IT Executive and former Uber-Geek. Married with "The Boy", living La Vida Loca in Fabulous Las Vegas.
Great quote from Steve Ballmer on Apple’s “Cult Following”
Oct 01
Author: Paul Ballard
Wednesday October 1st, 2008 4:41pm
I attended a TechNet event today called “Technologies to Change Your Business: How Customers Are Implementing Tomorrow’s Strategies Today”. It was primarily geared around Microsoft’s virtualization stories and SQL Server 2008, but I attended to see if Steve Ballmer was going to drop any news about Microsoft’s Cloud Services. After his keynote, there was a question and answer session where a question was asked that led to the presenter talking about Apple’s “cult like following” for its products such as iPhone. This was Steve Ballmer’s reply:
Currently 97% of people run our software. I don’t know if that qualifies as a cult but we’re pretty happy with our numbers.
Well said sir, well said.
First published on my new blog at www.sleepdeprivedmind.com.
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Well said? It’s a totally nebulous statement. I love Ballmer, but the guy has to stop burying his head in the sand. Selling 4 million phones last quarter hardly seems like a cult to me.
Perhaps you didn’t understand the context. It wasn’t Steve Ballmer who said that Apple had a cult-like following, it was the moderator. His response however was very rather on point.
You’re right, I don’t understand the context, or the point. Was it just a dumb question, and if so, why repeat it?
iphone’s are cool. before I bought my phone all i could think about was.. geeze how am i going to open up excel, open up word.. etc. Since I’ve had the phone i havent even thought of it. The Apps Iphone and gphone offer truly help with everyday things. I wish microsoft would stop bucking the trend and start trying to get ahead of it. Its pretty disappointing…. thats what we are talking about here you know.. “trend”. back when cars were just comming out, im sure the horse and buggy guys were saying something like “well we currently have 97 percent of the market.. who cares about cars…”
Microsoft is a great company and they have some great products. they just need to have some more robust divisions.