April 18, 2008
Add to 
del.icio.us
Digg this
At an important annual event in Seattle yesterday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that the Vista operating
system still "needs more work" and that the software giant won't wait five years for its next "patched" release.
Microsoft has recently pushed the date when its older XP operating system will be available for lower-cost
computers.
Ballmer also repeated that Microsoft doesn't plan to listen to some other user complaints,
including the one that Vista is much too big in size, and that it requires two to three times more RAM and
resources than what XP needs.
Ballmer added "while it's accurate to say that Vista is bigger than XP, I can tell you right now that it's
gonna stay bigger than XP. We have to make sure that it doesn't get bigger still."
During the lively session, Ballmer spoke about a few other key areas that the company will focus on in the near
future. "It's virtualization time for Microsoft," he said. "We're gonna make sure we democratize virtualization."
Probably less than five percent of Web servers in the world are virtualized today, he said. "It's too darn
expensive and way too hard to manage. We intend to take major strides around addressing both of those."
Ballmer also said to expect more work from Microsoft in the search market. "There's an opportunity to knock
the socks off in terms of innovation," he said.
As many have expected, Microsoft is to introduce a few blog services later in 2008, and Ballmer intends to ask
its MVPs (Most Valuable Professionals) to switch their default searches to Live Search for one week.
After that week, Ballmer will ask for their feedback about what they liked and what they didn't, as part of a broad effort to
improve Microsoft's third-place standing in the search market.
Another key area for the future of Microsoft is Web services and
SaaS (Software as a Service). The use of hosted services worldwide is small, but Ballmer expects that in two to three
years there will be an inflection point after which millions of people will use hosted Web services, he said.
There are about four thousand Microsoft MVPs around the world, and nearly 1,800 of them gathered in Seattle this
week for an annual summit. MVPs are technology experts who provide feedback to Microsoft about its products-- Ballmer
said they are his favorite group to address.
The topics Ballmer tackled during his talk were sometimes similar, but much broader compared to the big issue that
he, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Microsoft's founders, discussed while beginning to develop software at Harvard
University.
"Our strategy and mission have greatly expanded," Ballmer said. Soon after the 'birth' of Microsoft, year after year, Paul Allen would approach Gates with the idea to start
building computers. And each time Gates sagely said, "no Paul, we're not hardware guys, we're software people"
Ballmer said.
"We're on that same strategy thirty years later... but we do have an expansive vision, and we intend to keep it
that way," said Ballmer.
Add to
del.icio.us
Digg this
Source: Microsoft.
Bookmark this Tech Blog by
clicking here.
Home |
Write to us
