From the Dark Side--M$ CEO Steve Ballmer living in the past

David DeJean's InformationWeek article provides an interesting analysis of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's iPhone-related comments given in this USA Today interview. Yes, M$ has a monopoly on PC operating systems which it has leveraged into a monopoly on office productivity software, web browsers and a few other things. That's history, a wrongful history that the federal anti-trust mechanism and the courts have failed miserably to right. Microsoft proved to be just too big of a fish.

Flash forward to today and M$ has a miniscule market share of digital music players despite a major effort. On the eve of Apple delivering the iPhone running on Mac OS X, M$ has no cell phones. Ballmer talks as if M$ has a huge share of the 1.3 billion cell phone market but, like PCs, he really means operating systems. And that's not true either according to data in DeJean's article--M$'s cell phone market share is miniscule. So-called smart phone are on the order of 10 percent of the total cell phone market. Within that 10 percent, the top smart phone OS's are Symbian OS (73%), Linux (17%) Windows Mobile (6%), RIM (3%) and Palm OS (2%). That makes Windows less than 0.6 percent of the cell phone market share.

You're living in the past, Mr. Ballmer. Get real. [Dana Baggett & Bill Fox]

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