By Mike Ricciuti, 20 October 2005 08:25
NEWS Steve Ballmer wants you to know one thing: he never throws chairs.
In a morning keynote at Gartner's Symposium/ITxpo, Microsoft's CEO said: "I have never, honestly, thrown a chair in my life." Ballmer was responding to a comment regarding well-publicised testimony by a former employee that Ballmer had tossed furniture and vowed to "kill Google" when informed of the employee's decision to leave Microsoft for Google.
Ballmer also touched on a variety of areas related to Microsoft's competition with Google. Ballmer said: "How are we going to compete with Google? The good old-fashioned way: with innovation. There are many things - who knows - Google may or may not do. If you read the papers, other than curing cancer, there are many things Google is going to do."
He pointed to the strength of Microsoft's MSN brand outside the US as proof that the company is making strides in the web search market. "People say 'I'm going to MSN you' in Holland and Korea. Not here. But globally, more people spend time online with MSN than any other site," he said.
Overall, Ballmer said Microsoft needs to continue to invest in research and development to deal with open source software, Google, IBM and other competitors. But in years past, that sort of investment has been spread disproportionately between the companies' divisions. "The top priority for us is to be an innovative company. We need a variety of ways to innovate. We have gone through a period where we have not had all of the muscles working evenly, if you will."
Microsoft is "at the beginning of 12 months of the greatest innovation pipeline we have ever had", Ballmer said. "Vista, Office, Windows Mobile, IE 7... I can point to a lot of things. We are in the middle of the best pipeline we have ever had as a company."
Microsoft on Monday launched an update to a community-based preview release of Windows Vista, which includes a number of new features, such as efforts to improve the web browser and make the operating system more resilient.
Vista is the first major update to the client version of Windows since 2001. The final version of Vista, which has also been known by its Longhorn code name, is due out in the second half of next year, Microsoft has said. A server version of the operating system is expected in 2007.
"I'm going to trust Vista on day one," Ballmer said. "I bet most people in this audience will trust it day one - on their home computer," he joked. "I'm trying to be honest among friends."
Ballmer acknowledged Vista's long gestation period and said it has taken Microsoft so long because the company had consciously decided to add several major features to the operating system. "Why have Vista and Longhorn taken so long? We made some big bets," he said.
The company scaled back its plans for Vista in August 2004 after it became clear that the development plan was too ambitious, Ballmer said. "We made a call 14 months ago... that the integration challenges of bringing together a new operating system with a new presentation, file system, communications system... and have all of those things co-dependent" was too much of a challenge, he said.
On software licensing, Ballmer said the company has made strides in simplifying its terms but more work is needed. "The simplest thing we have today is our enterprise agreement. Used to take two years of postgrad education [to understand it], now it's a ninth grade education. We know we have a lot more work to do in terms of tools and licence forms," he said.
The company is taking some cautious first steps to add new web programming tools. Microsoft last month made available to developers a set of application programming interfaces to its MSN and other public websites. The software company hopes that developers assemble new applications that build on those sites - a technique used successfully at Google and at other web companies to promote their properties.
The plan has raised questions over whether Microsoft eventually intends to promote the web - via MSN and other properties - as a development platform in addition to Windows. Some analysts, such as Thomas Bittman at Gartner, say this is likely, although Microsoft will need to tread carefully so as not to diminish the appeal of Windows and Office, the company's most valuable franchises.
Mike Ricciuti writes for CNET News.com
Comments
There are 4 comments. Join the discussion
1. anonymous
What have Microsoft ever innovated? Can any of you name one thing Microsoft did which somebody else did not do first?
Oh yes I know, the friendly paperclip guy in the office programs. Where would the world be without him! Thank you Microsoft
2. Cristian Nicola
Here is an idea for Microsoft search engine:
The current search engines are nice, but they do not adapt to the user (the way human brain learns). To see how it works we should have a quick look at a normal search pattern:
- search for some keywords
- look at some pages and find out of keywords needs changing or improving
- extend the keywords set and go back to step 1.
As you can see this could be improved a bit ...
We all know (or heard) about Bayesian filtering - which is currently used to filter spam emails. The concept is very simple:
- at the begining all emails are non-spam,
- the user flags some of them as spam
- the sytem automatically calculate a probability on each word and then it would filter the emails which have similar properties (words/probabilities)
- after a while the sytem is capable to detect spam with a very high accuracy..
In a search engine one could use the ammount the user spends on each page to automatically filter out from the result the pages that have been closed very fast, or as a quicker start it could have a small toolbar where user can rank the page.
Google does something like this by removing similar pages from the result, however it doesnt adapt the resultset as the user goes through it...
It is not a very difficul idea to implement and i think it would make the search experience much more pleasant ...
ps: if anyone is in need of ideas please do get in touch with me - i'm sure i'll find something for you to do :D
3. Lionel A Smith
To make search engines learn and act upon user’s preferences is akin to on-line news being tailored so and is not a good paradigm for self development, more folk would become like GW Bush, that is only seeing (hearing) what they want to see (hear) and thus unlikely to discover the word serendipity.
4. Cristian Nicola
The whole point was to start it fresh each time - so at the begining one would get a full set of data. The idea is to filter things out, not to hide half of the world :D
You see, millenia ago when there were no web site and search engines and so on - looking for information (outside of the fact it kind of was a privilege) it would result in a very defined set of answers - most of them being on the subject and accurate.
In any modern search engine there is a huge ammount of junk outside of proper information and while i don't know about the rest i find it increasingly difficult to find useful information on the net. Honestly, when you add the fact that i'm the internet generation, and i work in computers so i should push them as a universal solution to finding information, the fact that you find me over and over in the local library should be pretty scary...
My feeling is that we reached the point where there is more junk than useful information on internet and there should be a way to faster filter the junk out ...