of power. The iPad also had a similar effect with data only plans for iPads.
  - 4y ago

seba_dos1 4y ago

Well, who would have thought back then that Apple would actually succeed in making the whole industry be taking multiple steps back for many years ahead?

threatofrain 4y ago

Steve Jobs said on stage at the iPhone launch that the killer app was the phone app. IMO that was wrong — the killer app was Google Maps, back when GPS navigation devices used to cost $200+. This made the economic value of the iPhone a lot more solid and subsequently destroyed the entire device category.

ulfw 4y ago
Maybe in subsequent phones but the initial iPhone didn't even have GPS, only WiFi triangulation which worked only so-so and only in cities (with well... WiFi).
- FPGAhacker 4y ago
  It was cellular triangulation.
yftsui 4y ago
Google Maps didn’t have turn by turn navigation until late 2009, you probably mistaken the original iPhone with iPhone 3GS.
- slavik81 4y ago
  I didn't buy an iPhone until the 3GS, but I never used turn-by-turn navigation. I just needed a map with directions that I could refer to if I got lost. After I got it, I also discovered how useful it was for planning trips by bus. Did the original iPhone not have Maps at all? I think it would have been a killer app even without turn-by-turn.
  - yftsui 4y ago
    Well, people don’t carry a Garmin when they ride buses I guess? iPhone’s navigation didn’t become reliable enough to replace a Garmin / Tomtom till 2011-2012.
seba_dos1 4y ago
Several smartphones already had a GPS receiver back in 2007. The original iPhone did not.

Daub 4y ago

Steve Jobs greatest iPhone achievement was in getting Stan Sigman, CEO of Cingular Wireless, to upgrade his network to be equal to the iPhones demands. Prior that that, the tail (carriers) wagged the dog (phone manufacturers).

Gravityloss 4y ago
At least in USA. It's the similar thing with a lot of online business:music, videos , movies or ride sharing. First it's illegal and then someone big enough does it and it's a great business. Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, Uber etc... Technologically certainly fairly interesting but the real roadblock was regulations and contracts and conflicts of interest.

michelb 4y ago

Pretty sure he just said whatever he needed to say to promote Microsoft. I can't take anything what any tech leader said/says as truth or their honest opinion. They all have something to sell.

thunderbong 4y ago

IMHO, it was not so much as iPhone won, it's more like all other phone companies lost. Nobody innovated, nobody focused on the developer or bothered with creating a platform for developers although developers were asking for it. Sony, Nokia, Ericsson had big fan bases. There were any number of customizations that people all over the world created for them. But those phone companies didn't care. Each year, all these phone companies would come out with new form factors to keep their fan bases hooked. That's it. No standardization, no nothing. They all lost. And deservedly so. And we were left with Google cannibalizing open-source to create Android. Even then, and now, companies only accepted Android because they saw the rise of iPhone. It was a threat. They had to scramble to get something together. Everyone else just gave up. Even now, all I hear is, "It's not an easy task to create a new phone because you have to create everything from the ground up". It's this attitude which has been the death of mobile communication. Instead of having something that everyone could use and build upon, we're left with brittle pieces of proprietary software, completely at the mercy of two behemoths who call all the shots. The PC revolution happened but nobody learned anything from it.

iamphilrae 4y ago
I very much agree. Ironically the only relevant 3rd option who truly felt like they were trying to innovate was Microsoft+Nokia (the real Nokia) with Windows Phone. But failures to market and encourage adoption, and perhaps staining it with the “windows” brand, just led it down the path of being forgotten about by developers and so it withered and died.