Ballmer knows the fastest way to get people talking about Microsoft is if he slags off the competition, which is exactly what he did yesterday. Boasting, he compared 350m sold PCs in the last year with their rival selling just 20m.
That rival being Apple, we can only presume, with TNW looking into sales data and figuring that Mac sales amounted to 15.25m—some way off what Ballmer quoted, but near enough that it must be them—maybe with a hit of Linux, too.
Whichever rival it is Ballmer referred to, he claimed it was “too much” and that Microsoft wishes to scoop up those 20m customers with the caressing touch of the Windows hand. This by no means is the first time green-eyed Ballmer’s spoken of a rival’s sales, with this time last year a report of him talking about iPad sales quoted him as saying “they’ve sold certainly more than I’d like them to sell, let me just be clear about that.”
While they might be selling well on Windows, their phone platform Windows Phone 7 hasn’t taken off in quite the same way, with Ballmer stating “we’ve gone from very small to very small, but it’s been a hell of a year.” Before you take a guess that that means about 10 phones were sold, he claimed they’ve seen “millions of phones” passing from store shelves to people’s pockets, but that’s still a long ways off the number of Android devices being connected each day (500,000 according to Google’s Andy Rubin).
Perhaps everyone’s just waiting for the Mango update to hit? After all, it’s been leaked and spoken of for almost as long as WP7 phones have been on sale, and considering the very positive first impressions reviews that have come in, it wouldn’t be surprising if everyone’s holding off upgrading ’til then. [The Next Web]