Ballmer: Microsoft will leave no ‘stone unturned’ in battle with Apple

Microsoft will do everything in its power beat Apple. Not just in personal computing, the space in which the two have been rivals longest, but in every space that the Cupertino-based tech giant plays in.

In an interview with tech news site CRN, Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer made it clear that the company would leave “no stone unturned” in its innovation battle against Apple.

“We are trying to make absolutely clear we are not going to leave any space uncovered to Apple,” he said, “We are not. No space uncovered that is Apple’s”.

“We have our advantages in productivity,” he said. “We have our advantages in terms of enterprise management, manageability. We have got our advantages in terms of when you plug into server infrastructure in the enterprise.”

“But we are not going to let any piece of this [go uncontested to Apple],” shouted Ballmer. “Not the consumer cloud. Not hardware software innovation. We are not leaving any of that to Apple by itself. Not going to happen. Not on our watch.”

“We do feel empowered to innovate everywhere and bring our partners with us,” Ballmer said. “We are just not going to leave any — what’s the expression people like to use — We’re not going to leave any stone unturned, so to speak, as we pursue that.”

While Ballmer says the company isn’t discounting the possibility of its own smartphone, we shouldn’t expect one to drop any time soon.

“Right now we are working real hard on the Surface. That’s the focus. That’s our core. Look, we’ll see what happens. We have good partners with Nokia, HTC in the phone space. I love what we’ve got going on with the Surface. We are going to focus on Surface and our other Windows 8 Tablet partners and see if we can go make something happen.”

The Microsoft CEO said that the company hadn’t been approached by any of its partners about using some of the technology from its recently launched Surface tablet, it wouldn’t be averse to the idea.

“[If] a partner says, ‘Hey look I want to sell some of these things. I want to put them in solutions,’ they can order some off Microsoft.com and sell them. There is nothing that gets in the way of that. But, we have not set up what I would call industrial distribution as sort of a first element. We may get there. But, if a partner wants to order some and put them in a solution with the customer, we’ll be excited to see that happen.”