Steve Ballmer Gets A Real Question From The Crowd

• When’s the last time you ran into someone using a Windows Mobile based phone? Still thinking, huh? Well, it’s been at least 12 months for me. Now, imagine if you are the guy working on WinMo products, and every night you went out with your friends you were bombarded with your friends playing MafiaLive on their iPhones? Well, yesterday a member of the audience addressed this very issue directly at Steve Ballmer during the Microsoft CIO Summit. As usual with an high level executive, Ballmer offered an answer with little substance. He does mention however, that they need to pick up the pace. Here is the question, then the answer.

Question: With platforms like the Google phone and iPhone coming out, it’s really tough to continue to stand behind Windows Mobile when our employees are bringing these consumer devices into our environments,” the questioner explained. “And in your presentation you put Windows Mobile right in the center there, but it was a phone that doesn’t work in America and an operating system that you haven’t released. I’m wondering what your commitment is to continuing to get newer versions of the operating system in our hands so that we don’t have to fight this battle on the ground.”

Ballmer: “We have a significant release coming this year,” he said. “Not the full release we wanted to have this year but we have a significant release coming this year with Windows Mobile 6.5….We still don’t get some of the things that people want on the highest-end phones. Those will come on Windows Mobile 7 next year. Certainly I’m not, um–there’s opportunities for us to accelerate our execution in this area, and we’ve done a lot of work to really make sure we have a team that’s going to be able to accelerate. With that said, we did sell more Windows Mobile devices last year than Apple did iPhones–just an important factoid to have. Blackberry was a little bit ahead, and Google was nowhere to be seen, except in Silicon Valley, I’m sure. But we’ll do our best to help you with that challenge.”

Tagged as: Apple, iPhone, steve ballmer, windows mobile