Microsoft’s Ballmer: We are not going to leave any space uncovered to Apple

During an interview after the 2012 Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer stated that the company would leave no stone unturned in its innovation battle against rival Apple. In fact, Microsoft will not ‘leave any space uncovered’ to Apple.

“We are trying to make absolutely clear we are not going to leave any space uncovered to Apple. We are not. No space uncovered that is Apple’s. We have our advantages in productivity. 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]. 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. 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,” Ballmer stated during an interview after the 2012 Worldwide Partner Conference.

According to Ballmer, Microsoft’s pimary hardware focus is the Surface tablet. “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, HDC 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.”