Ballmer Laughs at iPhone

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 ( [VIDEO] )

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. [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.

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: [VIDEO] But with a screen you can do many more things.

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. [VIDEO]

> 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 version is the worse it will ever be. In other words, it will get better and it’s too soon to judge its impact. ¹ [LINK] ² [VIDEO]

>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. [VIDEO]

"Overthrown" does not mean "disappear", it means "no longer king." IBM was once the king of computing. It was overthrown by Microsoft. Microsoft was then king, but it is no longer, though those living in the past will point to its continue dominance of the PC, a dominance that is both declining and becoming more irrelevant. Google was crowned the king of the web, with users spending most of their time on google.com, but now they spend far more time on Facebook. > The Roman and British empires lasted hundreds of years. We're talking technology, not geopolitical power. The former operates on a vastly accelerated time scale, aka "Internet time". I recommend you read the Innovator's Dilemma, or at least the cliff notes on Wikipedia: [LINK] . There's a nice list of things many of which weren't expected to be overthrown so quickly. I'm wondering if you might actually be a celeb: [VIDEO] .

Chromebook is like the flipside of that Ballmer quote[1]: "that is the cheapest computer in the world and it appeals to everyone because it even has a keyboard" [1] [VIDEO]