Microsoft never has lost its hardball edge. In a discussion with Gartner analysts at Gartner's annual Symposium ITxpo, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called his competitors "pretenders."
Ballmer said Microsoft realizes computing is in the midst of a shift from desktop-centric to a more balanced world that interweaves the best of the Web, the PC, enterprise functionality like manageability, and the explosion of different devices, but that companies looking to develop platforms on a larger scale have far to go.
"I think when it comes time to really building platforms; we have a lot of experience," he said. "It's taken us 17 years but people think we finally get it a little bit in the enterprise. Some of the pretenders have no enterprise expertise."
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