TAG | Steve Ballmer speaks and he’s excited! |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Thursday, 06 November 2008 | |
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He said he was so excited backstage that he had to take his tie off backstage, and that he was now taking his coat off, injecting more of his excitement into the proceedings. Then he said he could think of nothing better than spending an hour with “Developers! Developers! Developers!”, making his famous refrain once more, and referring to the fact videos of him on stage at previous events throughout the years have been hits on YouTube and the subject of mirth for users and developers alike. Ballmer quickly explained that “The real creativity in IT comes from folks who develop software. At the end of the day, the things people use and fall in love with and bring in value – it's the code that the folks, like the folks in this room - write.” He explained why he did his “wacky” developer soundbite stunts in the past, why he loved working at Microsoft, and why developers loved to develop: “At the end there isn't anything much more satisfying than actually creating software that someone else really gets a kick out of.” Admitting that he has been a salesperson and never a developer, although he'd hired many, many developers, Ballmer explained that the theme of the “Power to Developers” conference was “Liberation Day”. He asked how developers could take “the next step”, how developers using Microsoft’s software could “create the next gen of apps that will change the world”, and how Microsoft would make that happen. Ballmer then pointed to Microsoft’s new vision, which used to be a computer on every desk and in every home. He noted that “we still don’t have that in our society”, but that as the world has continued evolving, “the kind of experiences we want to deliver are broader than they used to be 10, 15 years ago.” The new Microsoft vision is: “Today we want to create seamless experiences that combine the magic of software using the power of the Internet across a world of devices.” Ballmer referred to a favourite phrase of Bill Gates, saying that “It's the magic of the software that uses the full power of that environment to deliver some kind of excellent, wonderful and special experience.” Ballmer said that developers would once write software for several devices, but that today, “Partly what we're trying to capture in this statement – we want to give you the ability to take advantage of compute power wherever it lives – devices, servers, PCs, phones – in the most seamless way possible – peer to peer, in PCs, rich services in the cloud talking to rich clients – HTML – these things have to be created, formed and programmed in one homogeneous way”. “We see it in this model of computing and its evolution.” Ballmer then exclaimed that he was “probably one of the oldest people in this room. I remember when in 1980 the mainframe was the centere of computing. When I was reviewing developers resumes it was BAL, COBOL – developers used to develop for the mainframe.” “They talked on dumb links to terminals. Then along came the PC – the whole model of who we wrote programs changed and you wrote programs for that device.” Ballmer explained that “the late 80s early 90s” was the generation of the client and the server, with big power and app logic at the server. But, said Ballmer... “There was a problem – the programs were easy to write – but kinda hard to manage for IT depts to keep co-ordinated and synchronised. But rather than having that generation refine that model – along came the web. The web was kinda like the mainframe again – big centralised computing but out there and available at large.” “We started writing programs to run on the Internet over HTML to clients almost mainframe style. The world we all want and the one that will deliver the most seamless experiences across the Internet PC and phone, is the new world of software plus services. This isn't SaaS, this is Software plus Services, taking advantage of the intelligence of the phone, PC and corporate data centres to deliver great experiences.” Continued on page 2, with the link to the webcast so you can see the event for yourself on page 3, which includes two more Microsoft directors on "Understanding Microsoft's cloud computing platform" and "Amazing software experiences for Windows and the Web". |
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