In only half a dozen years Microsoft went from laughing at the iPhone to admitting MS had none of the mobile phone or mobile device market, while Apple became the most valuable company in the world. Another entrenched industry, electric power will also change radically in only a few years, and solar power will win like the Internet did.

MG Siegler of Google Ventures blogged this on ParisLemon 20 September 2013, What A Difference Six Years Makes…

Steve Ballmer, 2007:

Right now we’re selling millions and millions and millions of phones a year. Apple is selling zero phones a year.

Steve Ballmer, a few months later:

It’s sort of a funny question. Would I trade 96% of the market for 4% of the market? (Laughter.) I want to have products that appeal to everybody.

Now we’ll get a chance to go through this again in phones and music players. There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.

Steve Ballmer, yesterday:

Mobile devices. We have almost no share.

And it wasn’t just Steve Jobs riding Moore’s Law on an iPhone: Google and Samsung and HTC and others have slid up that exponential slope to spread smart phones around the world, while Steve Ballmer just resigned as CEO of Microsoft after presiding over losing its place at the top of the tech pyramid. Utility companies that don’t get on with solar are going to slide off the top of the heap just like Microsoft did.

Paul Bowers of Georgia Power and Tom Fanning of Southern Company know this history. Will they be Ballmer or will they get on with solar power?

No, they can’t be Steve Jobs: they’ve got lifer utility boards to answer to. But they don’t have to invent solar power or even rooftop solar with microinverters: that’s already been done. SO’s famously largest private R&D operation in the U.S. can do what neither Apple nor Google nor Microsoft can do: it can design, implement, and deploy a smart grid to power Georgia and the southeast with solar power inland and wind offshore.

-jsq

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