Ballmer Sees Many Billion-Dollar Opportunities Vista Criticism Brushed Aside for Rosier Outlook on Sharepoint, Other Apps David Needle
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer stood before a packed crowd at the Gartner IT conference in Orlando, Florida and gave a bullish and often pointed outlook of Microsoft's prospects.
"In business computing, the other guys aren't even as good as 'me too,'" said Ballmer during the Q&A session with analysts. He did concede that Google is No. 1 in search and online advertising with Microsoft trailing in third place, but has strong aspirations to move up.
"We're playing the stakes. It's expensive to do an ad platform and indexing. We're differentiating in certain verticals like shopping, and we're also trying to rewrite the game of how that world works. When we have something ready, you'll see it." (Microsoft bought online ad company aQuantive for $6 billion earlier this year).
Ballmer said Microsoft has several product lines that could grow quickly to billion-dollar businesses — a billion being a "mere" 2 percent of the $50
billion the company generates.
"We're already close with SharePoint, with hundreds of millions of dollars," he said. "There's also management software, office communications, and mobility [that] could explode."
But amid that rosy outlook, Gartner research vice president Yvonne Genovese related her unhappy experience with Microsoft Windows Vista, noting it was difficult to implement and that after two days she switched back to XP. Vista has "not had a lot of the value we perceived it would have," Genovese said.
Ballmer said there have been problems with device drivers, but he said the company is working with vendors to get those resolved.
"There's always a tension between end users and what we can deliver to IT," said Ballmer, noting Vista's security features. "There are actually fewer vulnerabilities
in the first six months than any of our other releases."
In an interview after the session, an information services executive at a large insurance company who asked not to be identified told InternetNews.com she's been disappointed with the complexity of Microsoft's service agreements and the value of Microsoft's Software Assurance maintenance agreement.
The company "saved a ton of money," she said, by dropping the client support and sticking with XP. "We found we didn't need it and we don't see a lot of business value in upgrading to Office 2007," she said.
Ballmer of course disagrees. "I think it's phenomenal what we delivered. I don't think everyone realizes that when we launched Office 2007, it was essentially with 33 other products, like a new version of SharePoint and the Office Communication Server we're launching
next week.
He said the value Microsoft has offered with its software has not decreased in the past five to 10 years and added that it's working on a number of improvements. "It's super critical that people want software to be easier to take care of. Software should self-update, and we need click-to-run on PC applications."
He also said Microsoft was offering enterprise customers more flexibility with technology such as that from Softricity, the virtualization company it acquired last year, which lets applications run on one version of Windows while being hosted on another.
On the question of Software as a Service (SaaS) and Web-based applications, Ballmer said he expects Web apps will be richer, but he didn't back away from the company's view that rich-client applications will continue to dominate.
"With Windows Live we see the OS having more real-time extensibility via the cloud so you can do richer things on thin clients."
