Ballmer: I would do Windows phone differently now

Regrets, I’ve had a few

The shy and retiring, softly spoken and delightfully understated former Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, has been talking to Bloomberg about Microsoft’s failed move into mobile.

Steve “I never threw a chair at anyone” Ballmer shared his wisdom on the move to mobile telling anyone who still had an inner ear that with hindsight he would have done things differently now.

“I would have moved into the hardware business faster and recognized that what we had with the PC that there was a separation. [Our] chips, systems, and software [success], wasn’t largely going to reproduce itself in the mobile world,” Ballmer said.

He said that Apple did one thing better which he had not thought of – the model of subsidizing phones through the operators.

“People like to point to this quote where I said iPhones will never sell. It was because the prices, $ 600-700, were too high. It was because of business model innovation by Apple to essentially get it built into the monthly mobile phone bill.”

Ballmer added that one of the things that did for Microsoft’s mobile plans was the troubled launch of Vista.

“We should have been in the hardware business sooner in the phone case and we were still suffering some of the effects of our Vista release of Windows which sucked up a huge amount of resources for a much longer period of time than it should have because we stumbled over it,” Balmer states.

Ballmer said that the move to buy Nokia was agreed by the board even though he had decided to leave.

“If executed in the certain way, I think it made a lot of sense. The company chose to go in another direction and that’s the decision the company made.”