Ballmer admits Windows Phone failure

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, says that Windows Phone 7 is still “very small” compared with the competition.

Discussing the mobile operating system at the 2011 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Los Angeles, Mr Ballmer said: “In a year, we’ve gone from very small to... very small.”

Since launching in October last year, Windows Phone 7 has occupied around one per cent of the US handset market. However, Mr Ballmer said he was confident that things would improve. “It’s been a heck of year and you are going to see lots of programs in that market as we move forward,” he said. “Nokia and people in the phone business believe in us.”

The bulk of Mr Ballmer’s speech was about cloud computing. He said that 58 per cent of the companies attending the conference had begun experimenting with services in the cloud, adding that Microsoft had gone “all in” on cloud computing.

He said: "We are the only company out there that's investing in on-premises and on the cloud. The amount you learn from working [in] both environments to work in the other is dramatic."

Mr Ballmer was positive about the growth of Bing but said that partner companies were not really getting involved with the search engine.

He said: "Bing is the Microsoft product and service our partners expend the least amount of time with right now.”