Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that Microsoft is the only company going directly head to head with Apple, according an interview he gave to Bloomberg.
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When Microsoft asked Lenovo, a long-standing Microsoft hardware reseller, to sell its recently-released Surface Pro products, Lenovo declined the company’s offer because it sees the Surface Pro as a device that competes in the same space as Lenovo’s laptops and hybrid Yoga devices.
“They [Apple] have done a great job”.
Steve Ballmer believes that Amazon is, indeed, not a nice environment in which to work. Microsoft, however, made the investment into Apple as a part of a lawsuit settlement involving Windows 95 and stolen Quicktime code.
He added that “many, many” people “round trip” leaving Microsoft, going to Amazon, and then returning to Microsoft.
When asked about Twitter, Ballmer, who is one of Twitter’s biggest investors said that “there’s all kinds of opportunity” at the company and believes “Jack’s on top of it”. In a way, you could say that is the craziest thing we ever did, but they’ve taken the foundation of great innovation, a few cash, and they’ve turned it into the most valuable company in the world. Apple was worth less than $3bn when it took Bill Gates’ money and now it’s worth $700bn, on course to becoming a trillion-dollar company – something that eclipses Microsoft’s relatively lowly $247bn. But you’ve got to remember, there is intense competition between Microsoft and Amazon.
“Nobody else has really tried to compete with them anymore really seriously in hardware”, he said.
As Jobs famously said at that time, “we have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose”. Who is really going after the Mac, who is really going after the iPad. The software giant also revealed its new Surface Pro 4, which will go up against the iPad Pro.
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This makes Microsoft the one and only true rival for Apple because it has the software, Windows, plus the hardware, Surface, which makes the ultimate high-end device. You know a surface book isn’t either an iMac or an iPad. In Seattle, there are fewer startups, and just two major tech firms: Amazon and Microsoft. However, Microsoft agreed to make an investment into the company, giving Apple its much-needed lifeline to be able to innovate. One of the topics that were discussed in the interview is the investment that Microsoft made in Apple nearly two decades ago, and how it could probably be “the craziest thing” that Microsoft has ever done.
