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Comment by bleachedsleet | Hacker News Reader

> I think he also overestimates its success. He pretty much sees everyone using it for work, gaming, friend interactions, etc. I just can't see it being so ubiquitous.

“There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.” - Steve Ballmer 2007 [1]

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2007/04/ballm...

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I think it's perhaps possible that Ballmer, as CEO of a major competitor, was not engaging in dispassionate analysis and in fact there was a non-zero chance that the iPhone would gain significant market share.

I think it’s usually better to accept someone’s words at face value than to attempt to infer deeper meaning. Ballmer has gone on to say that was one of his biggest mistakes and history agrees.

Regardless, there’s many examples of people throughout history finding no value in seemingly pointless technologies only to be proven wrong so I believe the point the quote still stands. I suppose I could always just link to the infamous Dropbox post here instead…

I agree in general, but in the case of CEOs giving public remarks it's safe to assume they are talking their book. Regardless, I don't see it as particularly relevant that people have been pessimistic about technologies that turned out quite successful. For every instance of "they said revolutionary product X was crazy but it turned out to be wildly successful" there are probably a 1000 instances of "they thought revolutionary product X was crazy and it failed miserably and faded into irrelevance." In other words, you have to actually articulate a reason why you think VR will be as successful as Meta claims it will be rather than make a "they laughed at Einstein/Semmelweis/etc too" argument. And with respect to VR I just don't see it. I've played games on the Occulus and they are pretty fun but I just don't see what the value proposition of VR is beyond gaming. And VR gaming can still be a huge industry but I just don't see it being anything more than that. Whereas I think the value proposition of smartphones was fairly obvious. It of course wasn't clear than any particular phone (like the original iPhone, perhaps especially the original iPhone given that it only worked for one carrier at the time) would break through. So it could have been that Ballmer was completely correct if things had turned out slightly differently. But some smartphone would have broken through. I don't think VR is the same. It's not just that there is uncertainty over which particular product will take off, but uncertainty about how big the eventual market for VR products and services will be in total.

> Whereas I think the value proposition of smartphones was fairly obvious.

As someone who was in the industry at the time, I think you're looking with hindsight goggles on.

In the initial age of smartphones we had Blackberries (email/productivity devices) for business people, then a hodge podge of HTC Windows devices, the Hiptop, etc. There was no obvious path to ubiquity, and they were made for business men or teenagers.

Nothing at that stage indicated either the likelihood of every person in a western country carrying one, common services and businesses switching exclusively to them, the massive quantities of time spent on them or them becoming our primary computing devives.

Fast forwarding 15 years - yes, the value proposition is obvious. However it seems we're in a similar situation with a hand wavey "VR is just for gamers". Time will tell.

Fair enough. I may just be indexing too much on my own experience. It certainly seemed obvious to me in the mid-2000s that ubiquitous computing would be hugely valuable but I was also a nerd into that sort of thing so maybe I shouldn't generalize from that.

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