QOTD

October 8, 2009 at 8:20 am PT

“Free is not a business model. We are a commercial company, we will look to gain revenue and profit from our activities. You’ll have to ask our competitors if they’ll make money on free things.”

– Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer

Tagged with: John Paczkowski, Microsoft, QOTD, quoted, shorty

comments so far. Add yours.

Fred Hamranhansenhansen

That is fundamentally untrue. Free is quite often a business model. Especially when you’re talking about software, which always requires some hardware to run it, to use it.

A Windows 7 Ultimate DVD for $399 is completely worthless unless you buy a PC from HP/Dell or Apple. Android is free but also worthless unless you buy an HTC or other generic handset to run it.

Other examples:

- Firefox is free to the user, but when you do a search query, Mozilla gets paid by the search engine.

- Windows or Windows Mobile pre-installed is essentially free to the user, but when you buy a PC or Windows Mobile phone, Microsoft gets paid by the PC or phone vendor.

- Razor handles are essentially free, the manufacturer makes nothing from them, but they make great money from the razor blades you need to use the handle.

- Google Search is free for the user, but Google gets paid by ad placements.

- iPhone OS and Blackberry OS are free for iPhone and Blackberry users, but Apple and RIM gets paid on the phone hardware.

As usual, Ballmer is so far out of touch that it’s amazing. It’s just amazing to hear him braying the same old foolishness. No wonder they are still trying to sell the same old Windows and Office on DVD that they sold on CD that they sold on 3.5 inch floppy that they sold on 5 inch floppy. They have not even adapted to the Internet yet at all.

Finally, I have to say, if I was the CEO of a company that just shat out Windows Mobile 6.5 a full 3 years after Windows Mobile 6.0 and the iPhone, I would resist the temptation to criticize anyone else’s mobile products or strategy. If Android is so bad, why has it replaced more than 50% of the Windows Mobile installations? Because Windows Mobile is 100 times worse.

Ballmer’s talk is even cheaper than Android. His company has done absolutely nothing but fail for the entire 21st century. Windows 2000 is the last product that you can even pretend is a success. XP sold a lot of copies, but it also created the Botnet and it has 20,000 new viruses a day and no in-place upgrade to Windows 7. These are terrible, terrible failures.