Just under a year ago, on November 6th, 2008, ‘Mystic’ Steve Ballmer gave the world a prediction on how he saw things going for Google Android’s future.

At the time, Ballmer was speaking at a Telstra annual investment day and when asked about Android, he claimed that designing the phone OS wasn’t going to be easy for Google. “They can hire smart guys, hire a lot of people, blah dee blah dee blah, but you know they start out way behind, in a certain sense,”

With an uncanny lack of prescience, Ballmer questioned Google’s ability to make money with Android. “I don’t really understand their strategy. Maybe somebody else does. If I went to my shareholder meeting, my analyst meeting, and said, ‘hey, we’ve just launched a new product that has no revenue model!’…I’m not sure that my investors would take that very well. But that’s kind of what Google’s telling their investors about Android,”

At the time, Ballmer claimed that, whilst the idea of Google giving away the operating system so that it can put it’s search facilities on devices for free was sound, he felt that communications operators wouldn’t be fooled and they’d still ask to be paid for carrying the search functions.

I wonder how he feels about Android now?

(the quotes came from this CNet article from Nov 2008)