Ballmer Talks iPhone SDK, Screams Again

After dismissing the iPhone as “silly” last year (just to see it crushing Windows Mobile’s market share a few days ago,) The Other Steve spilled his thoughts on the iPhone announcement yesterday, all during the Mix’08 keynote with Guy Kawasaki. Ballmer touched on Adobe-Flash-wannabe Silverlight on the iPhone, Apple’s cut on iPhone’s application distribution and Apple’s ActiveSync license. All good, until he reprised his chimptastic “developers, developers, developers” screams, which got caught on (YES!) video:

• They like the idea of being in the iPhone with Silverlight instead of Flash: “Silverlight for the iPhone is of course interesting,” he said. “I can’t say there’s been extensive discussion with Guy’s old boss [Steve Jobs].”

• Far from being non-profit, he accused Apple to take a too-large slice off the developer: “grabbing 30 percent of every bit of revenue, it’s a good business if you can make it.”

• This model may limit the royalty free distribution of Silverlight: He failed to notice that 30% of zero dollars is zero dollars.

• The Exchange connection was not a surprise for Microsoft: “We’ve licensed ActiveSync for a while. That’s been an option that’s been available to Apple. It was certainly an option we knew Apple might take advantage of.”

• The scream reprisal is not a joke, as this video shows.

On his defense, someone asked him to do it. Actually, forget about the defense. No wonder Bill is divorcing him. [Georg Holzer via ISS via Cnet]