Steve Ballmer has described Dropbox as being a “fine little start up,” dismissing its 100 million strong user base as a “pretty small number”.

The quotes come from a Bloomberg interview where the Microsoft CEO discussed the recent dual launch of a more cloud-centric Office 2013 and Office 365.

“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,” contested Ballmer.

 The tech-personality went on to assert that Dropbox was operating on borrowed ideas.

“We first did our HTML versions of Office, the so-called Web Apps, two releases ago. I think probably six years. We enhanced them three years ago,” he recalled. 

Ballmer has a long history of underestimating his opponents. He has made similarly dismissive claims about the iPhone, Android and Chrome, so only time will tell if he comes to rue his words.

Switching gears, Ballmer disclosed his expectations for Office 365, earmarking the new release to help push the productivity suite beyond its current boundaries, estimated to be in the region of one billion users.

“That number is going to grow,” he declared.

“More and more people enter the class of information workers and knowledge workers. More and more students getting more and more education, taking on more and more jobs where they work with information every day,” he reasoned.

For more, check out our Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium review.