Ballmer discusses Microsoft's battle against Apple's Mac App Store, and official PC support for Kinect

Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, chatted to the BBC at CES about a wide range of topics, including competition from Apple, the burgeoning 'appification' of everything, and Kinect for the PC.

When asked about official support for Kinect on the PC, Ballmer says Microsoft "will support that in a formal way in the right time" -- a cop-out, basically. His impish grin does suggest it's definitely on the cards, though, and hopefully sooner rather than later.

Regarding Apple and its recently-launched Mac App Store, Ballmer seems totally unfazed. "The biggest app ecosystem in the world is certainly not the Mac, not the iPad, and certainly not the iPhone. The biggest app ecosystem in the world is the [Windows] PC. There's no question about that."

Rather astutely, Ballmer goes on to identify an ecosystem that's even more important than Mac, iOS or Windows: the Web! "The Web, and particularly as the Web moves to HTML5, which I think we're doing beautifully in our new Internet Explorer 9, that's the other big base app." In other words, Windows is by far the largest software platform, and IE9 is in a great position for the upcoming Web app explosion.

It's rare to see Steve quite so calm and collected, and even charming. Perhaps the British accent of the interviewer has a soothing effect...

Ballmer discusses Microsoft's battle against Apple's Mac App Store, and official PC support for Kinect originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 08 Jan 2011 11:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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