Ballmer Envisions A New Course For Microsoft

That's the message from Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO, to a packed crowd of IT users at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2007 conference, held this week in Orlando, Fla.

Ballmer, who shared the stage with two Gartner analysts, said in response to a question about the impact of cloud computing on Microsoft that there are both short-term and long-term implications.

In the long-term, Ballmer said, there's no doubt the world wants to move in a direction that brings together the best of essentially four different models of computing that exist today: the Web or Internet, the PC, the enterprise, and TV or entertainment.

"The truth is, nobody wants to give up any one of them," he said. "There are advantages to the Web model in the way it grew up, where you kind of click and run. There's advantages of the PC model in terms of the richness of the experience and the ability to mix and match and control what goes on between applications. Enterprises have to engage in a focus on security and reliability, compliance, management. And TVs and phones have their own messaging. . . . We need to bring those together."

As a result, the cloud will become more important, and more and more computing will be done on users' behalf, under their control, but not in the way they are used to seeing it, Ballmer said.

"We're not going to move, in my opinion, to a world where everything is done on a very thin client," he said. "You're going to have rich clients that are more effectively and seamlessly managed and updated and taken care of from the cloud."

In the near-term, how quickly these are brought together will be different in the consumer world and the business world, and will come in many forms. For instance, he cited Outlook, which lives on mobile devices, on the Web, in a rich client form, and on multiple devices.

"We have to move that direction," he said. "We have a lot of competition that probably shares the same view. I think when it comes down to really building platforms, we have a lot of experience. It's taken us 17 years, but I think people think we finally get it in the enterprise. Some of the pretenders have no enterprise expertise. That's important. At the end of the day, people don't want to go backwards when it comes to presentation or word processing capabilities."

Ballmer also disputed the Gartner analysts' assertion that Microsoft and arch-rival Google are looking more and more like each.

The don't look like each other at all, Ballmer said. "In the world of search, Google is the leader, and Microsoft is the aspirant," he said. "We're number three, working at number two, and then working at number one. That is an aspect of the competition."

Microsoft is doing three things to enhance competition with Google, Ballmer said. First, it is doing the R&D and capital investment needed to build a search capability. Second, it is starting to differentiate itself in terms of user interface. "And number three, we are going to try to rewrite the rules on how that game works, and when we have something to say there, you'll see it," he said.

Another differentiator is in productivity and business computing. So far, Microsoft has yet to see much from Google in that area, Ballmer said. "What we've seen out of the other guy is maybe not even as good as 'me-too' with things that we have to offer," he said. "So I feel very well differentiated vs. Google."

Next: Ballmer on Vista, Mac and Linux