Ballmer's Full Plate

It would be the mother of all understatements to say that Microsoft president and CEO Steve Ballmer has a lot on his plate. Beyond running the $40-plus billion company day to day, he's dealing with the nagging Vista delay, answering questions about lackluster stock performance, swatting competitive threats, such as the launch of Novell's Linux-based desktop, and battling legal disputes with everyone from the European Union to security giant Symantec.

Oh, and then there's Google to contend with.

But the leader of the world's largest software company is positively bullish about what he sees as one of Microsoft's most opportune years from a product and growth perspective.

Ballmer sat with VARBusiness recently in his Redmond, Wash., office, and detailed a road map for the next 12 to 18 months that is indeed staggering, with new versions due of everything from Windows to the wildly successful SharePoint Server.

And partners, Ballmer said, should reap the rewards.

"I think there's tremendous opportunity. Seriously, now that we have Office 2007 in beta, and people can get their hands on some things, the amount of opportunity for us to grow and for partners to grow has never been better," Ballmer said. "All of these products have growth opportunity, but they only come to life if partners bring them to life. I think a partner will be able to amaze customers..."

Of course, partners need to have the products in hand to work that magic. And that brings us to Vista, which the world knows by now will not be shipping to OEMs until early 2007--missing the holiday sales season. Volume-license clients will still get the much-anticipated operating system in November as planned, but many systems builders and other hardware partners are irked at the delay. Though he defends the decision, Ballmer's none too happy, either.

"Software is hard to ship, period," he said. "Forget the schedule. The easiest way to be predictable is to not say anything until [it's] finished, but that's not going to work for a product like Windows that's supposed to galvanize industry support."

Ballmer acknowledges that Microsoft bit off more than it could chew in trying to develop the WinFS file system inside Vista, a technology he dubbed too "complicated" to complete in the time frame the company was shooting for. But he insists that OEMs are not unhappy with the decision, arguing that making the preholiday deadline, only to not deliver, would have a far worse impact.

More than perhaps at any time in its history, Microsoft is facing significant competitive pressures from emerging business models.

Take Google, the poster child for the ad-based software-as-a-subscription-service model. That's a market on which Microsoft has set its sights. As Ballmer describes it, the company wants to build out the underlying infrastructure for delivering software as a service (SaaS), while simultaneously creating a commerce infrastructure for transactions, subscriptions and advertising. On top of that are Microsoft's own services, such as the forthcoming Office Live.

"[SaaS] is going to be the model," he said. "I don't think it's all going to be ad-funded, but everything will have a services element."

Ballmer believes Microsoft's differentiator in the services space is in building a soup-to-nuts infrastructure. In Google, though, the company has some formidable competition. The search-engine giant recently inked a distribution deal with Dell--a development Ballmer is neither pleased nor alarmed about.

On open source, Ballmer seems even less stressed.

"We can't embrace open source as a business model, as it's inconsistent with paying our people," he said. "But we are focused on it and will use our value and TCO to compete."

That's a full plate, to be sure.

Read our QandA: Ballmer Touts Product Bonanza As Partner Opportunity