» But they’ve always been a hardware company
Steve Ballmer in September of 2008 on why Apple would lose the smartphone war:
Even Nokia, the biggest guy in the phone market, only has, what, 33-34, something like that, percent of the market. And if you want to reach more people than that, you sort of have to separate the hardware and the software issue.
Uh-huh. Hence the Surface and the takeover of Nokia in everything but name.
Also this:
We, in a sense, have the most mature of those platforms, ironically, of Linux mobile, Symbian, Android and Windows Mobile, we have the most mature of the platforms, we’ve made the most progress. We’ve got over 65 vendors building hardware with Windows Mobile. We’ve got a lot of work to do. We’ve got marketing work. We’ve got branding work.
That’s all he lists. Marketing and branding work. There was nothing wrong with Windows Mobile! As if, girlfriend!