It is still amazing that Steve Ballmer has a job after all the blunders that Microsoft has committed in the past few years. Microsoft may still be one of the largest tech companies around, but it has given up leadership in multiple markets. Instead of coming up with iPhone or iPad like products first, Microsoft seems to be content with just following what others are doing at this point. Now that netbooks are not as hot as they used to be, Steve Ballmer’s main focus is on dethroning the iPad:

Apple has done an interesting job of putting together a synthesis and putting a product out, and in which they’ve… they sold certainly more than I’d like them to sell, let me just be clear about that … We think about that. We think about that in competitive sense. And for us, then, the job is to say, Okay, we have a lot of IP, we have a lot of good software in this area, we’ve done a lot of work on ink and touch and everything else – we have got to make things happen.

Can a Windows 7 based slate work in Microsoft’s favor? It’s tough to say. Microsoft does want to portray its products as device friendly. However, as we have seen with personal and laptop computers, they are anything but. Microsoft may have market leadership in the software side of things, but the Windows brand has been a mess for quite some time.