Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is something of a polarizing figure. His loud, bombastic style on stage stands in stark contrast to the generally more reserved demeanours of other CEOs, and his tendency to gloss over what he sees as irrelevant detail with a cavalier "blah blah blah" rubs many the wrong way. Even after thirty years at Microsoft, Ballmer is nothing if not enthusiastic about the company and the work it does, and sometimes that enthusiasm boils over.
The contrast is particularly striking when we look at Apple. Though there are certainly similarities between Jobs and Ballmer—neither CEO is a straight-laced, buttoned-down, ordinary businessman, both have high-profile public images and personas, and both, apparently, have tempers—Steve Jobs is seen as almost the diametric opposite of Steve Ballmer. Steve Jobs does go off the reservation from time to time, but his manner is orderly, precise, and controlled.
The different characters of the two men lead to very different perceptions in the media and beyond. When Steve Jobs makes an absurd pronouncement—for example, his recent (and thoroughly dishonest) claim that Apple's Facetime is "the first video calling on mobile devices"—he's almost allowed to get away with it. It's just part of the Reality Distortion Field, the aura of marketing spin (and occasionally outright deceit) that surrounds the man. Rather than criticizing that the guy is living in a fantasy land, it's just attributed to the strength of his vision and belief in the company's products.
On the other hand, when Steve Ballmer says that "we're early" on mobile—a reasonable statement in the broader context of the speech he was giving (the modern era of the smartphone market is still in its infancy, and it is still early in the Windows Phone 7 lifecycle)—unscrupulous hacks are happy to invent new context just so they can paint the man as "bonkers." That's not to say Ballmer gets everything right—his early predictions about the iPhone now look wildly misguided, and he would have been better served being a bit more guarded and circumspect. But bonkers? That's not at all justified.
Ballmer's sanity and enthusiasm were both on display when I sat down to speak with the man himself. My time with Ballmer was brief. Twenty minutes, slap-bang in the middle of the keynote presentation at PDC. While Bob Muglia was on stage talking about Windows Azure, I ducked out of the presentation to have a chat with Steve. After a brief mix-up over meeting rooms—Microsoft has an awful lot of meeting rooms—we were together, along with Frank Shaw, corporate vice president of corporate communications. Steve, drained from his on-stage performance, made a beeline for the soda selection—Microsoft has an awful lot of soda, too—and grabbed a Pepsi. "I'm running on fumes," he exhaled as he cracked open the can.
It's dangerous to form too many opinions of people in this kind of context. Naturally, company representatives tend to be on their best behavior when talking on-the-record to journalists. Microsoft employees are, in my experience, frustratingly well-trained and careful about what they say. Though the CEO obviously has more freedom than the rank and file, one nonetheless expects him to be somewhat guarded, and to only give answers that are politically acceptable and in line with existing public information. Though sometimes, even public information can surprise people.
In person, Steve Ballmer was as enthusiastic, emphatic, and excitable as he appears on stage. Key points were reinforced with a clap of the hands, gestures, sketches on whiteboards. He was also jokey and self-deprecating—and interested in Ars and its operations.
The cloud
The big themes at PDC were cloud computing and Windows Phone 7, and it's with cloud computing that I kicked off the questioning.
Ballmer has made clear that "the cloud" is of strategic importance to Microsoft. He describes the company as being "all-in" on the cloud: products like Windows Azure and Exchange Online have the potential to be hugely damaging to Microsoft (they could devastate license revenue as people switch to cheaper online services instead of running their own servers), but if the company gets it right, and becomes a dominant provider of these services, they could cement its status as the cornerstone of business computing for decades to come. What's not so clear is what this means for Microsoft's considerable consumer business.
Ars Technica: I can see how cloud computing is pretty transformational for the enterprise market, both with Azure and Exchange Online, that kind of thing—you're covering a wide range of stuff there. Can you see a similar transformation taking place in the consumer space? What sort of shape that would take, what sort of timeframes, because the enterprise is happening now.
Steve Ballmer: Well in a sense I'd tell you that I think the consumer stuff is happening now but this may be definitional, so let me explain what I think will happen in the consumer space. Number one, the percentage of applications that consumers use that are cloud-based is probably already higher than the percentage of applications that business people use that are cloud-based. That's number one.
Number two, the developers who build sites for consumers have every bit, if not more—and I'd say probably more—motivation and more open-mindedness about using cloud-based back-end to target consumers than enterprise developers do, both because they tend to either be already in the consumer world, or because they tend to be smaller. And if they're smaller, then [there are] advantages particularly for something like Azure, where you can get rapid deployment and a high-level management I'd say almost for free.
AT: So it's very easy to start small and get bigger as you need.
SB: That's right, that's right. So it fits well with the consumer world.
There is certainly some truth in what he says. Regular consumers have been using "cloud e-mail" en masse for many years, and while this kind of outsourced e-mail provision is common in small businesses, it's still quite unusual in larger organizations. The integration of cloud mail into a wide range of organizations represents a switch to a more consumer-like way of using mail services.
But overall, the response doesn't really answer the question. It might well be the case that home users never see a great transformation—the lure of local processing power and storage is enormous, as it's a great enabler for a lot of things—but that's looking less certain than it once was.
I don't think that we're ever going to live in the Sun fantasy world of network computers, where we only have dumb terminals and all the power is elsewhere, but I think there's clearly going to be a greater mix of devices. Windows Phone 7 is already cloud-synced for the most part; it needs the Zune software for loading music, but even that is something that will diminish in the future as mobile networks improve. Future tablets will almost certainly have a similar dependence on the cloud for storage and backups. It just makes sense: using the cloud for mass storage protects your data, and that's extremely valuable for these highly portable, easily losable (or stealable) gadgets. These are areas that will almost certainly expand, and these devices will equally occupy a greater part of our lives.
They won't be able to do everything, and the conventional PC won't disappear. But even it, too, can benefit from such things as online backups and simpler application delivery. One of the features suggested for Windows 8 is a kind of reset switch that would allow a PC to be restored to its factory configuration but without wiping out stored data or desirable applications. Being able to retrieve that data and those applications from the cloud would make this kind of capability a cinch. It would offer the same kind of convenience as Steam does for games and game settings, but for the entire PC.
And then we get into even more exotic applications; Microsoft's Office 365 provides cloud-based access to various Office tools, but we could envisage this going further still—selling remote access to the Office desktop applications running on remote virtual machines, for example. It doesn't make much sense to run every application virtually in this way, but for Excel to balance a checkbook once a month, or Word to write a school report once a week, it could be the right approach: better software than the Web applications but without those pesky piracy concerns.
Of course, that might be too close to network computers and dumb terminals; it may never fly, even if it would make sense for some users. But if Microsoft is really "all-in," the company should be saying something about these kinds of scenarios, I think. The point of being "all in" is that you have a make-or-break commitment: if it pays off, you win big, and if it doesn't, you lose everything.
Now obviously, the CEO of a company Microsoft's size doesn't get to literally bet the farm on any one product or venture—even the bankers aren't that stupid—but if the cloud is really fundamental to Microsoft's future, and that's certainly company's message, then I think the company should be telling us more: the impact in the enterprise space is important, of course, but the consumer space is also a substantial part of Microsoft's business.
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