Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has said that cloud storage service Dropbox is nothing more than a "little startup".
SkyDrive, the software giant's own cloud storage service, has more than 200 million users as of October, 2012, as revealed by former Windows president Steven Sinofsky (who is, incidentally, said to have been fired by Ballmer himself). Dropbox reached the 100 million users milestone back in November.
"Well, you've got to remember, 100 million sounds like a pretty small number to me, actually," Ballmer told BusinessWeek. "We've got a lot more Office users. And actually if you even want to go to the cloud, we have a lot of Hotmail and SkyDrive users. I'm not beating on Dropbox. They're a fine little startup and that's great."
The executive's comments come after Microsoft launched Office 2013, which allows users to save documents to SkyDrive. Ballmer, however, has had a history of bashing the competition. Back in 2007, he stressed that the iPhone will never account for a significant market share. He also criticized Android by stating that Google's mobile platform can only be used by a computer scientist.