Steve Ballmer: ‘Microsoft will give Apple a run for their money’

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has chose to share his feelings about Amazon.

Steve Ballmer, electric fanboy owner of the Los Angeles Clippers and former Microsoft CEO, told Bloomberg TV’s morning show what he really thinks about Amazon and Apple. Anybody who ever left Microsoft, we could count on them coming back within a year or two.

15, characterized Amazon as “a bruising workplace”, where overworked employees cry at their desks, are criticized for not being available on vacation, and scheme against each other to climb the corporate ladder. I believe the same is true at Amazon. I think they are a place that people don’t want to work.

“In a way you could say that was the craziest thing [Microsoft] ever did”. In 2003, Ballmer was running Microsoft. Bloomberg Business shared a quote with Ballmer from Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, referring to Microsoft as a “country club”.

Many believe that Microsoft’s Surface Book puts the Redmond-based software giant in direct competition with Apple, and even Panos Panay, head of the devices unit at the company, suggested that the fruity-named company finally has a more challenging rival in this premium laptop market. It also is on a hiring spree, adding 39,000 employees in the last three months alone – and reaching an all-time high of 222,400 employees – as it continues to expand its business into areas such as hardware, media, and cloud services. The company’s best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad.

“Microsoft will give [Apple] a good run for their money…Nobody else really tries to compete with them anymore, really seriously, in hardware…If there’s going to be any competition for Apple at all, it will be from Microsoft”, the former chief executive said. Who is really going after the Mac, who is really going after the iPad. “You can basically say Microsoft and Samsung”. Who’s going after the iPad? “Microsoft is really the only one which has got both hardware and software capability”. So if there’s going to be any competition at all from Apple, it’ll come from Microsoft. After saying Amazon is not a great place to work, the conversation drifted to Apple and Ballmer actually admitted that “they’ve done a great job”.