Newsmaker: Ballmer discusses life after Vista

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There are some things where, frankly, if IT doesn't get in the middle, things are better on the Internet than they are inside. We've got great enterprise search, but IT has got to want to do it. If IT doesn't want to do it, you have a bit of a problem, because you really don't want to put your company's information out in the open Internet. So enabling those technologies and having them be popular in the rest of the world does help corporate adoption.

With that in mind, do you feel that marketing products to consumers is more important now that it might have been in the past?
Ballmer: No, not more important. We grew up with end users: the end user is very important, the end user stays very important. (Microsoft's) history is that we're all about end users and, people say, we don't get IT. That's our history through about 1995, 1996, 1997. It's only the last five or six years that people actually say we get the enterprise, that we get IT. We have to have good muscle with the developer, with IT, with the business and with the end user. If any of those muscles gets weak, we've got problems.

Our flagship consumer products are the ones that have had the gaps in releases. Windows, IE?I mean, those are all our top consumer products. Office didn't have quite as big a gap.

You talked a little bit about a consumer launch of Vista on January 30. I know you're not going to tell me where it's going to launch. But can you give us an idea of the scope, compared with the business launch?
Ballmer: They are two separate activities. I think it's 200 to 350, 400 seminars we're doing right now, for business people and IT people, and traveling road shows all around the globe. Seminars are a fairly effective way to market to business customers. We're doing those now.

Windows, some of the user interface, we could be more dynamic with.

But then we will hit with a set of new technologies in Office that people can try on the Internet--try and buy. We have advertising campaigns?both for Vista and Office. So a lot of things coming will happen in that time frame, when somebody can actually go get and work with the product.

Will there be any connection between Windows Live and Vista highlighted in the consumer launch?
Ballmer: It's possible. Will we tell some of that story at the consumer launch? Maybe.

There are many Web services, such as word processing, available today from Google and many others. So, looking down the road at the next version of client Windows: How do you reconcile that monolithic way that Windows has been developed--with one big release every so many years---with the pace of some of these services that are coming out from competitors?
Ballmer: It's Windows and Windows Live. The brand, I mean--they're not tied in a commercial sense, but the brand and the experience should tie together. You should expect to see the kind of (development and release) cycles that we have on Windows Live be appropriate for that, and the kind of (development and release) cycles that we have for the thing that basically runs the core hardware--Windows--be appropriate for that.

Windows, some of the user interface, we could be more dynamic with. But when it comes down to the rock-solid stuff that runs the hardware, manages the memory, runs the programs, it's not clear to me that people want that dribbled out...and have new releases all the time.

In some senses, we get pushed to do not-too-frequent releases on that front. In terms of the end-user functionality and some of the developer choices, we could push to do things more often. You'll see us do more frequent releases in terms of runtimes in Visual Studio. You'll see us do more frequent releases in terms of what we've got in Windows Live.

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