Creative Critics

Steve Keynote at Mix’08 – Microsoft, the underdog

// March 6th, 2008 // technology

Guy Kawasaki of all people interviewing Steve Ballmer. Very funny interaction, good questions and great answers.

Q: Why do you would like to buy Yahoo?

We would like to become a bigger player in the advertising space. The killer application for online advertising is search. We are not were we should be, but we are comitted to get there. Yahoo can accellerate this – they will help us to get the critical mass.

(the “Y”-word, brings us to the “G”-word ) It took a while, but Guy managed to have Steve pronouncing “Google”.

Google is not in the server-world, not in the games world and so on. We’ll see who gets where. But once we are online, ít’s all Google, Google, Google, … and we are the underdog…

We have larger footprint than Apple, but here again, in the music players space, we are the underdog.

Steve answered that he is very proud to stay at Microsoft, even when being a very rich person. When asking the audience about their enthuosiasm for Silverlight, the croud applauded strongly. Steve knows how to play this audience

On his management style and schedule: Steve explained that he is a real entrepreneur. 1/3th of his days are spent at customers. 1/3th is meetings and 1/3 he is putting together the view and vision for the company. Ballmer receives about 60 mails per day. Human beings are very constructive when sending mail. As he is not subscribing to lists and probabely has good spam filters, he only receives mails that are intended to reach him. If the CEO of Microsoft can reach this, I have got to do something about my mail-management.

Q: How do you get new poeple to work for Microsoft

On the technical site, we still manage to get some of the best people in the market. We still have to pay some good money to get them, but even as our stock is not doubling every year.

Steve is explaining that Vista is very popular in the consumer space. Steve explained the choices for security, that caused most of the incompatibility issues. Accoring to Steve, a lot of the suggestions are included in SP1 and now the businesses are picking up and are getting into migration towards Vista.

on apple:

 

On Adobe:

we know that adobe is still very inmportant, We have now offered a few alternatives to some of their products, but we will be working with them on the great standards they have developped, such as PDF (that we support very well in Office)

Great quotes:

Steve: “that thing you can carry in an enveloppe (note: Guy is carying an apple air) is heavier than my Toshiba”

Guy: (after ending in a corner after a discussion) “I will not invite you to the next Mix”

Guy: “I think the guys at Mountain View (Google) have helped you to build a better image (as a company)”

Note already: the next year: MIX09 : 18-20 march 2009