Ballmer Laughs at iPhone

What Hacker News said

Cites rvivek · 2013-05 · on “Tap Into Y Combinator's Contrarian Thinking”

Great article! Looking at a lot of successful companies (apple, tesla, spacex, amazon, etc.), it seems like the founders believed that such a thing should exist so strongly that they made the rest of the world follow them. When iPhone launched ( [this video] )

Cites rmason · 2019-06 · on “Bill Gates on making “one of the greatest mistakes of all time””

That wasn't Gates, it was Steve Ballmer. In an interview a decade later after this one he acknowledged to an interviewer that it might have been a mistake. [this video] One error Gates later admitted making was not buying Allaire Corp because he thought the price was too high. His own staff members argued with him on that one. But after Allaire was sold to Macromedia J.J. Allaire started the company Onfolio with some friends from Allaire. Gates insisted after launch that Ballmer purchase it, primarily to acquire the services of J.J. Allaire. During his time at Microsoft he created Windows LiveWriter and I've been told also worked on the creation of Azure. He left Microsoft and founded RStudio.

Cites TekMol · 2023-01 · on “Study Finds That Buttons in Cars Are Safer and Quicker to Use Than Touchscreens”

The same could be said for mobile phones. Some things can be done quicker with physical buttons. That's why people thought phones with just a screen would never become popular: [this video] But with a screen you can do many more things.

Cites somsak2 · 2023-06 · on “Here’s what Mark Zuckerberg thinks about Apple’s Vision Pro headset”

Interesting just how similar his reaction is to what Ballmer's was when asked about the iPhone. "We like our strategy," comments about how it's so expensive (in fact giving almost precisely the same comparison; $99 vs. $500 back then is quite close to the $500 vs. $3500 with VR!), and mentioning that they're selling "millions of phones per year" while Apple is selling zero. [this video]

Cites latexr · 2024-01 · on “Apple Vision Pro available for pre-order”

> When the iPad was introduced, everyone was shocked by the very low price and the sleek form factor compared to previous Windows tablet devices. What I remember is everyone making fun of it, including the name¹, for being “just a big iPod Touch”. Similarly, the iPhone wasn’t taken all that seriously² on launch. The App Store wasn’t even an idea yet, let alone a reality. That is to say this always happens: people discount a new thing and use as contrast something else which was also discounted at the time but framed as if it had always been perceived by the current lens. I have no idea if the Vision Pro will “succeed” (however we define that), but we can be reasonably sure that the current v

Cites encom · 2024-06 · on “EasyOS: An experimental Linux distribution”

>what Steve Balmer said about the iPhone The first iPhone, running iOS v1, was kinda shit. It's easy to look at what the iPhone is today and laugh at Ballmer, but I don't think what he said was wrong at the time he said it. [this video]

Critical snowwrestler · 2012-05 · on “Steve Ballmer's Microsoft”

> It is losing money, sure, but short term losses are not important when you're talking about entering a market as large as the mobile phone market after the existing players are firmly entrenched. I think the point on mobile is that Microsoft itself was a well-entrenched player in mobile, and they laughed[1] while allowing that position to get completely eroded by less experienced competitors. It's true that after that happened, they've seemed to build a pretty good project in Windows Phone 7. But I don't think it's really accurate to start the scorekeeping so recently. [1]: [this video] edit: formatting

Critical jre · 2013-02 · on “Google Glass is Ridiculous”

This immediatly reminded of about Ballmer's reaction to the first iPhone [1] : he started laughing explaining it's too expensive, doesn't have a physical keyboard. [1] [this video]