First Bill Gates said it and I repeated and reported on it and now MarketingShift confirms it (as if Bill Gates own words were not enough); Microsoft’s main competitor is IBM, not Google.

According to a recent article

In a question-and-answer session with press and analysts following his remarks, Ballmer singled out IBM as the primary target of the new people-ready campaign.

"We’re staking out a position quite different than our leading competitor. That’s IBM," Ballmer said. "We are talking about making the people in the business making more productive. IBM is talking about a project. We’re talking about software….IBM increasingly is a services company. At the end of the day, we’re a software company.

"There’s a prevalent view that IBM is a technology company…And yet, I think in large measure, we’re talking about apples and oranges," Ballmer said.

I agree with MarketingShift, this should be interesting and it’s certainly no surprise to me.