Steve Ballmer has mostly kept quiet on his views of the tech industry since he left Microsoft in 2014 as its CEO to become the owner of the LA Clippers pro basketball team. However, he has offered some of his insights into his former company, and its competition in a new video interview.
Ballmer, in a chat with Bloomberg TV, admitted that Apple had "done a good job" with its efforts in combining software and hardware. However, he also feels that "if there's going to be any competition at all for Apple it will come from Microsoft." He cited the recently announced Surface Book as an example of how Microsoft could compete with Apple with that kind of business model
Ballmer also took on Amazon as well. Both Microsoft and Amazon are based in the Seattle area, and while he says some Microsoft employees have left to go work at Amazon, "we could count on them coming back within a year or two because it's not a great place to work." You can watch the full chat with Ballmer in the video below.
Source: Bloomberg
