This made me chuckle. Last week, Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer made an interesting comment about the smartphone market. According to Matt Asay of CNET News:
Asked about smartphones, Ballmer said Nokia, Research In Motion, and Apple will all lose out as the market expands over the next five years, because they design their own proprietary hardware and tie it closely to their software.
Nokia leads the smartphone market today with about a 30 percent share, he said. “If you want to reach more than that, you have to separate the hardware and software in the platform,” he said.
I wasn’t the only one who had a chuckle though. The fine folks at Ars Technica, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, and The iPhone Blog also couldn’t help smirking. TUAW had the best title though: “Ballmer channels 1985…” Ha!
I wonder how Ballmer feels about Google (GOOG) Android then. Hey, that’s a separate hardware and software solution! Just like you said, Ballmer!
The Android platform rox! Too bad it is not as mature as the Iphone platform yet.
Funny you mention that. I met an iPhone developer a few weeks ago and he said the same thing – that the Android platform had some memory & performance issues. He praised Apple’s iPhone platform for being much more stable than Android, for now. But perhaps Android will catch up soon.