Ballmer Laughs at iPhone (2007)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

by simonebrunozzi • 4 years ago

32 84 4 years ago

youtube.com

mytailorisrich• 4 years 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To me this really makes this video a fine historical document.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• 4 years ago

What a terrible leader

b800h• 4 years ago

As mentioned in comments on the video, he's responsible for XBox and Azure, so not all bad.

random3142• 4 years 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.

Normille6• 4 years ago

  >What a terrible leader

How can you say that!

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.

DocTomoe• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

dagmx2• 4 years 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.

pmontra• 4 years ago

It was 2G when Europe has been 3G for a while. No copy and paste anywhere, but that wasn't probably a big problem (can't remember.) It was more of a fashion / luxury statement than a useful phone. The incredibly large screen would be very useful for web browsing, but 2G... Remember, no apps on the first ìPhone.

Edit: can't remember this too but maybe its 2 Mpx camera was a great one in 2007 (for a phone.) After all the view finder was unprecedented in size and it had wifi to download (or usb through iTunes?). No video recording, no selfie camera.

seba_dos115• 4 years ago

can't remember this too but maybe its 2 Mpx camera was a great one in 2007 (for a phone.)

It was comparable to what mid-end smartphones offered in 2007, like Nokia N75. Higher-end ones, like Nokia N95, already offered 5MP cameras with ~3" screens.

padjo2• 4 years ago

That’s not my memory of it at all. I remember it feeling like something from the future. The massive screen, the accelerometer, the light and proximity sensors and the overall slickness of the UI were really clearly a step change.

I didn’t quite realise at the time that it was a whole new device category that would essentially eliminate all other personal electronics but I remember it being clear that this was more than just another gadget, definitely not a joke!

seba_dos115• 4 years ago

These kinds of sensors were the norm on smartphones already. Even Openmoko phones had them (and Neo1973 was announced before the first iPhone was), those were touchscreen-only too. Nothing the first iPhone did was revolutionary, you couldn't even use those sensors yourself as you couldn't develop apps for it (and there were Symbian games that used accelerometers already).

It had some exquisite marketing which tried to place it as a somewhat accessible yet luxury item and they succeeded. Then they pushed with their app store walled garden, and the rest is sad history.

saurik• 4 years ago

It also had abysmal support for actual "phone" features... the showstoppers I remember were that it didn't support MMS--so no group text messages, which definitely made it feel like a "joke" given how many people I know relied on text messages (and no photos, though the phone I was using at the time didn't support that either)--and it didn't support any kind of ring tone groups, both of which being features that essentially all other competing phones (including Nokia brick phones) had supported for a long time. And that it didn't come with even a single game--even something as silly or stupid as snake--with no capability of installing a game felt somewhat ridiculously "Apple".

vlunkr• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

yftsui3• 4 years 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.

Gordonjcp4• 4 years 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.

ZGDUwpqEWpUZ3• 4 years 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.

qbasic_forever• 4 years ago

2G had full internet access, it's just that every smartphone until the iphone had _terrible_ browsers. I had a Windows Mobile 5 device and it was pretty bad, like using IE6 again but low resolution, extremely slow, and navigating with a horrid little joystick to select links.

random3142• 4 years ago

He might be laughing on screen, but internally he was panicking. By the next year he had dismissed Peter Knook and installed myerson and shuttered windows mobile 7 to completely rebuild from scratch windows phone 7.

jhugo• 4 years ago

No it’s like no one even checks the price tag because their carrier is slowly milking it out of them instead.

Eh, iPhones are still popular in many countries where paying outright for your phone is the norm.

Normille6• 4 years ago

And thanks to those people who have to have the newest shiny-shiny and allow themselves to be 'milked' that I can pick up a few years old ex-flagship model on eBay for a couple of hundred £££ or less. So long may it continue.

whizzter• 4 years ago

It might've seem funny to those that hadn't seen the future in 2002.

I had a SonyEricsson p900 (The p800, p900 and p910 series was released from 2002-2005) and it had a numpad for quick dialling, but for "smart" usage you really only used the touchscreen that covered most of the front real-estate (and a dial-knob for navigation since they hadn't figured out how to make UI's like Apple did later).

By 2006 however though I was looking to upgrade but SE chickened out and released successors (P990,M600,W950) that _decreased_ touch-screen realestate in favour of num/keypads on the front. It's really sad that they had everything in their hands but fubbed out totally.

But by 2007 the time was definetly right for the iPhone, disappointed by SE I began looking around and there was some "open" phone with touchscreen as well as that LG Prada. I even made a sketch of an ideal device a few weeks before Jobs came on screen.

Late 2006 sketch.. https://whizzter.woorlic.org/jonasphone.jpg

And yes, about as soon as iPhone 3G went on sale in Sweden I got one.

Semaphor• 4 years ago

I still miss my two last physical keyboard phones. Nokia E71 [0] as my last pre-Android/Apple-era phone, and HTC Desire Z (T-Mobile G2 in the USA) [1] as my first Android.

Thinking about it, I’d love an updated E71. Small, high-res touch screen, Lineage OS or something similar, physical keyboard. But that would be niche enough that it’d probably be very expensive for what it is.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_E71

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Desire_Z

retskrad• 4 years 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.

laumars8• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

Normille6• 4 years ago

  >Apple have successfully rewritten history here, like victors often do

Nope. See my previous post on this. I'm unfortunately old enough to have been around and involved in Apple forums pre-iPhone and there's no re-writing of history here. There really was genuine excitement at the prospect of an Apple phone. Maybe we were all a bit more naive back then. But it did seem at the time like Apple had the magic touch and anything they came up with would be revolutionary.

It's a long long time since I've had any interest in Apple or their products. But I wonder if the same excited anticipation still exists today [eg. with rumours of Apple producing an electric vehicle]?... or was it mainly due to Steve Jobs's cult of personality and mastery of hyperbole.

gambiting2• 4 years ago

That's like a funniest thing I read all day, assuming you are being serious. Was an iPhone revolutionary in terms of smartphones? Sure. But calling it a greatest invention in human history, within 100 years of literally thousands of other groundbreaking inventions, is just hilarious.

westoncb• 4 years ago

It’s not that crazy, assuming they’re equating it with everyone having a general purpose computer in their pocket (probably a greater impact on society than the previous personal computer revolution). But yeah, maybe a bit over the top...

Normille6• 4 years ago

I'd agree as far as the "i" part of "iPhone" goes. In my opinion, the internet is right up there with the greatest inventions in human history.

a_humean• 4 years ago

The iPhone was/is a good product, but I think mass indoor plumbing and the washing machine along with many other inventions ranks higher than the iPhone.

laumars8• 4 years ago

Decimal, the printing press, light bulbs, the power grid, telegrams, landlines, wireless data transmission (radio, TV, cell phones), computing machines, transistors, ARPNET, WWW, etc… to name a few.

All of which revolutionised humanity and were needed for the iPhone to ever exist. But also all of which were evolutionary ideas that emerged from several inventions predating it, already inching technology in that direction.

In short, we all stand on the shoulders of giants.

Normille6• 4 years ago

No matter what your opinion of Apple [and mine is pretty low!] it's churlish to deny this.

Yes, people wil point out that Phone X had a touchscreen, Phone Y had a browser, Phone Z had something else. But the iPhone was the first phone to bring them all together in one package.

I used to run an Apple user forum way back before the iPhone was released, when all we had were the occasional rumour that Apple 'might be' thinking of bringing out a phone.

Smartphones are so ubiquitous now that I reckon people forget just how much excited anticipation there was at the prospect that Apple would do for the phone what they'd recently done for computers [remember how revolutionary the coloured iMacs seemed at the time?] and portable music [the iPod]. Back then no-one was enthusiastic about their phones. They were just some utilitarian gadget you carried, like a wallet, a pen or your car keys and there was an almost messianic belief that, if Apple brought out a phone it would be an equally miraculous device.

The launch of the iPhone actually kick-started [for better or worse] the promotion of the formerly humble phone to the ranks of 'gadgets you dreamt of owning'

seba_dos115• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

It was cellular triangulation.

yftsui3• 4 years ago

Google Maps didn’t have turn by turn navigation until late 2009, you probably mistaken the original iPhone with iPhone 3GS.

slavik81• 4 years 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.

seba_dos115• 4 years ago

Several smartphones already had a GPS receiver back in 2007. The original iPhone did not.

mvladic• 4 years ago

The killer feature was the multitouch interface and removal of the keyboard. The same was with Macintosh, they removed the focus from the keyboard to the mouse. It is much easier to know what to do when you have several buttons on the screen instead of generic keyboard with many keys. I remember Steve Jobs emphasized this during the iPhone introduction event.

simonebrunozzi• 4 years ago

I disagree. I'd put Google Maps on #2. #1 was solidly the camera app, and the various apps (remember Burbn? [0]) that allowed the user to modify, post online, etc.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Instagram

Daub• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

Ballmer Laughs at iPhone (2007)

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