Ballmer predicts 400 MILLION Win 8 Surface and Lumia fumblers Steve Ballmer's back in the numbers game, this time predicting sales of Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 kit to draw in application developers. Ballmer is reported to have claimed at the event that "close" to 400 million Windows phones and tablets will be running Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8. He didn't say when, though. …
I haven't clicked on the link but I'm guessing that it is the momentary freeze of a pre-release version of the Netflix app running on the pre-release OS that was installed on the pre-release hardware in a demo that he finds so damning. I'm guessing it's that because he posts it repeatedly every week. If someone as overtly prejudiced against Microsoft as Bob is reduced to this as a damning inditement, then Win8 is looking pretty good. (And I've been using it for a couple of months on the Desktop and am finding it very reliable and quick).
@h4rm0ny - he's right though. you don't demonstrate an unfinished product that has a high risk of chucking sick back at you infront of potential buyers. shame companies don't take Apple's lead and make sure a product is ready to go in a few weeks when shown to the public.
anyway, pot kettle black. I'm sure you're chucking crap in every Apple article possible from what I remember.
400,000,000? yea right. a smiley because ballmer makes me smile when he talks crap.
@h4rm0ny - it may of been someone else, so apologies after looking through your back-catalogue of text through-out articles responses. there are a couple of hardcore anti-apple people around here that spout out rubbish with no justification.
@Peter R. 1 - find my an instance where it has happened since the i* products have been released. i don't remember any and i'm sure i would of been cruelly reminded of any very quickly (i did just find a video of the wi-fi failing on the iP4 but there's external factors in that instance).
"@h4rm0ny - it may of been someone else, so apologies after looking through your back-catalogue of text through-out articles responses. there are a couple of hardcore anti-apple people around here that spout out rubbish "
Thanks for replying with that. Pint for you. It's easy to get people confused around here, I've done it myself. There are hardcore anti-apple types. Every OS has its fanpeople. Even Microsoft seems to have acquired a cheerleader here recently (like a lonely butterfly emerging before the Spring ;).
As far as I'm concerned, any modern OS is an impressive feat of engineering and treating companies like your favourite football team is silly. We're not citizens of the state of Androidtopia or something. We're customers. Everytime one of them produces something better and improved, we benefit either immediately by buying it, or in the second order when their competitors up their game. Celebrating a failure in the market for a good product, is just a shame, imo.
@h4rm0ny - "As far as I'm concerned, any modern OS is an impressive feat of engineering and treating companies like your favourite football team is silly."
Unfortunately that's the nature of the beast... the IT crowd. I have ex-colleagues and colleagues who all have conflicting opinions from stance point of the OS they're supporting. Most in my office despise Apple. Even if you try to be equally praising and critical fairly in your points, it's still the same old responses. Okay, I maybe a heavy Apple user (pretty much across the board of their products), but I'm no Apple fanboi. I find their stuff simpler and less hassle to use when I'm not using Winboxes at work.
I'm surprised we have a M$ cheerleader. Must be someone on commission to piss-off the whole el-reg community by some sort of reserve-psycology to buy Win8. Not me for me thanks! Here's to another beer!
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The writer of the article cant count. Nokia already sold 4 Million Lumias last quarter. That's 16 million a year. So If they double sales over the next year, that means 8 million a quarter or 32 million a year.
Balmer makes it clear that the surface devices are included in the 375 million...
> Nokia already sold 4 Million Lumias last quarter. That's 16 million a year.
No it isn't. Apparently they sold 2million total for Q42011 plus Q12012 so the total was 6million. It was 7million total for all WP7, so 1million from other OEMs.
Given that WP7 has been announced as a dead end by MS and Nokia the end user sales in Q3 will be just the bargain bin remaindering of those 4 million. It is unlikely that vendors will accept any more WP7 and will await WP8 which will start again from zero market share, maybe by late Q4 or Q12013.
They might get to 8million for the whole year and then will need to start again building volume with the new products that are not even beta yet.
Nokia already SHIPPED 4 Million Lumias last quarter.
Everyone knows they are all buried in a frozen hole outside the former factory in oulu.. You would have to be a total idiot to think they SOLD than many. WHen was the last time you actually saw a real person with a Windows Phone?
"Here's some context: Samsung claims 20 million Galaxy SIIIs have been sold since its introduction three months ago. One million iPhone 4Ses were sold in the 24 hours after launch in October last year."
Here's some context: The Iphone platform took 76 days to sell one million, yet this was spun as an amazing success - even though Nokia were selling 10s of millions of Symbian phones a quarter. And it was years before the Iphone platform's sales grew to anything significant.
Compare like with like - if we're talking about the growth of a new platform, let's compare it to other platforms when they were introduced. And why criticise at all? No one criticised Apple's lack of sales in all those years, instead it just got media hype about how it would be the number one platform (even though it never did).
Also for context: Samsung and Nokia typically sell around one million phones a day all year round (though Nokia's may be less these days). Not just on the first day of a new product launch that's been hyped for months.
As for the numbers - yes, Windows phones/tablets outselling non-tablets seems unlikely. Though I think it's worth noting that we're going to see a lot of laptops with touchscreens that are convertibles/hybrids, and these so far seem to be marketed as "tablets". So we might have the odd situation where tablets do outsell non-tablets, but it's more that people continue buying laptops to use as traditional PCs, and just that it'll be standard for them to double up as tablets.
I don't see that we'll be able to cleanly divide Windows 8 sales into "PCs" and "tablets" when so many many machines will be both. All this "death of the PC" nonsense is largely spin, as I'm sure we'll continue to have conventional personal computers still, with additional features of portability and touch interfaces. What we choose to call them is matter of semantics.
>I don't see that we'll be able to cleanly divide Windows 8 sales into "PCs" and "tablets"
That's the problem for developers = develop for Win8 there are 400million devices.
Ok, some of them will be corporate desktops with a keyboard and a mouse and gig ethernet, some of them will be touchscreen tablets without 3G, and some of them will be phones with location awareness but expensive internet. We don't know how many there will be of each so you just have to write an application that is useful on all of them!
> That's the problem for developers = develop for w8's 400M devices
Wrong wrong wrong
Each platform is utterly different--tablet, desktop, phone, all completely different THAT is the problem for developers; be it the three different user interfaces, the different presentation metaphors or just plain operating system features, you will need to develop three different versions.
Stop spreading these MIcrosoft-sponsored lies.
Well you could treat them the same and just develop TIFKAM apps, but no-one would buy them for the desktop. You could develop a cool app which needs gig-ethernet data speeds, but no-one would buy it for phones or tablets.
Its just PR drivel. Actually, its worse for MS. By setting up the expectation that tablet, phone and desktop are all the same, they are setting up both devs and customers for a massive disappointment. Got IE on a tablet? Great, but why does the website say I need to install something called "flash"? I transferred my 300 page document from my work pc to my tablet, but I find it quite slow scrolling down, why is that? Why can't I find my colleagues' email addresses when I'm at home on my phone?
If Apple did one thing that no-one else had done before, it was to completely change the expectations of users, by not having a physical keyboard or mouse or anything which looked like OSX on the ip*d. Managing expectations is key to a happy customer and Ballmer's doing it all wrong.
You really dont get it. You can develop 3 different versions from a single code base with very little customisation required. With Visual Studio is is simple to update the core code and automatically rebuild 3 versions with customised interfaces, etc. for each platform. i.e. you only have to do the platform specific customisation once.
And some people actually suggest that there isn't an anti-MS bias here! The post contains a simple factual assertion, easily verifiable, and it gets downvoted. Do people actually require video footage of someone pressing the compile button in VS without re-writing their application?
And this spin is laughable - in the very same paragraph, we're told how the breakdown by quarter was 1 million, 2 million, 4 million - doubling every quarter.
So even if *their sales now remain constant*, that's 4 million a quarter, or 16 million. Predicting there will be growth from that doesn't seem unreasonable, especially consider the current growth rate, plus there are other manufacturers too (Samsung stayed out of the WP market this year, but have now returned with high end S3-like offerings).
I don't care about WP. I do care about accurate reporting.
The guy is an oaf and a buffoon. At least when billg was in charge, MS had direction and a plan. This just seems clueless, the world is in a recession, no-one wants Windows 8 and will stick with 7.
The vast majority of cheap phones are Symbian based, mid range is covered almost exclusively by Android, and high end is all Android or iOS. Tablets and smartphones sell based upon their apps, and Android and iOS have such a head start I can't see MS catching up.
In our business, we wouldn't dream of being the 7th or 8th company to enter a market place, which is exactly what MS are trying to do with Surface. It will flop, just like Zune, not down to any technical detail, it's just too damn late. Anyone who really really wanted a tablet has one, and it isn't an MS one. Those people will be captive to their purchased apps.
None of this sinks through to Ballmer. He'll probably start throwing chairs about 12 months from now..
@Tom38
Oh dear. Another clueless Ballmer hater. Why do you hate him?
How do _you_ know what kind of job he is doing?
Is he a good people person? Good at keeping their OpEx down?
You haven't got a scooby doo whether he is good or not.
Microsofts numbers have been fantastic of late. They have for the first time in a very long time got a very decent and clearly matching and consistent looking portfoilio from Xbox, Phone and PC.
You can't see MS catching up on Apps, when many AAA Apps are available and WP8 will have a similar dev platform to W8RT making ports simple. (Even the Unreal Engine will run on the phone, and ports of Games using it fairly trivial to move over)
But like any typical Ballmer hater, you just don't like the big man based on his personality.
Unlike many CEOs, he's a really interesting character. The IT world would be very boring with chair throwing Monkey boy. He seems deeply passionate about Microsoft from what I can see, so good luck to him.
I want MS to be successful, as successful companies make great products for *US* the consumer.
The surface is not being made for business success on its own, but rather showing OEMs what is possible if they apply themselves. Tablets currently are CONSUMPTION devices, the surface, RT and W8 on tablet will mean we can consume AND WORK/CREATE! I know many people who want to get one, myself included. I can throw out my iPad - which I barely use (once the initial gadget lust wore off).
Childish MS hating in comments, never stops does it. Kids, should allow em on the Internet. ;)
MS's share price is going nowhere, in spite of huge profits, because the company is stuck with two legacy products, and a load of junk. According to a recent report in the FT, Apple's price has grown at an average of 27% per year for many years.
Balmer throws chairs at his staff: he is not a “people person”.
Of course he's passionate about Microsoft, he's got a billion dollars worth of MS shares that he can't sell because so doing would kill the share price.
Balmer is a one-trick pony who can scare sales people out of their share-ownership-induced comfort zones into actually selling. It takes more than this to make a good CEO.
"Balmer throws chairs at his staff: he is not a “people person”."
Originally it was rumoured that he'd thrown a chair across the office when someone told him they were going to work for Google. Now chair throwing is apparently an established fact, a recurruring thing, and at actually targeted at people. In a few more years, he'll be using a custom built catapult to launch sofas at people's kids.
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