News · 29 Sep 2010 · MTW Editorial Team
The Seattle Times sat down with Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer for a quick Q&A session about the company’s current and upcoming products. It is interesting to see that Microsoft is really conservative and doesn’t xant to talk about any Windows Phone 7 sales forecast (contrary to what happened back in May..). Steve states that the primary goal with WP7 is to have a vast OEM ecosystem filled with great looking and interesting devices:
Q: Windows Phone 7 (a cellphone platform) is coming out this holiday season. How are you going to turn this into a billion-dollar business for Microsoft?
A: The place to start is, “Are we going to have cool phones out with our software on them this holiday season?” You put aside the questions of how you make money and blah, blah, blah. That’s all interesting in the long run. In the short run (claps his hands and rubs them together), people gotta want these phones. I think they’re going to look pretty good. … If we start the popularity chain and start kind of the buzz around these things, we’ll be able to make some money off them.
He is then asked about the KIN disaster:
Q: What did you learn from the Kin (a mobile phone that Microsoft canceled shortly after it began selling this year)?
A: The No. 1 message from Kin is a message of focus. You only get so many things you can really talk about, communicate, work on with the consumer. You’ve got to be bold, you’ve got to look forward and you’ve got to stay focused. Kin was neither — with 20-20 hindsight — bold enough relative to where the market’s going, and it just defocused activity from Windows Phone.
Source: Seattle Times
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