Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s keynote at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2007 conference has spawned hundreds of news stories.
For instance, Network World is reporting on Ballmer’s remarks that he remains unworried about Google Apps. Dow Jones MarketWatch is reporting that Ballmer is worried about competing against Google in the search/ad market. Meanwhile CRN reports that Ballmer is still pushing his message that the Next Big Thing is the convergence of four computing areas: the Web, the PC, enterprise computing, and TV/entertainment. The carefully crafted message is supposed to explain why a single company engages in such diverse IT businesses as SOA tools (Windows Communication Foundation) and high end entertainment gadgets (the Surface PC). But a note of antagonism can’t help but creep in, it seems. The CRN story quotes Ballmer as saying:
“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.”
