Steve Ballmer isn’t happy with the runaway success Apple’s has had with the iPad.
“Apple has done an interesting job of putting together a synthesis and putting a product out, and in which they’ve — they sold certainly more than I’d like them to sell,” he said at Microsoft’s annual Financial Analyst Meeting
The Microsoft chief executive said that Apple has “done an interesting job of putting together a synthesis and putting a product out”. Apple is selling roughly one million a month, and with well over three million units sold has already eclipsed Microsoft’s decade-long efforts in tablet computing.
Despite that, Ballmer is confident that Microsoft’s is right to remain focussed on “tuning Windows 7” for what he call slates, rather than developing a new, completely touch-based OS as Apple has done.
“Okay, we have a lot of IP, we have a lot of good software in this area, we’ve done a lot of work on ink and touch and everything else — we have got to make things happen,” he said. “Just like we had to make things happen on netbooks, we’ve got to make things happen with Windows 7 on slates.”
Ballmer hasn’t set any deadlines for when the first Windows-powered “slates” will appear, though he suggested that Microsoft is prepared to wait until next year.
“We’ll get a boost sometime after the new year when Intel brings its new Oak Trail processor to market, ” he said. “Oak Trail is designed to be lower power. Lower power is good in a lot of ways. It leads to longer battery life, no fan, lower kind of noise levels, a lot of less weight — a lot of things that people like.”
By then Apple is likely to have unveiled — or at least completed work on — iPad 2 running iOS 4.
[photo: Steve Ballmer - CEO, Microsoft @ Mobile World Congress 2010 by Aanjhan Ranganathan; some rights reserved]
