Balmer: Apple Pay “Obvious”

Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer played down the innovativeness of Apple Tuesday (Oct. 21), saying that Apple Pay was “obvious.”

“It was inevitable and everybody has seen this coming for years,” Ballmer said during an interview with CBS News, referring to mobile payments in general. “It’s kind of an obvious idea that you should use your phone to pay for things. That has been an obvious idea for 5 or 6 years. I’m not picking on Apple, (but) it’s an obvious idea.”

Ballmer said that all any company needed to make this work was to have two things. “Have enough volume of phones that the payments industry would take it seriously and Apple does have enough volume of phone. And two, get the tech right and I think Apple’s done what seems like a reasonable job on the tech.”

Although Ballmer’s comments are certainly true, the doesn’t address the context. Even though companies have talked about—and tried to deploy—mobile payments for years, Apple was the first to break through consumer awareness, to get shoppers to actually think about mobile payments and to seriously want to try.

Mastering any offering as complicated as mobile payments may be an obvious goal, but accomplishing that goal is far from easy. (Hey, Ballmer, don’t recall any masterful mobile payments moves from Microsoft during your reign. Just sayin’…)